Книга - A History of Food in 100 Recipes

A History of Food in 100 Recipes
William Sitwell


The ingredients, cooks, techniques and tools that have shaped our love of food.We all love to eat and most of us have a favourite ingredient or dish. In today's world we can get the food we want, when we want it, but how many of us really know where our much-loved recipes come from, who invented them and how they were originally cooked? In this book William Sitwell, culinary expert on BBC2's 'A Question of Taste' and editor of Waitrose Kitchen magazine, takes us on a colourful, whirlwind journey as he explores the fascinating history of cuisine.This book is a celebration of the great dishes, techniques and above all brilliant cooks who have, over the centuries, created the culinary landscape we now enjoy. Any lover of fine food who has ever wondered about the origins of the methods and recipes we now take for granted will find A History of Food in 100 Recipes required reading. As well as shining a light on food's glorious past, there are contributions from a glittering array of stars of British cuisine, including Marco Pierre White, Delia Smith, Heston Blumenthal, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver.In an incisive and humorous narrative, Sitwell enters an Egyptian tomb to reveal the earliest recipe for bread and discovers the greatest party planner of the Middle Ages. He uncovers the extraordinary and poetic roots of the roast dinner and tells the heart-rending story of the forgotten genius who invented the pressure cooker. And much, much more.













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Text © William Sitwell 2012

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For Laura


Contents

Cover (#u8de7b6bc-9343-5649-96fd-f194a1f078ad)

Title Page (#u25745a73-d5fb-51fb-9cbf-df75f203cf85)

Copyright (#u2028ccff-04ab-5adb-9667-d31e7f41c53b)

Dedication (#u5d9d2b1b-9981-58bd-a2a0-8b904346fb86)

Introduction



A note on the recipes

1 – Ancient Egyptian bread, 1958–1913 BC

2 – Kanasu broth (Meat and vegetable stew), circa 1700 BC

3 – Tiger nut sweets, circa 1400 BC

4 – Fish baked in fig leaves, 350 BC

5 – To salt ham, 160 BC

6 – Roast goat, 30 BC

7 – Another sauce for fowl, AD 10

8 – Honeyed cheesecakes, circa AD 200

9 – Congee, AD 636

10 – Dried fish, circa AD 800

11 – Manchet bread, circa 1070

12 – Pasta, 1154

13 – Rummaniyya (Meatballs in pomegranate sauce), 1250

14 – Pear of pies, 1379

15 – Erbolate (Baked eggs with herbs), 1390

16 – Green porray, 1392

17 – Party planning, 1420

18 – Muscules in shelle (Mussels in white wine sauce), 1440

19 – Lese fryes (Cheese tart), circa 1450

20 – Ravioli for non-Lenten times, 1465

21 – For to bake quinces, 1500

22 – Hippocras jelly, 1530

23 – Turkey tomales, circa 1540

24 – Hot chocolate, 1568

25 – To prepare a thick broth called zabaglione, 1570

26 – Earth apples (Potatoes fried and simmered with bacon bits), 1581

27 – Trifle, 1596

28 – Prince-biskets (Prince biscuits), 1602

29 – To butter crawfish, 1604

30 – An Englishman discovers the fork, 1611

31 – Spargus with white sauce, 1651

32 – A good supper dish (Mutton baked in breadcrumbs), 1664

33 – Peas soope, 1669

34 – Roast fillet of beef, 1671

35 – Fish experiment XIII, 1681

36 – Tomato sauce in the Spanish style, 1692

37 – Salad dressing, 1699

38 – Ice cream, 1718

39 – Puff past (Puff pastry), 1739

40 – Little foie gras pastries with truffles, 1740

41 – A Yorkshire pudding, 1747

42 – To make chip marmalade, 1783

43 – Sandwiches, 1787

44 – A buttered apple pie, 1796

45 – Soufflé, 1816

46 – Spring fruit pudding, 1817

47 – Pheasant Brillat-Savarin, 1825

48 – Cupcake, 1828

49 – Petits soufflés à la rose, 1833

50 – Brussels sprouts, 1845

51 – Kedgeree or kidgeree, an Indian breakfast dish, 1845

52 – Welsh rarebit, 1852

53 – Cauliflower & cheese, 1860

54 – Roly-poly jam pudding, 1861

55 – Eggs à la Benedick, 1894

56 – Hollandaise sauce, 1895

57 – Strawberry shortcake, 1896

58 – Preparation of peas, 1902

59 – Peach Melba, 1903

60 – Scotch barley broth, 1907

61 – Onion butter sauce, 1908

62 – Croque monsieur, 1915

63 – Chocolate cake, 1916

64 – Spaghetti à la Campbell, 1916

65 – Creamed mushrooms, 1919

66 – Strawberry ice-cream soda 1927

67 – Toad-in-the-hole, 1927

68 – Quick oatmeal cookies, 1931

69 – Omelette, 1937

70 – Elderberry & apple jam, 1940

71 – French creamed oysters, 1941

72 – Rice Krispies treats, 1941

73 – Victoria sandwich cake, 1948

74 – Cassoulet toulousain, 1950

75 – Syrup tart, 1950

76 – Boeuf bourgignon (Beef stew in red wine, with bacon, onions and mushrooms), 1961

77 – Watercress soup for one, 1963

78 – A large cocktail crush for 40, 1965

79 – Négresse sans chemise, 1966

80 – Cheese fondue, 1970

81 – Mediterranean lemon soup with Middle Eastern tacos, 1971

82 – Lamb korma, 1973

83 – Ginger cake, 1974

84 – Salmon fish cakes, 1976

85 – Classic bouillabaisse, 1984

86 – Sweet & sour pork, 1984

87 – Giura (Slow-braised beef), 1986

88 – Tagliatelle of oyster with caviar, 1987

89 – Chicken & goat’s cheese mousse with olives, 1987

90 – Quails with couscous, 1990

91 – Individual sausage, tomato & artichoke-heart pizzas, 1995

92 – Pecan waffles with pecan & banana syrup, 1998

93 – Fairy cakes, 2000

94 – Bacon, leek & potato gratin, 2001

95 – Spiced prawns, 2001

96 – Smoked mackerel pâté, 2004

97 – Asian salad with ponzu ginger dressing & wasabi peas, 2006

98 – Steamed salmon with tomato basil couscous, 2009

99 – Stewed rhubarb, 2010

100 – Meat fruit (or fois gras & chicken liver parfait), 2011



Select bibliography

Searchable Terms

Text credits

Acknowledgements

From the Reviews of A History of Food in 100 Recipes

About the Author

About the Publisher


Introduction (#ulink_7326d341-732a-59d5-ac6f-6f76b8421448)

After an auction at Sotheby’s, in the summer of July 2010, I came away with an armful of nineteenth-century cookery books and a smattering of food-related paintings and cartoons. They had been a tiny part of a vast culinary collection owned by one Stanley J. Steeger and now, as I took them home to Northamptonshire, they would be a large part of a rather small collection of one William R. S. Sitwell.

There on a shelf in my study, a room filled with giant photographs of food – ripened figs in a bowl, peas in a pod and a Damian Hirst-style ‘shark in jelly’ – the books added intellectual and historical weight to what I already had. There were cookery books sent to me by publishers and PRs over the years hoping for coverage in the food magazine I edit, autobiographies penned by famous chefs I know and the odd food tome that I had actually paid for.

