Io, Saturnalia! Aliter Dulia (fruit pudding)

Aliter Dulcia • Fruit Pudding

• 1/2 lb. fresh, green angelica stalks, or 1 large fennel bulb, or 4 apples
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1/2 cup honey
• ample ginger or cinnamon for sprinkling

To prepare angelica: Bring a large pot of water to a boil then cook the stems over a medium heat until tender (about 5 minutes). Drain, rinse in cold water, and drain again. Peel off the skin and long stringy parts on the outside of the stalks.

Alternatively: Try this recipe with a fennel bulb or apples.

Grate the main ingredient. Use a food processor if you have one—just consider it having a servant in your ancient kitchen. (I invested in a little 4-cup one just for Roman cooking, and it hasn’t let me down.) Spoon into a baking dish or loaf pan. Pour milk over it. When it is completely saturated, place in the oven at 350°F/170°C for an hour until baked but not dried out—it should be creamy, but not soupy.

Remove from the oven and pour honey over the pudding, poking it so the honey sinks in.

Sprinkle with ginger or cinnamon and serve.

Makes 2-3 servings

This dessert was mild in flavour but delicious (my garden-grown fennel has a stronger flavour than this bulb from the store). I enjoyed the texture and I found myself craving more the next day. The dessert recipes tend to take longer to prepare for a smaller quantity than the main dishes—no wonder ancient Romans usually just picked them up at the local pub—but I’d make this again, and will try it with apples. Someday I’ll try it with angelica too, which is what might have been intended in the original recipe, but fennel is a plausible ancient substitute. Ancient cooks would have had many variations on recipes depending on available ingredients!

Read Full Post »

Io, Saturnalia! Dulcia (sweet fry bread)

Ready for drizzling with honey and with sprinkling cinnamon

Dulcia

• 1 cup mixed spelt and oat flour
• 1 cup almonds
• 1 cup pine nuts
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup sweet raisin wine (or grape juice concentrate)
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 tsp rosemary, minced
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• olive oil for frying
• honey for drizzling
• more cinnamon for sprinkling

Grind together 1/2 tsp cinnamon, the almond and pine nuts, and the minced rosemary. Mix with wine (or grape juice concentrate). Whisk the eggs and mix them well with the flour to form a porridge.

Scald (but do not boil) the milk over a moderate flame; remove from heat and allow to cool a minute. Mix milk into the batter, then spread batter out in a flat, lightly oiled pan. When cool, spoon out bite-size pieces and pan-fry them in high-quality oil (the oil should be hot enough that the dough immediately begins to fry when dropped into the pan, but should not be allowed to smoke/burn). Fry to a dark golden brown. Drain the excess oil off by placing each fried piece on a cloth. Drizzle with plenty of honey, sprinkle with plenty of cinnamon, and serve warm.

Makes about a dozen.

Read Full Post »

Saturnalia, night 1: Minutal ex praecoquis (Apricot stew)

Mustering the troops for tonight’s cookery. No honey? Easy solution: use the honey wine.

The ingredients:

Apricots
I used 2 15-ounce (425g) cans of  apricots in light syrup, drained and rinsed off, because I couldn’t find fresh apricots, because, to be honest, I didn’t look very hard. But to find the canned apricots, I had to excavate through to the back of a bottom shelf behind a cart and many cans of peaches, so I feel like I worked hard to harvest these.

1 tsp white pepper
3 tsp cumin
4 tsp mint
2 tsp aniseed

Combine and crush the seasonings in mortar and pestle

honey wine (should have been honey and wine, but I was out of honey)—an indeterminate amount, as I spilled it while measuring out 1/3 cup
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
olive oil: 1 dollop
garum: less than a dollop—add more to taste, if that’s your sort of taste
3 medium-size shallots, diced

cubed ham
I added 1/4 pound cubed ham. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Thicken with a small amount of spelt flour. Stew until the apricots are tender, and/or until all the flavours have had a chance to blend. Serve hot. Serves 2 to 3 people.

Sides: diced almonds with golden raisins; mixed olives—kalamata, stuffed with garlic, stuffed with feta—plus peppers and cheese.

Cabbage and mixed-greens salad with Oxyporium dressing; and of course some bread and cheese.

The main course, awaiting my test subjects…I mean, dinner guests.

I think the ham made the stew too salty, without contributing much to the taste. Maybe this stew is better as a side to a meat dish!

Read Full Post »

OMNIBUS ET SATURNALIA

It’s the release day for the Knife of Narcissus omnibus!

Come for a visit every day next week for some free stories, more chapters from upcoming books, more ancient recipes, and general Saturnalia hijinks. There may very well be gladiators—it could happen! I won’t rule out gladiators.

After such a long time living every moment with the serial, I have all sorts of feels about putting it out there now as an all-in-one version. A fellow author asked me a few questions about the process (and I’ll be talking about her books next week too—great ones for Romanophiles, and contemporary stories also). Now that I’ve had time to reflect soberly, drunkenly, and under the influence of very sweet and highly caffeinated beverages, I have a few thoughts to share about it all here, too.

But mostly, December is a great excuse to experiment with a lot more Roman recipes and to share the results!

Read Full Post »

Casserole à la Apicius: perfect for your family dinner and/or lascivious banquet

Here’s the recipe as tweeted:

The sauce: crush celery seed, oregano, mint, ginger, coriander, raisins, honey, vinegar, oil, wine. And…this one is going to take 280.

The rest: In a clay baking dish put down layers of bread, cooked chicken breasts, pine nuts, diced onion, sharp cheese, sauce. Cover & bake.

