Egyptian Sweetmeat

This week's recipe is inspired by a reader who made Alexandrian Itria and shared them with us on the Pass the Garum Facebook page.  When another reader asked for a recipe for these sweetmeats, I set off on a hunt.  Quite by coincidence, I was looking through the rather fantastic Horrible Histories books (what an excellent Christmas present), and I chanced upon the very recipe I was looking for! It's not very Roman, and our source is a kid's book, but all the same we're going to have a bit of fun and hopefully make something tasty.

Egyptian Sweetmeats

Ingredients

•  6 or 7 Dried Dates (OR Date Syrup)
• 1 tsp Cinnamon Powder
• 1 tsp Cardamom Seeds
• 3 Handfuls Walnuts
• 2 tbsp Honey

Methods

• Remove the stones from the dates, chop them into small pieces, and mash them up with a mortar and pestle with some water.  You're looking to create a date paste of sorts.  If you have date syrup you can use this instead, or combine the two.
• Break open the cardamom seeds to get at the little seeds inside - grind these with a mortar and pestle to make a powder.
• Add the cinnamon and cardamom to the date liquid, and mix it all together.
• Smash up the walnuts so they're not too big, and add to the mixture.  Stir this all together to create a very festive smelling walnut/date dough of sorts.

• With wet hands, take a bit of this dough at a time and roll it into little spheres.  Mine ended up being ping-pong ball sized, but you can make them smaller or bigger.

• Heat up some honey in a little dish, spoon some cinnamon powder, powdered almonds, and ground pepper onto a plate (or if you're not too worried about being authentic you can use dessicated coconut as I have, or maybe even chocolate powder!).

• Dip each sweetmeat into the honey, and roll it in the dusting of your choice.  Let them set for a little bit, then enjoy! 

Notes

• Be careful not too have too much liquid in the early mixture, as you'll need a LOT of nuts to make it dry enough to mould into spheres.

Results

The nearest 'modern' food I can compare these sweetmeats to is, perhaps, alcoholic chocolate truffles.  The flavours and aromas are all very intense, with the cardamom and cinnamon lending these treats the taste of Christmas.  When coated in cinnamon the initial taste can be quite bitter, but it soon transforms into something more acceptable.  Almond, a taste which I'm not fond of, lends it that marzipan taste, which I'm also not fond of.  Pepper made it pleasantly tingly, but care must be taken not to use too much.  Perhaps the outright winner was the ever-so-authentic coconut covering, which I urge you to try if you make a batch.

Mustard Beans

That food you saw lurking in the background of last week's Roast Dill Chicken recipe was this ever so exciting (ok, not really) Mustard Bean dish.  Needing a side, and with plenty of beans in the cupboard, I figured we might as well cook those.  This Apician recipe calls for Baian beans, and rather unfortunately, nobody knows what type of beans these were.  I have opted for a nice broad butter bean, which has plenty of surface area for the mustard sauce to cling on to.  The original recipe is as follows:

Cook some beans and season them with mustard, honey, pine-nuts, rue, cumin, and a splash of vinegar. - Apicius, 5.6.3

Seems simple enough!  The only issue we (or at least I) have is that 'rue' sitting right in the middle of the recipe.  Rue is still hard to come by (in semi-rural Northern Ireland during winter at least), so it is going to be left out for now.  Everything else is good to go, so let's make a start.

Mustard Beans

Ingredients

• 1 Can Butter Beans
• 75g Pine Nuts
• 2 tbsp Cumin Seeds
• 1 tbsp Black Peppercorns
• 1 tbsp Mustard
• 1 tbsp Honey
• 2 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar
• 2 tbsp Dessert Wine

Methods

• Boil the butter beans for a few minutes in a saucepan.  Drain when finished.  Meanwhile:
• Toast the peppercorns and cumin seeds in a frying pan, then grind up in a mortar and pestle.
• Add the pine nuts to the mortar and pestle, and bash them until they make a nice paste.
• Add the mustard, honey, vinegar, and wine to the mortar, and mix everything together.  It should look like so:

• Pour the finished sauce over the drained butter beans, and toss it all together.
• A sprinkle of pepper is the perfect finishing touch.

Results

The pine nut paste which forms the base of this sauce means that it clings very well to the butter beans.  These beans are certainly a very flavoursome accompaniment to a meal, but the vinegar, wine, and mustard create quite a sharp, rich taste, so perhaps it is best not too eat too many at once.  An ideal way to serve them, in my opinion, is with a big hunk of bread - the sharpness of the sauce will counter the heaviness of Roman spelt bread.  Certainly worth a try.

Roast Dill Chicken

 

We have our Dill Chicken Dipping Sauce, and now we're going to use it!  This recipe isn't taken directly from Apicius, but it is based upon plenty which are, so you need not worry about authenticity. Essentially, all that you need for this is some chicken and your dipping sauce (click the link above to get to that recipe).  As I was cooking for just myself I decided to use a chicken breast, but it would work just as well with a whole chicken if you wanted to cook for several people.  You might also have noticed that I served the chicken with some butter beans - that's a little teaser for next week's recipe. 