I started leafing through the old books I had bought, slightly wondering if, while they certainly gave character to the shelf, they would be as dry to read as they looked from their tired bindings and browned paper. But I was quickly struck by the characterful writing that leapt from so many of the pages. Where I had expected placid cooking instruction I found verbose opinion. Entries in the nineteenth-century Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, for instance, were filled with radical opinion and comment. ‘It is a shocking thought that many die annually of absolute starvation, whose lives might have been saved twenty times over,’ wrote the editor, A. G. Payne, in a long and ranting introduction.

That view sounded rather familiar, I thought. ‘Scraps of meat, fag ends of pieces of bacon, too often wasted, with a little judicious management, make a nice dish of rissoles,’ it continued, making the idea that using leftovers was ‘fashionable’ – as promulgated in magazines such as mine – seem laughably prosaic.

I came across the writings of Dr William Kitchiner in his hilarious 1817 Cook’s Oracle in which, aside from describing in every gory detail some of the cruellest cooking practices he had ever heard of (don’t worry – I’ve also conveyed it with no stone left unturned on here), he lambasted those who had written cookbooks before him. Most, he wrote, were of no more use ‘than reading Robinson Crusoe would enable a sailor to steer safely from England to India’. He despaired of those who suggested of ‘a bit of this – a handful of that – a pinch of t’other – a dust of flour – a shake of pepper – a squeeze of lemon’. Such recipes left him bewildered. By contrast, Kitchiner promised that he would give the reader ‘precision [that] has never before been attempted in cookery books’. In a similar vein was Jules Gouffé – chef de cuisine of the Paris Jockey Club – in whose Royal Cookery Book of 1868 he attacked ‘the perfect uselessness of such cookery books as have hitherto been published’.

This all sounded very familiar. Didn’t every PR sending me a new cookbook from the latest culinary sensation claim that there hadn’t been one quite like this one, that no previous book had been written with such clarity, that the recipes in this book really worked, that it was a new style of cooking guaranteed to capture the public’s imagination?

Deciding to delve a little deeper, I soon came across Hannah Glasse who had published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747. It could have been 2011. Her book, she declared, ‘far exceeds anything of the kind ever yet published. I believe I have attempted a brand of cookery which nobody has yet thought worth their while to write upon.’

Then back in 1500 there was This Boke of Cokery in which the anonymous author stated: ‘Here begynneth a noble boke of festes ryalle and cookery a boke for a princes household or any other estates and the makynge therof according as ye shall find more playnely with this boke.’ The inference is clear: this boke was plainer, simpler and clearer than any other boke.

As well as such bold claims of authenticity and brilliance, it struck me that across the centuries the characters making these claims were as strong as the sentiments they expressed. In other words, there is nothing new about chefs today being mad, bad, passionate, obsessive, foodie fanatics. Furious rages echo out of kitchens throughout history, as does a passion for the best ingredients. Just as in the late 1980s Marco Pierre White was throwing the contents of a badly arranged cheese board at the wall of his restaurant, back in 350 BC the Sicilian Archestratus was losing his rag. If you wanted good honey, he said, it was only worth getting the stuff from Attica, otherwise you might as well ‘be buried measureless fathoms underground’. And if you didn’t cook simply and poured sauce over everything, you might as well be ‘preparing a tasty dish of dogfish’ (a fish variety considered as inedible then as its translation reads today).

Just as the passions of chefs, producers and consumers of food have brought the subject of food alive for me over the years, so this book is an investigation into, and a tribute to, the passionate people who have driven its story forward over the centuries. Were it not for a few rampant gourmands like the sauce-loving Apicius who in AD 10 wrote the only surviving cookbook from ancient Rome, or cheese-obsessed Pantaleone da Confienza sniffing his way around the dairies of Europe in the mid fifteenth century, the dim and distant past would be a great deal dimmer and considerably less tasty.

The history of food is coloured by the individuals who enveloped themselves in the subject and who wrote the recipes that help to tell its story. This book is my partisan choice of what I reckon are the 100 best stories: the biggest characters, the occasional culinary villain and some of the most delicious food in history. The recipes range, unashamedly, from the dead simple ancient Egyptian bread to the downright complicated ‘meat fruit’.

It’s a history skewed to what interests me as an English food writer from the early twenty-first century, working in London and living in the English countryside. It’s the story of constant stealing of recipes – from Platina’s pilfering of the works of Martino de Rossi in 1475 to the theft of content from Epicurious.com (http://Epicurious.com) in 2011. It charts the birth, death and early rebirth of British food culture (we’re not quite there yet, but we’re on our way). It follows the rise of consumerism and considers the delights of supermarket convenience versus the well-being of the planet. And it’s the account of the influences of kings, queens, conquistadors, cooks, restaurateurs and greedy pigs like me who live, breathe and talk food and are constantly on the lookout for as good a meal as we can lay our hands on.

William Sitwell

Plumpton, Northamptonshire

March 2012


A note on the recipes (#ulink_f89c9026-de8e-5f4e-a0b5-bf9764b6ec0c)

Unusually for a volume entitled A History of Food in 100 Recipes not every one of the ensuing chapters has an actual recipe and neither are they all eminently or indeed easily cookable. My ambition for the book is to take you on a journey where each stop gives you a colourful insight into the food scene of a particular period. Unfortunately in the early stages of this history not all the key players were as diligent in writing down their recipes as a cook might be today. As you’ll discover, for example, there are no Viking recipes, so I’ve relied on evidence from an Icelandic saga, which details the various marauding shenanigans of Grettir the Strong and his rival Atli the Red, who might not have been foodies but surely ate a lot of dried fish. Neither, indeed, is there a recipe for bread in the early stages of English history – we have to wait until the fifteenth century for that. But of course people were eating bread centuries before then, which is why you’ll have to forgive me for instead describing details of the Bayeux Tapestry to provide a glimpse into alfresco pre-battle catering from the eleventh century.

In other words, rather than give a modern interpretation of what someone might have cooked at a particular moment in history, my aim has been to provide an exact contemporary reference. And where I have dug up some ancient method of roasting beef or poaching mussels I haven’t updated it – except to ‘translate’ some of the trickier terms and old spellings – or provided a modern version of the recipe in question. I want you to simply read and enjoy the recipes as they were written down. So, perhaps uniquely, this is not a book where every recipe has been triple-tested, where the ingredients have been tweaked, changed and replaced so you can knock them out after a quick trip to your local supermarket. Denis Papin’s steam-digester-prepared mackerel from the seventeenth century will, I freely admit, be hard to reproduce at home, but then again so will Heston Blumenthal and Ashley Palmer Watts’s bang up-to-date ‘meat fruit’. This may not a recipe book that promises practical cookery, but I hope you nevertheless find it a delicious read …


1 (#ulink_3d1ac3fb-357d-53f9-b126-10d72e31713c)

Ancient Egyptian bread (#ulink_3d1ac3fb-357d-53f9-b126-10d72e31713c)

1958–1913 BC

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The wall of Senet’s tomb, Luxor, Egypt

Crush the grain with sticks in a wooden container. Pass the crushed grain through a sieve to remove the husks. Using a grindstone, crush the grain still finer until you have a heap of white flour. Mix the flour with enough water to form a soft dough. Knead the dough in large jars, either by hand or by treading on it gently. Tear off pieces of the kneaded dough and shape into rounds. Either cook directly on a bed of hot ashes or place in moulds and set on a copper griddle over the hearth. Be attentive while cooking: once the bottom of the bread starts to brown, turn over and cook the other side.

On the hot, dusty sides of the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, overlooking the Nile valley near the ancient city of Thebes – now Luxor – you’ll find the discreet and humble entrance to the tomb of Senet. Carved into the limestone mountain, it is one of hundreds of burial chambers in the area. The tombs were the funerary resting places of the nobles, officials who wielded power under the Pharoahs in ancient Egypt.