For 6 boneless (raw) chicken breasts I used:

• 2 tsp celery seeds
• 6 tsp oregano
• 3 TBSP mint (you may prefer less, but I like to go heavy on the mint)
• 2 tsp coriander
• 1-1/2 tsp ginger
• 1 cup raisins
• 4 tsp honey
• 4 tsp vinegar
• 4 tsp white cooking wine
• more white cooking wine, because the bottle was right there
• 2 cups pine nuts (in my opinion, you can’t have too much, for this recipe)
• 3 rolls of bread with sturdy crust (I used par-baked rolls), sliced lengthwise in thirds
• 8 thick slices of sharp cheddar (enough to cover the chicken on each layer)
• 5 chopped shallots
• pepper for garnish, if desired
• surprisingly, no fermented fish sauce
• I forgot the olive oil…probably because it was two in the morning…

Pound together the first six ingredients with the honey, vinegar, and wine. I layered the bread, chicken, sauce, shallots, and pine nuts (two layers fit the pot nicely) and cooked in a lidded Romertopf—soaked in water while I was at work, then placed in a cold oven, temperature set to 450F, and baked for about an hour and a quarter. An hour would probably have been enough, but I’m paranoid about cooking chicken thoroughly. After removing it from the oven, I let it sit in the clay baker for another 15 minutes.

Stray observation: I probably should have saved some of the sauce to pour (before cooking) over the top layer of bread, which came out crusty. Another alternative would be to cube the top layer of bread like stuffing (which is essentially what the other layers become). A variant on the recipe calls for layers of cucumbers as well and chilling the casserole and serving it jellied, which is a very different effect. Also one hard that’s to create if you don’t have snow handy in your ancient kitchen.

And now I’m too sleepy to eat more than a few bites, so I’ll leave you with a picture of the results…

Read Full Post »

3-day Countdown to Book 4!

The Knife of Narcissus part 4 releases on Monday, and will be available at all the usual places. I’ll be celebrating by making another ancient dish, my favourite Roman main course, Casserole à la Apicius. It goes well with the Apricot Stew side dish. I’m hoping it will also go well with Dogfish Head Brewery’s Ancient Ales. Here’s the recipe in 140:

The sauce: crush celery seed, oregano, mint, ginger, coriander, raisins, honey, vinegar, oil, wine. And…this one is going to take 280.

The rest: In a clay baking dish put down layers of bread, cooked chicken breasts, pine nuts, diced onion, sharp cheese, sauce. Cover & bake.

On Monday evening, I’ll post the expanded version of how the recipe turns out this time around, with pics.

Meanwhile, The Novel Approach has given Parts 1-2 an in-depth—and flattering—review:

“A wonderfully written historical gay romance, the first two books hitting the ground running as they introduce us to a world that’s both colorful and sensual in more ways than one….”

Please click on over and visit the site to see the whole review, and, of course, check out the other reviews to find other interesting books.

Read Full Post »

Morning Gruel: Apothermum

The results of the Apothermum recipe. If you missed the tweet, here’s the recipe in 140:

boil spelt grains w/pine nuts & bleached almonds into a pudding; add raisins & sweet wine, sprinkle nuts over, dust w/white pepper

I used 3 TB spelt flour, a half cup each of pine nuts and almonds. I ground the nuts and mixed them and the flour with about 2 cups water, which turned out to be a little too much. Stirred over a low flame at a simmer for about a half hour, then mixed in a cup of raisins and 1/3 cup sweet cooking wine. Stirred and simmered a while longer, adding a little more flour, until it was an acceptable porridge. Spooned into bowl, garnished with raisins and a dusting of white pepper.

Serves 2 Romans, or 4 who only feel snacky.

My sweet tooth wants to drizzle honey over it. If a Roman couldn’t reasonably pour fermented fish sauce over a dish, honey was often the next choice, so I think that’s acceptable. (I paired it with a refreshing cup of posca—water and wine vinegar. I opted out of the option to add honey and coriander to taste and went with the simpler soldier’s version.)

This is far too simple a dish for Cook in Knife of Narcissus to serve. She’d send master Bassus into the kitchen to make it himself.

Read Full Post »

Rome cooking, part something

I’m returning to the ancient Roman recipes today, and will be in the kitchen playing with some simple ones. Eventually I’ll try something elaborate, since, as Martial might sniffingly say,

Knowing how to cook is not enough to be a cook
One cannot have the tastes of a slave
But must possess the palate of a master

I’ll be out back convincing a thousand larks to give up their tongues in the name of fine cuisine.

Read Full Post »

Rome cooking

To celebrate this week’s release of The Knife of Narcissus book 3 and to continue the musings on food from the Sinfully Sexy Book Reviews guest post, each day I’ll be testing a few ancient recipes then tweeting the recipe for anyone interested in trying the tastes of ancient Rome. Today I started with a basic salad dressing that’s purported to be good for the stomach and digestion. Mixing it with ample vinegar is recommended.

Be sure to click over to the review for a Book 3 giveaway.

Read Full Post »

Mustering the troops

I’m getting ready for a week of Roman cookery.

spicy cheering squad is less blurry in real life than in this photo

I inspected the spice pantry to see what I’d need to pick up tomorrow. At a cursory sniff, they all seem to have stored well since the last Roman banquet, even though it was a long while ago. I can substitute fresh oregano, mint, and a few other herbs from the garden if those disappoint.

(spoiler for Monday’s guest post on Roman food: I did not sniff the asafoetida, even though, as I recall, this brand isn’t nearly as strong as the batch I got from a tiny little herb shop the first time I cooked Roman style.)

Read Full Post »