Parthian Chicken

A very simple chicken dish, although not necessarily Roman. As you can tell from the title of the dish, it has Parthian origins, because of the use of asafoetida which is a very traditional Middle Eastern spice. Parthia and the rest of the eastern Roman Empire were hugely important for supplying different kinds of herbs and spices throughout the empire, and as a result a lot of Apicius’ recipes contain ingredients which have origins from the Roman East.

However the use of Caraway seeds was a very typical Roman ingredient in recipes as it was common to Europe. It is for this reason that we get an interesting combination of ingredients to create this semi-Roman dish.

The Original recipe came from Apicius who wrote

‘Draw the chicken from the rear and cut into quarters. Pound the pepper, lovage, a little caraway, pour on liquamen, flavour with wine. Arrange the chicken in a ceramic dish, put the sauce over the chicken. Dissolve fresh laser in warm water and put it straight away on the chicken and cook. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.’

For a modern audience there are a number of terms within this recipe which may be considered confusing, or that they would not understand for example: ‘lovage,’ ‘liquamen’ and ‘laser.’ Which then posed the question of how this recipe could be recreated for a modern audience.

After a bit of research I was able to find out that laser was a spice known as silphium.  Silphium was preliminarily used as a form of medicine, but it was then added in to food due to its flavour. It was incredibly popular in the east, at one point it was even considered so valuable by the Romans that it should be stored in the state treasury alongside the gold and silver. Due to its popularity, however, it became extinct. Numerous years’ later recipes were found containing a spice called asafoetida, which had very similar characteristics to the silphium, so it is thought to be the same thing, hence why I have substituted it into this recipe. While asafoetida is not as common today, it has become incredibly popular in Indian cooking but known as hing. The rich yellow colour is great for creating the vibrancy associated with curry, but primarily the reason for the popularity behind ‘hing’ is it flavour which has been likened to a mix between onions, leeks and garlic alongside a spiciness used in Indian cooking. Because of this unique flavour combination in many languages the spice became known as ‘devils dung,’ and I must say I would not recommend take a powerful sniff of it, as it can be a bit overwhelming to the senses! However due to its popularity in Indian cooking it is still possible to be bought in shops today; it is stocked in most large supermarkets by Schwartz.

Lovage, another foreign term to a modern audience is a herb which was commonly used, especially by Apicius. Although lovage is still around nowadays, I wouldn’t go as far as saying it is a well-known herb. It is possible to still grow and use lovage, but for those of you who don’t fancy trying to grow an ancient Roman herb, just for the one use in this recipe, then parsley creates a hugely similar flavour.

Finally liquamen is similarly another term for garum or fish sauce (which we have already seen in my ‘The original Cheesecake- Sweet or Savoury, Part 2’ blog post).

 

Ingredients:

4 Chicken Breasts

Ground Black Pepper

170 ml Red Wine

1tsp Fish Sauce

½ tsp Asafoetida Powder or 5 drops of Asafoetida Tincture

2 tsp chopped Parsley

1 tsp Caraway Seeds

 

Method:

• Preheat oven to 190 fan/ gas mark 5
  

  All of the ingredients in a casserole dish, pre cooking

• Place chicken breast in a casserole dish and add a sprinkle of pepper
• Combine the rest of the ingredients and then add to the casserole dish
• Cover the casserole dish and place in the oven for an hour
• Remove the lid of the casserole dish for the final 15 minutes in order to brown the chicken slightly

 

 

Mid-Way through the cooking process

It may not look glamorous, but it tastes good!

Final Product

Thoughts:

Getting the proportions right in when recreating a recipe can be incredibly difficult, and it certainly proved challenging here. Much like most ancient recipes there is little to no instruction about the quantity of the ingredient to use. Therefore when recreating a dish it is very important to take all the different flavours into account.

When I first made this dish I used far too many caraway seeds and fish sauce, which combined with the wine and parsley created a strange flavour, because it was almost as if the caraway and fish sauce were competing to be the most over powering flavour. So I refined these a little, reducing both of the quantities, which created a much more enjoyable flavour for the chicken.

I simply served the chicken with on a bed of colourful rice, however this lead me to question how the Roman’s would have eaten meals like this: did they have side dishes, or would the chicken by itself have been a meal on its own. Nowhere in Apicius’ work is there a mention of an addition part of the meal, such as rice. Which provided the idea that maybe they would have just eaten the chicken without anything else. While in modern cooking the majority of dishes come with a side of potatoes, rice, or maybe pasta it seems like this would have been unlikely for the Romans.