Painted onto the walls of their tombs are scenes from daily existence that they wished to be replicated in the afterlife. So everything that was pleasant – happy memories, experiences and rituals – is recorded in detail, giving us a clear picture of everyday life 4,000 years ago. There are scenes of hunting, fishing, the harvesting of crops and grapes, feasting and general rural life.

Almost all of the tombs were for men, but Theban tomb number TT60 is the resting place of Senet. Hers is both the only known tomb for a woman dating from Egyptian Middle Kingdom period, between 2055 and 1650, and the oldest burial chamber whose decorated walls have survived in good order. In addition to images of hunting, ploughing and sowing, there are depictions of bread-making. These are so detailed and colourful that those who have seen the wall paintings attest to their overwhelming power. ‘We are,’ wrote Egyptologist Thierry Benderitter on viewing them in the 1970s, ‘in the presence of the exceptional representations of actual cooking in the Middle Kingdom.’

But who was Senet herself? It appears that she was either the wife or mother of Antefoqer, a vizier – the most senior of men who stood between the pharaoh and his subjects – who served both King Amenemhat I and then his son Sesostris I at the start of the Twelfth Dynasty, between 1958 and 1913 BC. That she was accorded her own hypogeum, or private underground tomb, attests to Antefoqer’s importance. Yet the entrance today has no majesty. Less grand than others on the same hill, it now has a brick entrance with a simple wooden door added in 1914 by the English Egyptologist Norman Davies.

Only very few tombs are open to the public. This one is rarely visited – entry being highly restricted – and photography is banned to prevent light damage to the wall paintings. Those permitted access must first manoeuvre past the endless rubble that surrounds the entrance before removing a pile of stones that frequently blocks the actual door in a crude but effective form of security. Once opened, the door reveals a long, narrow and bleak passageway extending into the tomb, its roof descending in height and adding to a sense of compression. The passage leads to a dusty square chamber where there’s a statue of Senet herself, seated; a reconstruction, the sculpture having been found completely fragmented.

Beyond the chamber is another long passageway, but this one is bright with paintings, in colours of ochre, yellow, red and blue. The eye is drawn first to an image of Antefoqer hunting, posing majestically in a simple loincloth, his bow fully extended. Around his neck is an elaborate necklace of blue, green and white, while his wrists are adorned with matching bracelets.

There are images of greyhounds, hippos and beautifully drawn birds: geese, ducks and flamingoes in a bright, sky-blue background. Gazelles and hares are chased by dogs. Birds are netted and fish – so detailed you can tell their variety – are hauled in from a pond. And then halfway down the 20-metre passage, on the right, are scenes of cooking.

There is meat preparation, for instance. Under the cooling protection of an awning, men butcher an ox. They hang pieces of meat on ropes, while others out in the sun tenderise it, tapping it with stones. To their right a man adds a bone to a cauldron of soup with one hand while stirring it with a stick in the other. Another roasts poultry on a skewer over a raised grill, while encouraging the embers with a mezzaluna-shaped fan. It is a hive of activity.

As is a precisely drawn recipe for bread-making, summarised at the top of this chapter. The images were not of course intended to instruct the household cook, but to help the departed soul have some decent, freshly baked bread baked in the afterlife. Yet it is a foundation that has informed bread-making for thousands of years.

The images not only show how flour is prepared from grain, it also records some chatting (deciphered from hieroglyphs) between the characters, painted near some of their heads like speech bubbles. First, two men crush the grain in a wooden container. ‘Down!’ one orders as another replies, ‘I do as you wish.’ Next a woman passes the grain through a sieve to remove the husks, while her female companion grinds the grain even finer using a grindstone. In another image a girl kneads small rolls of dough in her hands, while another adds thin lines of it to some tall conical moulds. Behind the girl a man can be seen placing the conical containers into an oven. He pokes the embers with one hand while protecting his face from the heat with another. But he’s not happy with the state of the logs. ‘This firewood is green,’ he moans.

Meanwhile, another woman can be seen kneading a much larger piece of dough. She leans over a table, pressing and stretching it out. The finished dough is presumably destined for the bakery in an adjacent picture. Here a foreman stands holding a threateningly pointy-ended staff while he encourages his workers. Below him a man on his knees kneads dough and meekly says: ‘I do as you wish, I am hard at work.’ His co-worker carries some dough in a reddish-brown mould towards a hearth where another pokes at the flames. While others are kneading dough by both treading or mixing it by hand, a final character can be seen turning a partially cooked piece of bread, which has turned brown in the hot ashes.






Werner Forman Archive

Egyptian bread-making depicted in a painting on the wall of Senet’s tomb in Luxor.

Bread made in this way was a staple food of ancient Egypt. The world’s earliest loaves show how people had progressed in agriculture and in the techniques of milling, leavening and baking, although we can’t be sure when they learnt to use yeast to help the dough rise and produce a lighter loaf.

It’s likely that the products of this early baking were a little like modern-day pitta bread. A set of beer-making scenes that exist in the same passageway suggests ancient Egyptians were using yeast. It’s needed to turn the sugar to alcohol and even if it was incorporated in its natural state, from yeast spores in the air, it was used at some point in ancient Egypt. Other hieroglyphs in tombs near Luxor show bread being left to rise near ovens, although the detailed scenes of grain being turned to dough in Senet’s tomb do not include this part of the process. Perhaps some dough that had been left for a day rose a little due to the presence of air-borne yeast and the baker enjoyed the resulting, fluffier loaf. (Although it is safe to assume that at that time he would not have understood the science behind the process – fermentation expanding the gluten proteins in the flour and causing the dough to expand.)

As bread- and beer-making often occurred in tandem, it could be, whether by accident or experiment, that some fermented brewing liquor was added to the dough. However, it did occur and using starter doughs (a soft lump from the previous day added to the next morning’s batch) became common practice. The regular use of yeast to make leavened bread is evident, at least, from the Bible – Exodus 12: 34 and 39, to be precise. As the Israelites fled from captivity in Egypt, ‘the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading troughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders’. The bread they made subsequently, as Exodus goes on to recount, was not a nice, airy country-style loaf: ‘And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual.’

Records show that in addition to bread, the ancient Egyptians enjoyed a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and poultry. They used herbs, from cumin to fenugreek, and that scenes of domestic cooking were considered important for the afterlife confirms that it was as vital a part of everyday life then as it is now.


2 (#ulink_2b004fe9-25d5-5ad6-87d9-dc02128cde7e)

Kanasu broth (#ulink_2b004fe9-25d5-5ad6-87d9-dc02128cde7e)

(Meat and vegetable stew) (#ulink_2b004fe9-25d5-5ad6-87d9-dc02128cde7e)

circa 1700 BC

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The Babylonian Collection

Recipe 23, tablet A, 21 kinds of meat broth and four kinds of vegetable broth. Kanasu Broth. Leg of mutton is used. Prepare water add fat. Samidu; coriander; cumin; and kanasu. Assemble all the ingredients in the cooking vessel, and sprinkle with crushed garlic. Then blend into the pot suhutinnu and mint.

Does the average Iraqi wandering the banks of the Tigris, munching on a minced meat kubbah, realise that he or she is treading a patch of land that 4,000 years ago saw the birth of haute cuisine?

While the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt developed some of the rudiments of cooking, Mesopotamia, which occupied the patch between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, became a gastronomically advanced civilisation. The land was fertile, more fertile than today. Indeed, the people had an extraordinarily diverse diet that featured many kinds of vegetable, including leeks, shallots, garlic, rocket, chickpeas, lentils, lettuce, peas, figs, pomegranates and much more. They ate a huge diversity of cheese, up to 300 different kinds of bread and an amazing variety of soup. A Mesopotamian’s supper of bread, soup and cheese might be rather more sophisticated than our own.






