Placenta Perfecta

There was no hiding my disappointment with the Placenta recipe - this was supposed to be a dish worthy of the gods themselves.  Instead, I ate enough to be able to write about it, and sacrificed the rest to a god called 'the bin'.  Knowing that it could be done better, I decided to give it another go.  Just to see how good it might be, I've abandoned the pastry-making process and used some shop-bought filo pastry.  The benefits are that:

a) I have something to try and replicate with my own pastry making.

and

b) it makes it more accessible to you, the reader.  

We will soon revisit Roman pastry in a bid to perfect it for future recipes.

The results were fantastic, with the crisp outer pastry complimenting the oh-so-indulgent creamy honey-cheese insides.  It was also filling, without being stodgy.  It is with a watering mouth that I introduce you to this recipe - now with measurements and timings!

Placenta Perfecta

Ingredients

• 270g Filo Pastry
• 250g Ricotta Cheese
• Lots of Honey
• Dried Bay Leaves
• Olive Oil

Method

• Put all of the Ricotta into a bowl, and add as much honey as you'd like.  Taste it as you go along until you've reached perfection.  I added about 5 tbsps.
• The Filo, when bought, should come in folded sheets.  Take 3 or 4 full sheets for your outer crust.  Then fold what is left in half, and cut into rectangles 2 or 3 sheets thick.  These rectangles will create the layers inside the placenta, taking the place of the tracta, so size them accordingly.
• Oil whatever tray or dish you plan to bake this on, and arrange enough oiled bay leaves to form your base.  Place the crust layer of Filo on top of this, and one of the Filo rectangles in the middle of that.
• On top of this rectangle, spoon the cheese/honey mixture.  Place another Filo rectangle on top of that, and continue until the cheese is gone, or until you wish to stop.
• Fold the outer crust over the top, chopping off any excess.  Decorate with an oiled bay leaf, and place into a cold oven at 150 Celsius.  We are NOT covering the placenta this time, as we want the pastry to be crisp.  Cook for 45 minutes.
• Serve, love, and enjoy!

Roman Religious Cake - Placenta

The Latin 'C' was pronounced like our 'K'. Kai-sar, Kik-ero, Pla-kenta.  Hopefully that little bit of knowledge allays all fears, worries, and squeamishness, because now that we know the name, it's time to meet the dish.

Placenta is variously linked to Lasagne, which it resembles in form, Baklava, which is a tenuous link at best, and Pizza, which is just plain crazy.  If anything, its closest modern relative is the Romanian Plăcintă, which I've both tried and enjoyed.  Placenta is a 'dessert' made from layered cheese, honey, and pastry, but really it is much more than the sum of its parts.  It was offered to the gods themselves as a form of bloodless sacrifice.  I am currently working on several posts about the role of food in Roman religion, so will deal with sacrificial cakes in more depth there.  For now, I merely wish to stress the significance of the dish we're about to attempt.

Our recipe for placenta comes from Cato (the bloke with the bread) in his work on agriculture.  Varro, another Roman who wrote an agricultural treatise, questioned this (On Agriculture, I.2.25-28) - why include a recipe for a semi-religious pastry in a work on how to tend the farm?  Farming, and Roman life in general, revolved around religious rituals, so perhaps Cato recorded the recipe for that reason.  Or perhaps he just fancied a nibble on something nice after a day spent telling slaves how to work the land.  Whatever his reasoning, we ought to be thankful that the recipe survived for us to make today.

To make placenta.  Moisten 2 pounds of flour, then knead it and make a thin crust.  Macerate 14 pounds of sheep's cheese in water, changing the water three times.  After, take the cheese out a handful at a time, squeezing it dry, before placing it in a bowl.  Once all the cheese is dry, knead it until smooth again, before forcing it through a sifter.  Add 4.5 pounds of good quality honey and mix it all together.  Lay out your crust on top of some oiled bay leaves, and construct the placenta as follows.  Place a layer of tracta on top of the crust, then cover it with the cheese and honey mixture, before adding more tracta.  Repeat this until the mixture is finished.  Place a single layer of tracta on the top, fold over the crust, and prepare to cook it.  Prepare the hearth, add the placenta, then cover it with a crock.  Heap hot coals on top of this.  Cook slowly, checking it two or three times along the way.  When it is cooked, smother it in honey. - Cato, On Agriculture, 76

For once, we have actually been told how much of each ingredient we need!  Unfortunately, Cato is either a) really hungry, b) cooking for the whole of Rome, or c) sacrificing the placenta to the whole Pantheon of Roman gods.