• It is thought that rice would have been present within the Roman Empire, but it would have been very rare as it was imported from Egypt, however there are no remains or obvious connections to rice anywhere in antiquity.
• A lot of people who have no knowledge of food history may think that due to the starchy and carby nature of potatoes they would have been perfect for a Roman and medieval diet, however potatoes were not widely used until the 18^th century when they had been brought

Therefore that leads us to think that it is likely that for Romans, who were rich enough to afford meat, this would have been all they had for their meal, with the chance of it being accompanied with some vegetables or bread. But there is no sense of having a side dish to complete the meal.

The Original Cheesecake… Sweet or Savoury? (part 2)

As we have already seen with the sweet cheesecake recipe, the tradition Roman recipe shows us that it is easy to use one recipe to create two completely different recipes, which is what I decided to do.

This time I decided to swap the ricotta cheese for feta in order to create a more savoury cheesier flavour in order to contrast the mild ricotta cheesecakes. I also chose to increase the amount of bay leaves to intensify the flavour, making it seem like a completely different dish to the sweet cheesecake balls.

The final alteration to the traditional recipe was to change the way it was baked. Whilst in the previous recipe I create 4 individual balls of dough, this time I chose to create a more traditionally Roman loaf shape, a round shape with 6 slits across the top, similar to that of the image below. This change meant that I need to increase the cooking time to 35 minutes.

Ingredients:

120g/ 4oz plain flour

340g/ 12oz feta cheese (rinse slightly before use)

1 medium egg

6 bay leaves

 

Method:

• Preheat the oven to 225 fan/ gas mark 7
• Break up feta and place in a food processor. Blitz for 30 seconds or until it begins to look smooth instead of crumbly
• Add the flour and the egg and process until the mixture resembles a soft dough, ensuring all the ingredients are well combined.
• Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper, place the bay leaves in a circular pattern on top of the greaseproof paper
• Shape the dough into a circular loaf and make 3 slits along the top of the dough in order to create 6 mini segments. Transfer to the prepared baking tray.
• Place a cover over the baking tray and bake for 35 minutes or until golden brown
• Leave to cool slightly. Serve either warm or cold.

Combination of the flour, egg and feta

So it may not look the greatest, but oh well!

Straight out of the oven

Served as a starter

My Thoughts:

I made this recipe several times because I didn’t think the first attempt was quite right, so I decided to alter a couple of things. The first time I made the cheesecake I found it was far too salty, so on the next attempt I decided to reduce the amount of feta used, and rinse the feta before I used it in order to get rid of some of the brine that the cheese came in. This was a great improvement and the cheesecake was much nicer because you could taste more of the flavours from the ingredients because the dish wasn’t over powered by salt.

This led me to think about how the Romans would have eaten it. In the ancient world salt was a hugely important ingredient. This is mainly because they had to use salt as a way of preserving meats and fish, therefore a lot of the basic foods they would have used within a meal were already covered in salt. On top of this is the role that garum or fish sauce played within cooking. Fish sauce was a stable to the majority of Roman food. To make garum you had to combine fish guts and basically let them stew. As a result it created a pretty pungent smell, the smell got so bad that it is thought at certain times the production of garum within the city was banned. As you can imagine the garum added a lot of flavour to a dish, however the main flavour it created was salt.

Therefore we see that many Roman recipes were extremely high in salt. It is even thought that Romans would have added more salt to some meals just to take away the taste of the dish itself, especially if it contained rotting meat.

In Roman times this kind of cheesecake would have been served as a gustatio or a starter. It was most likely served by itself but accompanied with olives, or other forms of snacks. So when I recreated the dish I paired it with olives and hummus, although I also found that it worked very well within salads as a form of croton.

 

Conclusion:

The most beneficial thing I learnt from both the sweet and savoury adaptions of the original recipe by Cato is that we can interpret one recipe in a number of different ways. The lack of instruction or measurements in the ancient recipe has made it possible to use the same method and basic ingredients but to produce two completely different end results. I would go as far as saying just making 1 change to the cheese made a huge difference. This illustrates how difficult it can be to interpret these recipes and recreate them today.