Yale Babylonian Collection

Recipe for Kanasu broth carved on a clay tablet.

We know all this from detailed records. But while today you might sketch out a recipe on a notepad, publish it in a book, put it online or on an iPhone app, in those days it was a rather more laborious process. Firstly, assuming you were a member of the rarefied and literate professional classes, you made a clay tablet, then, presumably while it was still wet, with a blunt reed stylus you slowly carved out your recipe in Akkadian cuneiform, an ancient pictorial precursor of alphabetic writing.

Many such stone tablets have lasted and survived more in less intact. At the New England University of Yale, a large number of tablets are stored as part of its Babylonian Collection, among some 40,000 artefacts acquired by the university in 1933. In an effort to preserve the tablets further, the curators had them baked and then had them copied. For many years it was assumed that the inscriptions were obscure pharmaceutical formulas but then French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro took a closer look, reporting his findings in 2004.

Focusing initially on three cracked, caramel-coloured tablets, he managed to decipher the code and on reading them discovered that they weren’t complicated equations, just recipes. The tablets revealed a rich variety of cuisine, moreover, a sophisticated mix of skill and artistry and a wonderful breadth of ingredients. Among the tablets, on a piece of clay measuring just 12 by 16 centimetres, is the recipe for kanasu broth.

Kanasu, ancient wheat – not dissimilar to durum – was mixed into a lamb stew as a thickener. Think of it as lamb casserole cooked with pearl barley. The recipe itself is brief, partly due to the time it would have taken to scratch it onto the clay and partly, as Bottéro believes, the recording of the dish constituted a kind of ritual. This wasn’t a recipe for the beginner, either: with no quantities or cooking times, it assumes a fair degree of culinary know-how.

The lamb stew is just one of twenty-one meat- and vegetable-based dishes, but it sounds a little tastier than some of the other recipes, such as one for braised turnips that begins: ‘Meat is not needed. Boil water. Throw fat in.’. Because many of the ingredients need some deciphering – samidu, for instance, was either semolina or fine white flour used for thickening, while suhutinnu was probably a root vegetable like a carrot or a parsnip – they can be hard to replicate in the modern kitchen. Indeed, having spent years deciphering the recipes, Bottéro – himself an accomplished cook – declared: ‘I would not wish such meals on any save my worst enemies.’ He may have been thinking of grasshoppers in a fermented sauce, which turns up in one of the tablets. By constrast, an editorial in the New Haven Register gave the thumbs up to Bottéro’s decoded recipe for kanasu broth, stating: ‘You can almost smell the 4,000-year-old leg of lamb bubbling in a sauce thick with mysterious Mesopotamian herbs.’.

While the dishes may not all be to the modern taste, the ingredients listed in the tablets are impressively varied, as are the various cooking techniques, suggesting that – given the number of tools required – these were dishes cooked in temples or palaces, rather than in the average home, in a mud hut, or cave, where equipment would have been rudimentary, to say the least. Recipes variously call for slicing, squeezing, pounding, steeping, shredding, marinating and straining. So even way back in the days when countries had eleven letters to their name, when people were inventing the wheel, reading the livers of chickens and believing that when you died you went underground and ate dirt, cooks were doing pretty much what most still do today.


3 (#ulink_86982b98-a894-582c-86b3-0b19786c0392)

Tiger nut sweets (#ulink_86982b98-a894-582c-86b3-0b19786c0392)

circa 1400 BC

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The Bible, Genesis 43: 11

And their father Israel said unto them, If it must be so now, do this; take of the best fruits in the land in your vessels, and carry down the man a present, a little balm, and a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts and almonds.

Don’t think that food in prehistorical times was entirely savoury – all roasted lamb, flatbreads and chickpeas. After all they were human, just like you and me. And while I might crave a HobNob come four o’clock, so the ancients would have needed to sate their cravings for sweet things.

If we are to believe the story of Joseph’s rise to prominence in Egypt – and a large entertainment industry depends on it, or his colourful coat, to be precise – then archaeological evidence suggests he may have lived around 1700 bc.

According to the biblical account, after Joseph’s jealous brothers had forced him into exile – selling him as a slave to people travelling into Egypt – he rose in prominence partly due to his gift for interpreting dreams in which he advised the Pharoah to store up food during the good years, in anticipation of lean years to come. Sure enough those lean years came and people flocked from neighbouring countries to buy grain, including Joseph’s estranged brothers, looking for food to take back to famine-ravaged Canaan.

Joseph, rewarded with king-like status for his dream-interpreting and so grand now that they don’t recognise him as their long-lost brother, permits them to take food back to their family, saying that they can have more food but only if they return with their younger brother Benjamin. This they tell their father back home, who is suspicious at first but then relents. He then sends off his sons with advice and a few things in their pockets that unwittingly ensures him a place in A History of Food in 100 Recipes. For take a closer look at what he stuffs in those pockets: honey, spices, nuts and almonds. All the ingredients, in short, for tiger nuts.

No doubt he also popped a recipe for them in Benjamin’s top pocket. It was an early example of the tradition of taking a sweet gift to someone as a sign of appreciation or affection. Fragments of such a recipe exist on scraps of parchment from the same era and they are called tiger nuts because they resemble the tuber root of the same name. They are thought to be the earliest sweets and, with their sticky mix of honey, dates, sesame seeds and almonds – blended together and rolled into balls – are pretty nutritious too. Try them after dinner with a dark, black cup of intense coffee. And make sure to don a dressing gown or cloak decorated with a patchwork of colours, for added authenticity.






Bridgeman Art Library: Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena, Italy

A piece of fine parchment paper showing Genesis, the creation of the universe, from the magnificent Italian Renaissance Bible of Borso d’Este Vol 1.


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Fish baked in fig leaves (#ulink_acabd60d-7956-5fba-8b4f-627d9bb8f29d)

350 BC

AUTHOR: Archestratus, FROM: Hedypatheia (Life of Luxury)

You could not possibly spoil it even if you wanted to … Wrap it [the fish] in fig leaves with a little marjoram. No cheese, no nonsense! Just place it gently in fig leaves and tie them up with a string, then put it under hot ashes.

Archestratus’s mission in life was to visit as many lands as he could reach in search of good things to eat. A Sicilian, he ventured all over Greece, southern Italy, Asia Minor and areas around the Black Sea. He tasted his way to paradise and then recorded it in classical Greek hexameters. Not the way one might record recipes these days, but maybe he felt it added a lyrical nuance to his findings, as well as a playful parody of epic poetry.

The entire project was recorded in the form of a poem appropriately entitled Hedypatheia or ‘Life of Luxury’. And while only fragments of it remain, there are enough of them for us to get a good idea of the food he ate, what he thought of it and, vitally, how it was cooked. Archestratus’s writings on ingredients, dishes and his views on flavour combinations paint a picture of the well-to-do of ancient Greece in around 350 bc. Their tastes were cosmopolitan and they appear to fit the stereotypical image of them taught at school – lying languidly on couches, eating in a reclining position, grapes dangling from their fingers.