Cato Feeding Rome

Needless to say, we'll be toning down the quantities a little bit.  The other thing we'll be dropping is the maceration of the cheese.  If you macerate something, you break it up in water - the reason it was done in this recipe was to remove the salt from the cheese.  I tried this with cheddar and it worked very well indeed, but we'll be using Ricotta, which practically is water anyway.  Macerating that will leave you with a bowl of cheese flavoured water, which you don't want.  Finally, I used a mixture of spelt and white flour for the crust - I figure that since this would be sacrificed to the gods themselves, the Romans might make a bit of an effort to get some decent, refined flour.  Anyway, the gods are getting impatient, so let's start cooking!

Placenta

Ingredients

• Spelt Flour
• Plain White Flour
• Several Dried Bay Leaves
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Ricotta Cheese
• Runny Honey
• Tracta
• Water

Methods

• You need to judge what size of placenta you are making, and what you'll cook it in - this will determine how much of each ingredient you'll need.  I've opted to use my Tajine, but you can use any old casserole dish or baking tray.

• You want to make enough 'crust', as Cato calls it, to wrap the whole way around the tracta/honey/cheese layers.  To make this, sieve your spelt and plain flour together, then add water and mix into a dough.  Knead well, then roll it out as thinly as possible on a floured surface.
• Mix the honey with the cheese, tasting as you go.  If you're using cheddar, as half my mixture was, add it to water and break it apart with your hands.  Alternatively you can grate the cheese and add it to the water.  Grab handfuls of this and squeeze all of the water out - this leaves the cheese with a subtle flavour.  Do not mix Ricotta with water, as you'll be left with nothing.
• Oil all of the bay leaves, then arrange them in the bottom of your cooking dish.  Oil this dish too, to prevent sticking.  Place the crust on top of these leaves.

• Oil each of the tracta.  Place one on top of the crust.

• Spoon some of the cheese/honey mixture on top of this.  Place a tracta on top of this.  Continue until it is lovely and layered.  You want to finish with a tracta on top.  The finished product should bear some resemblance to a lasagne.

• Fold the crust over, cutting off any excess dough as required.  You do not want this crust to be too thick, as it won't cook thoroughly, and will be very stodgy indeed.  Garnish with an oiled bay leaf.  Either add your tajine lid (having seasoned it as required), or construct a foil tent over the top of the placenta.  This stops the pastry getting too crispy.

• If using a tajine, set it into a cold oven and raise the temperature to 150 Celsius.  Otherwise, preheat the oven to 150 Celsius and place in.  Cook for 1 hour/1.5 hours depending on size.
• Remove, serve, and enjoy.  Don't forget to set some aside for the gods.

Results

Whilst cooking, this smelled divine, but after trying some I'm not entirely sure what the gods saw in it.  The problem, I think, lies with both the tracta and the crust - both feel just a bit too stodgy.  Having done some more research into tracta, I'm not convinced that we need to dry it completely before use.  Thankfully the excess liquid from the ricotta softened it sufficiently, but I just feel that it can be done better.  As such, until we solve the tracta mystery, you might want to send your placenta to the gods, rather than the dinner table. Other than that, the cheese and honey made a nice team, giving the dish a savoury sweetness.  The bay leaves, however, which created such a nice aroma when cooking, added little to the taste.  At least they looked the part.  All in all, eating this reminded me of eating a stack of savoury pancakes - if that's your thing, then maybe this is the Roman recipe for you.

EDIT:  I remade the recipe with modern pastry HERE, and it was amazing!

Ofellae (with added Laser)

Adding lasers to anything automatically makes it better, but how does adding laser, or rather asafoetida, compare?  Today we'll be adding asafoetida to the ever so ambiguous Roman ofellae.  Ofellae have variously been translated as 'meatballs', 'meat burgers', and 'cutlets', which means that this recipe has been complicated from the start. My inspiration for, and interpretation of this recipe comes from several different sources, but the two main ones are as follows:

Crush laser, ginger, and cardamom.  Mix this with some fish sauce, and cook the ofellae within. - Vinidarius, Excerpts from Apicius, 6.1.