 

The Original Cheesecake… Sweet or Savoury? (part 1)

Cheesecake is the modern term for what would have been known by the Romans as Libum, consisted of a mixture of cheese, flour and egg. Typically the cakes would be given to the gods as a form of worship and dedication, especially revolving around sacrifice. Ovid best emphasis this which is descriptions of Libum;

‘Cakes are made for the gods.’ (Fasti 3.735)

However this recipe has survived from Cato’s On Agriculture when he describes the basic recipe for a cheese based cake:

‘Grind 2 pounds of cheese thoroughly in a mortar; when it is thoroughly macerated, add 1 pound of wheat flour, or, if you wish the cake to be more dainty, 1/2 pound of fine flour, and mix thoroughly with the cheese. Add 1 egg, and work the whole well. Pat out a loaf, place on leaves, and bake slowly on a warm hearth under a crock.’(De Agriculture 75)

In this recipe there is no specification about the type of cheese needed. This opens the recipe up to several possibilities, for example having a sweet or savoury flavour. But the basis behind the recipe for my cheesecake is a combination of both Ovid and Cato libum due to the addition of honey and use of a neutrally flavoured cheese. In Ovid’s Fasti he writes all about the discovery of honey by Bacchus and the other gods. In book 3 he also writes about the luxury of honey, and tells us that it was added to traditional libum to make it more pleasing for the gods:

‘The father god enjoys honey, and it is right that we should give to its discoverer golden honey infused in hot cakes’ (Fasti 3.761)

For all these reasons I was able to create this recipe to match the idea of a sweet cheesecake.

Ingredients:

120g/ 4oz Plain Flour

225g/ 8oz Ricotta

1 Egg

4 Bay Leaves

120g/ 4oz Runny Honey

Method:

• Preheat oven to 225 fan/ gas mark 7
• Sift flour into a bowl
• Beat the cheese until smooth and then combine with the flour. Add the egg to this mix
• Stir the mixture together until it resembles a sticky dough, adding a bit more flour if the mixture is too wet
• Once the mixture resembles a dough, divide into 4 balls. Place the bay leaves onto a greased baking tray, then add the dough on top
• Cover the dough in a testum fashion (see notes further down on instructions about this)
• Bake for 25-30 minutes
• Whilst the cakes are still hot, scour holes in the surface
• Finally melt the honey in a microwave and then pour over the top of the cakes. Leave for 10 minutes before serving

After baking

Application of honey

Final result

My thoughts:

Whilst nice, the cheesecake was not what I or any of my testers had expected after hearing the word cheesecake. Instead of the 21st century  concept of a cheesecake- a biscuit base and having a rich, creamy, and sweet topping- the Roman cheesecake functions more as a dough or a dumpling with a very dense and close texture.

However this recipe for cheesecake may not have been thought of as odd if I had served it to an Italian audience. Even today, authentic Italian cheesecake recipes vary significantly from what we know, love and buy from our supermarkets. Just like how New York has a distinct style of baked cheesecake, Italy does too, and it is typically made out ricotta and little else, just like this traditional Roman recipe. In fact numerous recipes can be found online, just like this, or sometimes with the addition of what we would recognise as a biscuit base. American celebrity chef Martha Stewart has even written a recipe for her website which is incredible similar, despite the fact that it features a small amount of sugar, and orange vest to add extra flavour alongside the bay leaf.

The idea of pairing the cheesecake with orange was common in many of the modern recipes I looked at, due to the fact that citrus fruits are readily available in Italy. However for an ancient audience I imagine that a Roman cook might have pairing the cheesecake with fruits such as fig and apricot due to the sharp nature of the fruit contrasting the sweetness of the honey glaze.

One of the tricky areas of this recipe was the way in which it needs to be cooked. Traditionally a cheesecake like this would have been cooked by placing red hot coals over a testum (pot) which created a hot oven. However this is incredibly difficult to recreate due to the nature of modern ovens. But Dalby and Grainger in ‘The Classical Cookbook‘, suggest in their recipe for barley rolls that this can be done by placing a casserole dish (or any other form of oven-safe dish) or even a plant pot over the top of a baking tray. This would have helped to create a similar technique as how the cheesecakes would have been cooked authentically. It is also thought that traditional testum would have contained a hole at the top, so that air could circulate around helping the cooking process. Therefore in my recipe I  used a large casserole dish, which I took off during the penultimate 5 minutes in the oven, to allow the dough to crisp up as I presume it would have done when baked in a testum.

Overall I  would consider the recreation of a sweet Roman cheesecake to be easy to do, as none of the methods or ingredients that are involved are too different from a modern style of cooking. I think it’s also  significant that modern recipes can still be found in Italy and also across the world, therefore showing how successful the legacy of Cato’s recipe is.