The poem shows Archestratus to be a man of strong likes and dislikes. He was not a great eater of meat, for instance, its link with religious sacrifice making it less appealing as a dish for feasting, but he loved sea and river food. Of the sixty-two fragments that remain of his poem, forty-eight concern fish. He divided these into two categories: tough fish that needed marinating and the finer type that could be cooked straight away. And his guiding principle in cooking it was simplicity. He believed that the better quality of the raw product, the fewer additional ingredients the cook needed to add. Cooking should be simple – preferably grilling with the lightest of seasoning and oil, such as in this recipe for cooking a variety of shark: ‘In the city of Torone you must buy belly steaks of the karkharias sprinkling them with cumin and not much salt. You will add nothing else, dear fellow, unless maybe green olive oil.’ The recipe for baked fish, at the top of this chapter, is prepared with a similar lack of fuss.

‘All other methods are mere sidelines to my mind,’ he wrote. ‘Thick sauces poured over, cheese melted over, too much oil over – as if they were preparing a tasty dish of dogfish.’ Perhaps this was a rebellion against the meals he had endured as a child, which could be very rich as well as over-abundant. As Plato wrote disparagingly: ‘[Sicily is] obsessed with food, a gluttonous place where men eat two banquets a day and never sleep alone at night.’

As well as his disdain for sauces, Archestratus was insistent on what he considered were worthy ingredients. ‘Eat what I recommend,’ he said. ‘All other delicacies are a sign of abject poverty – I mean boiled chickpeas, beans, apples and dried figs.’ And he was obsessed with where food came from and where the best ingredients were to be found. ‘Let it come from Byzantium if you want the best,’ he wrote, like the voiceover of an early product endorsement.

Of the few meats he liked – hare, deer, ‘sow’s womb’ and all sorts of birds, from geese to starlings and blackbirds (animals not used for sacrifice, that is) – he preferred the following method of serving: ‘[Bring] the roast meat in and serve to everyone while they are drinking, hot, simply sprinkled with salt, taking it from the spit while a little rare. Do not worry if you see ichor [blood – used normally with reference to the Greek gods] seeping from the meat, but eat greedily.’ As with cooking fish, the principles are of a dish simply prepared and served.

Highly opinionated Archestratus may have been, but he was also extremely knowledgeable. Indeed, he demonstrated a sophisticated appreciation of the various parts of a fish, writing of the subtle differences in texture between the flesh of the fin, belly, head or tail. Subsequent writers relied on his expertise. Athenaeus of Naucratis, author of the Learned Banquet in around AD 200 and a man without whom we would have little knowledge of the cultural pursuits of the ancient world, was much influenced by his predecessor. He wrote of Archestratus: ‘He diligently travelled all lands and sea in his desire … of tasting carefully the delights of the belly.’

While his musings on food are appealingly vivacious, Archestratus’s recipe writing is deliciously free and passion-fuelled, such as when championing the finest-quality ingredients: ‘If you can’t get hold of that [sugar], demand some Attic [Greek] honey, as that will set your cake off really well. This is the life of a freeman! Otherwise one might as well … be buried measureless fathoms underground.’ Probably the world’s earliest cookbook, Life of Luxury has all the energy and colour of a modern bestseller.







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To salt ham (#ulink_c4945c9b-795a-580c-8e8c-ffc16692bc36)

160 BC

AUTHOR: Cato the Elder, FROM: De agri cultura (On Farming)

Salting of ham and ofellae [small chunks of pork] according to the Puteoli [a Roman colony in southern Italy] method. Hams should be salted as follows: in a vat, or in a big pot. After buying hams [legs of pork] cut off the hooves. Use half a modius [a dry measure equivalent to about 9 litres (2 gallons)] of ground Roman salt per each ham. Put some salt on the bottom of the vat or pot, and place the ham on it skin downwards and cover it with salt. Then, place the next ham on it skin downwards and cover it with salt in the same way. Take care that the meat does not touch … After all the hams are placed in this way, cover them with salt so that the meat cannot be seen; make the surface of the salt smooth. After the hams stay for five days in the salt, remove them all, each with its own salt. Those that were on top should be placed on the bottom and covered with salt as previously. After twelve days altogether take the hams out; remove the salt, hang them in a draught and cure them for two days. On the third day, take the hams down and clean them with a sponge, smear them with olive oil mixed with vinegar and hang them in the building where you keep the meat. No pest will attack them.

Roman politician Marcius Porcius Cato was brought up on a farm south-east of Rome near a city called Tusculum. He enlisted as a solder at seventeen and later rose to high office as a statesman, known as a skilful orator who made use of his public-speaking prowess by chastising those in the Senate whom he felt were too liberal. This accorded with his latter role as censor, an official position that included supervising public morality and which he took to with enthusiasm. With his clamp-down on immoral officials and support of a law against luxury, he was identified with the job – known to posterity as Cato the Censor. He was censorious about those he thought were extravagant – he wouldn’t have approved of the creamy sauces that came out of Apicius’s kitchen 150 years later – while the first-century historian Plutarch praised him not for any triumphs as military leader but that ‘by his discipline and temperance, [he] kept the Roman state from sinking into vice’.

Perhaps it was his childhood on the farm that had instilled in the young Cato a Spartan frugality. His father apparently died while Cato was quite young and he inherited considerable responsibilities, learning the business of farming in his early teens. As an older man, he ate with his servants, was a strict parent, a harsh husband, an inflexible official and, by all accounts, a downright bore.

He was also a prolific author, although only fragments tend to remain of his writings. He wrote a history of Italy in Latin, published a collection of his speeches – including the deadly retrospective On His Consulship (he’d been a consul before discovering his métier as censor) – and a tome entitled On Soldiery. Not even fragments of the latter remain but one can imagine the sort of thing it might have included: dawn rises, cold showers, spotless uniforms and suicidal charging at the enemy.

But one volume that has survived completely intact is his De agri cultura, or ‘On Farming’. A manual on good agricultural practice, it advises, for example, how many slaves to hire for the olive harvest and how – in one particularly charming note – a slave’s ration might be reduced should he be so audacious as to fall ill. It also gives details on how to preserve food, including the earliest recorded description of how to salt pork – the recipe that heads this chapter. In addition Cato offers recipes for pickling and smoking, and his writings show that he had considerable expertise, employing methods that would be just as workable today.

Knowing how to preserve meat, fish or indeed fruit was vital in the centuries preceding the advent of the supermarket and the fridge. Indeed Polish professor Maria Dembinska, writing in the late twentieth century, has described it as ‘the greatest worry of primitive man’. In the days when finding food for everyday consumption was a trial, if not life-endangering, its preservation was all the more important. That ever-present fear of hunger challenged man’s ingenuity to find methods to both preserve food and then store it effectively.

How much less meat we might waste today if we had to hunt it ourselves – if we had speared it while it was charging at us. Preserving food was necessary not just so that it would last beyond the weekend but because food might be sourced at quite a distance from where it would be consumed. So people buried food in situ. Excavations on the Irish and Norwegian coasts have uncovered bones, for example, from fish buried between 5000 and 2000 bc. That they were excavated shows a skill in burying fish, if not in retrieving it. Without a map to mark the spot, that fish remained buried for rather longer than was perhaps intended.

Herodotus, meanwhile, wrote 2400 years ago of the Babylonians and Egyptians drying fish in the wind and the sun. And meat was often hung in the roofs of houses. Perhaps that is how it came to be smoked – by mistake over a home fire, but resulting in another method of preserving food as well as enhancing the flavour. The Vikings may have developed this concept, although no records exist to confirm this. Once it was discovered that salt was a proficient preserver, that idea quickly spread too. By 1800 BC there were salt mines all over the place. Although many still preferred to bury their fish, particularly in the lands of the north.