Before starting, I wish to stress that although I have called this dish Roast Dill Chicken, the chicken isn't actually roasted for the entire time.  To start off with, we poach it in hydrogarum.  This is a lot less fancy than it sounds, and consists of water, pepper, and a few splashes of fish sauce.  It is, in essence, a stock, and boiling the chicken in this hydrogarum adds flavour to the meat before roasting.  Bearing this in mind, let's cook us some chicken!

Roast Dill Chicken

Ingredients

• Chicken Breast
• Dill Chicken Dipping Sauce
• Some Splashes of Fish Sauce
• A Few Grindings of Pepper

Methods

• Preheat the oven to 180 Celsius.
• Fill a saucepan with boiling water, a few splashes of fish sauce, and the ground pepper.  Add the chicken and boil for 10 - 15 minutes.
• Once the chicken has been parboiled, put it on a baking tray or in a casserole dish.  Score several deep cuts into the meat.
• Pour over the dipping sauce, and rub into the cuts.  Make sure to coat the meat well.
• Place into the oven for 30 minutes.  Every 10 minutes, baste the chicken with the sauce again.
• Serve and enjoy!

Notes

• If the sauce reduces too much in the oven, or starts to burn, add a little bit of water and fish sauce to recover it.

Results

Cooking has tempered some of the flavours of the Dill Dipping Sauce, making them blend together that little bit more, but the sauce is still the journey of flavours that it was before.  I'm amazed at how luxurious this chicken tastes, given how simple it is to make.  I'm also amazed at how well the sauce has held up as both a cold dipping sauce and a warm pouring sauce.  If you were willing to sacrifice some of that Roman authenticity, I think this cooked version would work fantastically with rice - cut the chicken into bite size chunks once cooked, serve on a bed of rice, and pour the sauce all over.  However you choose to serve it, just try making it - it is delicious.

Dill Chicken Dipping Sauce

Flicking through Cooking Apicius I spotted the rather tastily-titled 'Chicken in Sweet and Sour Sauce'.  I wanted to know how similar this tastes to Sweet and Sour Chicken as we know it today, so decided that this would be our next recipe.  Hopping over to my translation of Apicius, I soon learned that the 'Sweet and Sour' was added by Grainger, and that the recipe is actually called 'Raw Sauce for Boiled Chicken'.  Suddenly, our exotic sounding dinner sounds a lot less appetising.  Let's see if the ancient recipe can fix that:

In a mortar put some dill seed, dry mint, and asafoetida.  Add vinegar, fig wine, fish sauce, some mustard, oil, and grape must.  Serve.  Also called 'dill chicken'. - Apicius, 6.8.1

'Dill Chicken' - that's something we can work with, so that's what we're making.  This recipe is essentially a two-parter.  For now, we're making the sauce, which can be used for dipping meat into.  Later (in a matter of a few hours), we'll be cooking some chicken in the sauce.  I have decided to break with tradition a little bit and use fresh dill weed, rather than the seed.  I currently have lots of fresh dill weed which needs using, and no dill seed, so the decision is based partly around that. Dill also happens to be a flavour I love, and if the dish is called 'Dill Chicken', it's dill I want to taste.  I've also gone for fresh mint rather than dried mint for similar reasons.  I will come back to this recipe with the proper ingredients in the future, just to see how much of a difference it makes, but for now, we shall start.

Dill Chicken Dipping Sauce

Ingredients

• Handful Fresh Dill Weed
• Handful Fresh Mint Leaves
• 1/2 tsp Asafoetida
• 1 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar
• 2 tbsp Fish Sauce
• 2 tbsp Date Paste
• 1 tbsp Mustard
• 1 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 3 tbsp Caroenum or 1 tbsp Balsamic Glaze

Methods

• Wash the dill and mint leaves, add to the mortar, and pound away at them until they become a paste.
• Add the asafoetida and mix it in.
• Add all of the various sauces, syrups, and liquids.  Mix the whole lot up.
• Leave the sauce in the mortar, and serve with cold cuts of meat for dipping.
• Enjoy!

Notes

• As mentioned before, I've gone for fresh dill weed and fresh mint leaves rather than dill seed and dried mint.
• You can use balsamic glaze as a substitute for caroenum.
• If you don't have date paste, try a bit of honey for sweetness instead.

Results

If ever you wanted the taste of ancient Rome in a quick and easy to make sauce, this is it.  The sauce took just five minutes to make, and the results are spectacular.  Because of the dill and mint, the sauce clings very well to meat, making it great for dipping.  I also believe that this sauce proves, without a doubt, that the Romans didn't overseason food into anonymity.  Chicken dipped, and a bite taken, you immediately feel the tang of the vinegar and taste the sweetness of the date syrup and balsamic.  The flavour then evolves as the savoury of the fish sauce comes through.  The experience is made complete by the lingering delicate flavour of dill.  This isn't overseasoned, but rather it is the perfect balance of flavours, each working with the next.  It is, like all the Roman food I've tried so far, a journey of taste - you start off with one taste, and finish with another.  I cannot wait to see what this sauce is like when cooked with chicken!