To prepare the meat, clean it of bones and sinew.  Scrape the meat as thin as skin, and shape it. - Apicius, 7.4.1

Vinidarius is somebody we haven't encountered yet, so it is only polite to introduce him, albeit briefly.  He was a Goth (The East-Germanic tribe who invaded Rome in the 4th and 5th centuries) who compiled recipes.  His Apician excerpts actually contain very little from Apicius, but the dishes are Apician, and Roman, in style.  The trouble with his ofellae recipe is that we don't actually find out what ofellae are, or how to make them; this is why I've had to turn to Apicius for help.

Not Vinidarius

Apicius, as ever, is ambiguous - how exactly do we 'shape it', when it comes to the meat?  Grainger believes that ofellae are chunks of highly seasoned meat, but this doesn't seem to match up with the instruction to 'scrape the meat as thin as skin, and shape it'.  However, when it comes to other recipes, she does appear to be correct.  I would also hesitate to call them meatballs as some translations do, as they didn't hold their shape very well when I tried.  Ultimately, I think that the best translation for ofellae is 'tidbits' - tidbits are small, tasty morsels of food, and ofellae are small, tasty pieces of meat, regardless of how they look.  Because we have to scrape the meat thin and shape it, I've decided to base my ofellae on Kofta, which can be ball shaped or burger shaped.  The key is that they are shaped meat.

I've also made the maverick decision to cook both beef and pork ofellae.  As we discovered before, the Romans preferred to keep their cows in their fields rather than on their plates, and because they were work animals their meat was tough.  As such, I've chosen a tough beef 'frying steak'.  The pork is an ever-so-lovely pork fillet.  So, without further ado: 

Laser Ofellae

Ingredients

• Meat
• 1 tsp Asafoetida
• 1 tsp Cardamom
• 1 Piece of Ginger
• 5 tbsp Fish Sauce

Methods

• Trim the fat, bones, sinews, and yucky bits from the meat. If using pork I'd be tempted to keep some of the fat, as pork fat is divine.
• We need to prepare the meat, which I did in two ways.  One method is to take a really sharp knife and slice super thin slices of meat.  The other method is the Apician one, and involves scraping the meat until it gets really thin.  Be warned though, this can blunt your knives fairly quickly, which is why I used an older, blunter one.  It can also prove tough when you have little meat left to play with.  What you're looking for is a board of meat as follows.  Yes, I know I've cross-contaminated the meat, but it made for an easier photo.

• Shape the meat into whatever squares, triangles, or circles you fancy.  I've opted for the squashed egg look.

• Break open the cardamom pods to get at the seeds.  Add these to your mortar and pestle along with the ginger.  Grind these down, then add the asafoetida and the fish sauce.  Mix to bring it all together.
• Pour this mixture over your ofellae and leave to marinate for a few hours.  The asafoetida is supposed to have tenderising properties.  I don't feel like there was enough 'sauce', but such was the recipe.

• Stick the whole lot in the oven at around 180 Celsius for around half an hour, or until the meat is cooked.  Frying is another option.

Notes

• If you really don't have enough marinade, instead of using straight fish sauce, use some hydrogarum.  To make hydrogarum, add fish sauce to cold water and bring to the boil, stirring every once in a while.  It is essentially diluted fish sauce.
• If you read the results below, you'll see that I recommend trying this dish with sliced belly of pork, or with ground/minced pork or beef.

Results

This recipe was tough, from start, with the ambiguous instructions, to finish, with the too-tough-to-enjoy meat.  Whilst this was partly down to my choice of meat, it was largely due to the way in which the meat was prepared.  Even with the thinnest of slices, the meat, once shaped and cooked, resembled overcooked diced meat.  This was true for both the pork and the beef.  Setting aside all problems with texture and toughness, the flavours were exactly what you might expect from Laser Ofellae - it tasted of asafoetida.  This savoury seasoning tastes like the love-child of onion and garlic - it is intense, unusual, and pungent enough to make you brush your teeth after eating it, but it is a great addition to a meal.  It was the dominant flavour, by far, but the ginger was just strong enough to make an appearance at the end of eating.  My recommendation is to try Laser Ofellae, but to slice pork belly, or use minced/ground pork or beef instead.  This is a recipe I will revisit in the future, with a brand new post; the flavours alone make it worthwhile, but it is the challenge of perfecting ofellae which tempts me.

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!