A Swedish census from 1348 records the existence of a man called Olafuer Gravlax. He lived in Jamtland in central Sweden and as his surname means ‘buried fish’ we can assume that that’s what he did. Whoever first produced gravlax – cured salmon – in Scandinavia probably did it by mistake, his aim simply being to store fish for the winter season when freezing temperatures and ice-covered rivers and lakes would have made fishing almost impossible. Burying it also would have kept it away from thieves – from ‘those on two, as well as those on four legs’, as the Norwegian author Astri Riddervold puts it.






So he buried his fish. Then when he dug it up months later, it would have stunk, horribly, having lain underground and then fermented. But, ignoring the smell, whoever dug it up then bravely tasted it and found it not just to be edible but to have a remarkable flavour, albeit very different from that of the fresh fish he had buried all those months before. It was a miracle. The following season, maybe he added salt to one fish, a little sugar to another and sugar and salt to another. Perhaps he then experimented to see what happened if he stored it for less time – a few months, weeks, then days.

Who knows quite how it happened and when it became an established practice. But people liked the tart taste and it became a culinary tradition, not to mention a commercial enterprise. Indeed, while Olafuer Gravlax buried fish he may not have run the entire business. This we can surmise from another record – this time in the 1509 annals of Stockholm – which lists one Martin Surlax, whose surname translates as ‘sour fish’. So as sour fish is the result of burying fish, perhaps Mr Gravlax buried it while Mr Surlax dug it up.

Gravlax brings echoes of the 1980s, when it was all the rage in Britain, served at dinner parties with dill sauce. These days you don’t of course need to bury it to make it as a trip to the supermarket makes its procurement rather easier. And with the addition of salt, sugar, dill and some spices (peppercorns and coriander seeds), you can even do your own burying – in the fridge for just two days. Back in the fourteenth century it wouldn’t have been quite so straightforward, but those early fish buriers were clearly on to something. They may have been using their instincts when they added salt and sugar, but they were unknowingly engaging in a very complicated scientific process. The salt drew out the water but also refreshed the proteins and preserved the fish.

Be they medieval fish buriers who cured salmon for a living or a Roman disciplinarian who salted pork in his spare time, these early innovators used their ingenuity to keep hunger at bay. Meanwhile, the techniques that once staved off real hunger in former times now sate the greed of the modern snacker today. For where would we be without all those salty, sugary goodies to make us obese and thirsty?


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Roast goat (#ulink_2b81c5a7-5cba-5892-8514-5989f750a28e)

30 BC

AUTHOR: Virgil, FROM: Georgics II: 545

Therefore to Bacchus duly will we sing,

Meet honour with ancestral hymns, and cakes

And dishes bear him; and the doomed goat

Led by the horn shall at the altar stand,

Whose entrails rich on hazel-spits we’ll roast.

You may not consider Virgil to be a recipe writer, yet here is what amounts to a recipe for goat, roasted on an early version of a spit. And I’m not the only one who has cited this extract as a recipe. It was quoted back in the 1800s, to illustrate the simplicity of roasting as a cooking method. In a section entitled ‘The Ladies Department’ in an 1825 edition of the US publication the American Farmer, the poem is referred to with the comment that ‘Roasting is the most simple and direct application of heat in the preparation of food.’ While four years earlier, in 1821, Frederick Accum in his Culinary Chemistry also cites Virgil, going on to say: ‘Roasting on a spit appears to be the most ancient process of rendering animal food eatable by means of the action of heat.’

Before metal spits were devised, meat would be skewered onto branches pulled from trees – often hazel wood, as in Virgil’s poem. The sap in the wood, when heated, would make the branch turn (so long as the animal being cooked was light enough, such as a small bird like a lark; it wouldn’t happen if you skewered a pig on it) and people who witnessed it thought it supernatural. Hazel was also used as a divining rod.

But quite how roasting came about can only be guessed at. For thousands of years the human race ate its food raw, and then between the discovery of how to make fire and the appearance of the Neanderthals, man began to cook his food. So at some point, while using fire for warmth or to ward off wild animals, a discovery was made. Did the spark from a fire catch light and burn down the lair of some wild pigs? Did man smell the roasting fat and try out the first pork scratchings? Or did a grazing mammoth fall into a fire pit, the smell of its cooked flesh wafting on the wind in an appetising new aroma?

However it happened, man’s use of fire to cook was revolutionary. It wasn’t just the new flavour that it introduced to food, but the inedible then became edible. Items that could only be eaten when cooked – wheat, barley, rice, potatoes – were then worth cultivating. As man consumed more nutrients, his health must have benefited too. Furthermore, his use of fire for cooking is one of the decisive factors that separates him from other animals. When man cooks, he becomes fully human. Animals may store food – dogs bury bones, racoons douse their food in water – but only humans cook it.

Having learnt to roast food, man then got all sophisticated and started boiling it. So where roasting – or burning – food distinguished us from animals, boiling was proof of civilisation. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss muses on this point. In his essay ‘The Culinary Triangle’, he thrashes out his theory on cooked food. ‘The roasted is on the side of nature, the boiled on the side of culture,’ he writes. This is literally true because boiling requires the use of a receptacle, a cultural object: ‘Boiling requires a mediation (by water) of the relation between food and fire which is absent in roasting.’

Thus, as we became cultured so roasting was seen as primitive and basic, while boiling was regarded as sophisticated and classy. Until more recently, that is, as we became increasingly sophisticated and decided that roasting was in fact rather more upwardly mobile. After all, the urbane gentleman doesn’t take pride in his ability to do a nice ‘Sunday boil’.






But he probably wouldn’t roast a goat either. Back in 30 bc, however, Publius Vergilius Maro – Virgil, to his friends – was more than happy to, and his reference to goat, spit-roast on hazel wood, comes in his epic work The Georgics. The Roman poet’s most famous work after The Aeneid, this chiefly detailed methods of running a farm – instruction manuals for those entering the agricultural sector making for perkier reading when in verse. In it he writes of raising crops and planting trees, of keeping livestock and horses and beekeeping.

His reference to roasting goat comes after a section on pruning trees and then a note celebrating vineyards, whose vines teem with ‘mellowing fruit’. With his mention of Bacchus, the goat roasting feels like a celebration of successful farming. The ensuing lines instruct on how to look after the soil with a few notes on hoeing.

As Virgil gracefully instructs one on correct farming practice, so he whets our appetites for a good roast, the flavours of which echo down the centuries as resonant as his poetry.


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Another sauce for fowl (#ulink_4daf7334-47ce-53d7-866c-f536671cd291)

AD 10

AUTHOR: Marcus Gavius Apicius,

FROM: De re coquinaria (Of Culinary Matters)

Pepper, lovage, parsley, dry mint, fennel, blossoms moistened with wine; add roasted nuts from Pontus or almonds, a little honey, wine, vinegar, and broth to taste. Put oil in a pot, and heat and stir the sauce, adding green celery seed, cat mint; carve the fowl and cover with the sauce.

His predecessor Archestratus may have had a downer on sauce. Poncey and over-elaborate, it engulfed good and simple ingredients. But Apicius was having none of it. He lived during the good times of ancient Rome, long before even the seeds of decline were sewn.

If anyone ever asks you, ‘At which point did Rome reach its zenith and what precisely symbolised that moment?’, remember the answer has nothing to do with beating back barbarians at the furthest reaches of the empire or with the building of public latrines. Rome was at its peak when its sauces were at their best, when they were plenty and at their richest. And we can pinpoint when this happened because Marcus Gavius Apicius wrote it all down. He lived between 80 BC and AD 40 – during the reigns of both Augustus and Tiberius –and his cookbook is still in print, although unless you speak fluent Latin, I suggest you find an English translation. It’s called De re coquinaria – ‘Of Culinary Matters’ – and is a bumper read of some 500 recipes. And did I mention sauce? Well, 400 of those recipes are instructions for making a sauce.

Sauce was the trademark of the ancient Roman chef and if Apicius was not the best of them, then he is at least an astonishingly impeccable example. Some scholars argue that Apicius could have been one of several people, or a collection of recipes by several individuals garnered under the name of Apicius, but the good money is on him being the aforementioned M. G. Apicius. He was a chef, a collator of recipes and he endowed a school of cookery. If he were alive today he’d probably be running some Italian equivalent of Ballymaloe (the Irish cookery school near Cork).

He lived and breathed his craft. He inspired those he met with his culinary ideals and he was an exhausting mentor to anyone who could withstand his rigorous teaching methods. He was an obsessive: exacting, precise, detailed and, naturally, opinionated. He also had the good fortune to be well born and wealthy. When we talk about good food during the period of ancient Rome, this was not a democratic idea. Most people would have lived very, very simple lives, with few possessions. The prospect of a decent meal, let alone decadent feasting, was denied to many. For the vast majority meals were a frugal affair at best; the richness of Apicius’s recipes therefore reflects only the dining habits of the elite. Of which he was a fully paid-up member.

Apicius had a vast fortune and he spent it on food. His kitchens would have been kitted out with all the latest mod cons. His cooking utensils were far more precious than ours as they would have been handmade, beautiful – works of art, even. By contrast, his apparatus for cooking food would have been basic (pots and a spit for roasting) and he seemed to make a virtue of his lack of chiller cabinets. At least that’s the only reason I can think for his creation of a recipe ‘for birds of all kinds that have a goatish smell’.

What he lacked in white goods, however, he made up for in kitchen staff. While good ingredients would have been hard to come by – this was a time when agriculture was haphazard, transportation limited and storage basic – once they were assembled there were plenty of people on hand to prepare and cook them. Perhaps this is one of the great differences between our age and his. Today ingredients are relatively cheap: we have access, within minutes, to ingredients from every corner of the earth. But while food is cheap, labour isn’t. Apicius didn’t just have cheap staff, he had free staff. What is unimaginable now was normal then – for the very rich, that is.

So we can picture Apicius beavering away with his dozens of kitchen underlings, chopping and prepping from dawn to dusk. Those lucky enough to work in his kitchen would have been dazzled by his ingredients. His larder would have been hung with hare, pork, lamb and endless fowl – from crane and duck to doves and peacocks, ostriches and flamingoes. He cooked with truffles, all kinds of mushrooms, sea-urchins, mussels, every type of fish. The herbs he used were of such variety that they take the breath away – from lovage and coriander to cumin and fennel seeds. He made wine reductions, pickled off-cuts of pork and served up great gravy, and he wrote this all down in his recipes.






Alamy: Mary Evans Picture Library

Marcus Gavius Apicius.

Apicius’s book is Europe’s oldest and ancient Rome’s only surviving recipe book. As Joseph Vehling, who translated it into English in 1926, wrote: ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; so here’s hoping that we may find a better way of knowing old Rome and antique private life through the study of this cookery book.’ Yet it was never plain sailing. Apicius’s recipes may paint a picture of luxurious dinners, of exquisite flavours and textures, but he had to deal with a bureaucracy that must have infuriated him.

Today, chefs and restaurateurs have to be much more than providers of good food. Aside from creating a restaurant worth eating at, they have to deal with council officials, inspectors and regulators, not to mention listening to the advice of their PRs and tolerating the critics. Apicius had his problems too. History books may carry the legends of Roman decadence but at the time many looked down upon those who enjoyed extravagant lifestyles. Writers such as Pliny and Plutarch disapproved of high living in the form of fine dining, let alone feasting. And they weren’t alone – severe laws existed that fixed the amount a household could spend on specific types of food.

Senior politicians and officials felt a need to protect public morals. Not that it stretched to stopping people watching Christians being eaten by lions in the Coliseum. So imperial food inspectors were sent out to perform spot checks on kitchens, not dissimilar to how hygiene officials operate today. Fortunately there was another aspect of life that was rife back then: corruption. So one can imagine Apicius, on being told a posse of ingredient inspectors were on their way, dispatching one of his chefs to entertain the inspectors when they arrived. No doubt the food wardens would have been quickly seduced with promises of some tasty morsels for them to take home, a meal in the kitchen or very likely money, gold even. Because they clearly failed to stop the purchasing of expensive ingredients and the dinners for which they were intended.

Wealthy food-loving Romans thus easily brushed aside the food police and circumvented the law. Which meant they were able to indulge in Apicius’s delectable food and, of course, his sauces. And there are sauces to accompany every meat you can think of, from hare and duck to lobster and sardines. But not the oft-mentioned ‘dormouse’ – not so much a mouse as a large rodent that lived in trees (not unlike a squirrel). Apicius stuffed it with pork, nuts and herbs and then roasted or boiled it, but he can’t have been that keen on it as he doesn’t do a sauce to match. This aberration aside, there are so many sauces it’s almost a frenzy. When he can’t think what to call it, he just says, ‘Here’s another one’ – as you can see from the recipe heading this chapter.

His writing style is chatty when there’s detail, of which there is often little. The language is of a busy, harassed man. He can be obscure and unhelpful, assuming a level of knowledge that would frustrate the novice. These days his publisher would have forced a ghost-writer on him. But instead we get the writings of a man focused on his work – after all he was a cook.

But reading between the lines he was also a humane chef. In those days many felt that the worse an animal suffered the better it tasted. Torturing some poor beast, it was thought, would bring out the flavour of the meat. Yet there are very few examples of this in Apicius’s writings. The two exceptions being a starter that calls for a dis-jointed chicken (this being done before the bird was killed) and a fig-fed pig, in which the poor animal would be starved before being force-fed with dried figs and then given mead to drink. The figs then simply expanded or start to ferment, the liver enlarged and the pig died. (For the modern equivalent – foie gras (or ‘fat liver’))

Apicius seemed less enamoured of this sort of animal cruelty and keener on promoting the cooking of vegetables. If you’re ever stuck for a recipe for cabbage, he’s your man. He was also a master of the art of disguising food. This was less for economic and practical reasons – think mock turtle soup in later times – than for show. Although the jury is out as to whether his ‘anchovy paste without anchovy’ might have been devised as an exquisite piece of trickery to fool and delight guests or simply concocted on the day he found he was all out of anchovies. With his extraordinary wealth, it was probably the former.

Apicius was a stickler for perfection, determined that his recipes should enlighten his readers and enhance their lives – although he wasn’t big on puddings. Despite the Romans love of confectionery, you won’t find any sweet dishes in this book. Perhaps this was one thing he sent out for.

But so great was his love of food that it did for him in the end. As he worked his way through his fortune – purchasing the likes of sea scorpions and Damascus plums or refurbishing his kitchen – his outgoings began to outstrip his income. So much so that when he was down to his last few blocks of gold, his last few million sestertii, he came to a grand conclusion. If he could no longer live in the manner to which he had become accustomed, if the quality of food that would pass his lips was anything less than what he aspired to, then it was not a life worth living.

So one day he gathered together his most appreciative friends and prepared one final, perfect banquet. Each dish was more exquisite than the previous one. But to one of his own dishes he added an individual twist. We’ll never know if it was his ‘pumpkin fritters’, ‘lentils and chestnuts’ or ‘suckling pig stuffed two ways’. But whatever it was, Apicius had poisoned it and he died.


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Honeyed cheesecakes (#ulink_551e842c-8c6d-5cd8-9698-5dd418f919f6)

circa AD 200

AUTHOR: Athenaeus (quoting Hebe’s Wedding by Epicharmus)

FROM: Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banquet)

Wheaten flour is wetted, and then put into a frying-pan; after that honey is sprinkled over it, and sesame and cheese.

One cannot leave the shores of ancient Greece and Rome – for forays around the wider ancient world – without enjoying the taste of honey and various recipes associated with it, courtesy of the Greek scholar Athenaeus. Born in the Egyptian tr ading port of Naucratis, he was writing in around AD 200. Some of his publications are lost but we are indebted to him because of his fifteen-volume work entitled the Deipnosophistae.

Translatable as ‘The Learned Banquest’ or ‘Philosophers at Dinner’, the work purports to be recorded conversations that take place during an epic banquet between a variety of learned people, some of whom may or may not be fictitious. Now you might quite understandably feel that a collection of dinner party discussions in fifteen volumes sounds like proper torture, but what is discussed is so detailed, so many writers and thinkers are quoted, and such a number of customs and ideas are recorded, that it makes the work hugely important. For we are left with a great array of precise detail about life in ancient Rome – where the work was written – not just in AD 200 but going back in history.

The conversation veers from food to music, dance, women and much more. As would happen naturally, topics go off at extraordinary tangents. Poetry, philosophy, myths and legends are quoted at length by various individuals, and there is one of the longest discussions in history on cheesecake. Of the many cheesecakes discussed – and from absorbing myself in the literature, I can assure you that the ancient Greeks and Romans consumed a large number of them, going by different names and all cooked in different ways – the one attributed to Epicharmus, a dramatist and philosopher from around 500 bc, seems the tastiest. Included at the top of this chapter, the recipe is quite straightforward and it uses honey, which, as you’ll see, was a pretty much a key ingredient.

Reclining on couches, adorned in flowing togas, the guests ate and chatted away while servants fluttered about bringing food and drink as the conversation ebbed and flowed. It was perhaps during the serving of cheesecakes as a second or final sweet course that the epic cheesecake digression took place. ‘The cheesecakes of Samos are extraordinarily good,’ we hear one diner say, while another talks of how he has eaten them ‘set in a mould and made up of egg, honey and very fine wheatflour’.

Mention is made of cheesecakes served at a wedding to the bride and bridegroom, drenched in honey – the cheesecake that is, not the happy couple. Others are mixed with honey, then deep-fried and served with honey. Another, a recipe ‘by that clever writer on confectionery, Chrysippus’, is made by first roasting nuts and the seedhead of a poppy. This is pounded in a mortar and added to fruit juice mixed with boiled honey and some black pepper. Added to a cheesy dough, the soft mass that results is flattened and made into squares, then sprinkled with crushed sesame softened with more boiled honey. No doubt it’s then cooked, not that the clever Chrysippus is helpful enough to mention this. Still, it’s one of a cast of thousands, virtually all of which include honey.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a pretty high regard for honey, which because of its preservative and antiseptic qualities they associated with longevity and hence immortality. It was both the food of the gods – ambrosia – and a gift from them. The mythical figure of Aristeaus was an apiculture – beekeeping – expert. The son of Apollo and a nymph, he had nectar and honey dropped on his lips as a baby and thus gained immortality. As he grew up, various nymphs taught him how to cultivate vines and olive trees and to keep bees. He then went about sharing his bee know-how with common mortals.

Early excavations on Crete show bee-related motifs on pottery and jewellery; Hippocrates recommended it to everyone, sick or otherwise; Aristotle made an intense study of bees; and Democritus, who spent a lot of time thinking about atoms, had a favourite recipe for a long and healthy life: ‘One must nourish the external part of his body with oil and the internal with honey.’

Honey was mass-produced by the Greeks and used as a traded commodity. A record of 1300 BC shows 110 pots having the equivalent value of an ass or ox. Above all, it was nutritious and tasted good and, as we now know, it was very popular in cheesecake.

Wade through the dinner party monologues of Athenaeus, perhaps imagining him declaim it as a piece of theatre, and you learn a thing or two about other foodie subjects. His dinner party guests appear to abhor drunkenness – even during the penultimate volume, when the party was drawing to a close (it must have been a dry night). ‘We’re not of the class who drink to excess, nor of the numbers of those who are in the habit of being intoxicated by midday,’ declares one. ‘Those who drink too much unmixed wine are become violent,’ says another, while a fellow guest opines sagely (quoting Herodotus): ‘When wine has penetrated down into the body, bad and furious language is apt to rise to the surface.’






They recommend songs to calm people at the start of feasts and stop them eating too fast: ‘Music softens the moroseness of character, for it dissipates sadness and produces affability and a sort of gentlemanlike joy.’ Not that they were without experience of overdoing it. There is considerable discussion on the subject of hangovers. A comic poet, Clearchus, is quoted as saying: ‘As we get all the pleasure first … we lose the whole delight in the sharp pain that follows.’

But if you want another measure of the spirit of these discussions it comes when referencing one Aristoxenus: ‘The theatres have become completely barbarised and … music has become entirely ruined and vulgar.’ No doubt he also felt that young people had no respect.

Still, on food, especially cheesecake, these are precious volumes. And while Atheneaus discourses endlessly on pomegranates, pheasants, sucking pigs and salted crab – to mention just a few of the foodstuffs covered in this work – he’s at his best when he waxes lyrical on ‘tartlets and cheesecakes steeped most thoroughly in the rich honey of the golden bee’.


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Congee (#ulink_84f36ee0-be4e-530c-956c-bc7145cfcfb8)

AD 636

AUTHOR: Linghu Defen, FROM: The Book of Zhou

While wearing the mourning of nine months, one might eat vegetables and fruits, and drink water and congee, using no salt or cream.

Of the official twenty-four histories of Imperial China, The Book of Zhou stands out – fifty chapters long, some inevitably lost over time – as the one that mentions a dish now enjoyed daily by millions across Asia. As well as recommending it as appropriate to eat during times of mourning, it records how ‘Emperor Huang Di was the first to cook congee with millet as the ingredient’. Today congee is mostly made with rice, but as the emperor showed, where rice wasn’t available it might be substituted with another cereal.

The dish has spread to Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and South Korea. Each culture has its own way of preparing it, although the basic method is pretty much the same, the rice being cooked in large quantities of water so that it disintegrates in the liquid as it’s heated and becomes a sort of thick porridge or soup. It would have been made in this way back in the days of the Tang Dynasty, when The Book of Zhou was commissioned by Emperor Taizong to give the official history of the earlier Northern Zhou Dynasty. Although congee was regarded as a little more special in those times – presented as a gift to the emperor’s nobles. No doubt given as a measure of respect with no end of bowing, it was then gently brought to the lips with gold-tipped chopsticks made of ivory.

Despite all the ceremony, it was, as now, a plain dish – the humblest gift signifying the greater respect. In fact, served on its own without the addition of other ingredients, it would have been almost tasteless. Think of gruel, stodgy from cooking in the pot overnight and served with little more than a smile. Yet its blandness belies its strength. Congee fortifies the body at the start of the day. It is easily digested, providing instant energy and making it a good dish to wolf down if you’re about to be attacked by some aggressive warrior. An expert congee consumer will tell you that by turning a hot bowl of congee in your hands and slurping the cooler parts around the rim, you can get through three bowls in as many minutes. And as it doesn’t sit uncomfortably in your stomach, but is absorbed quickly, you won’t get a stitch while wielding your sword at your attacker.

Congee is sustaining too, ideal for those who need a quick energy boost after exercise or are recovering from illness. Indeed, its fortifying properties are held in such regard that it is often served at funerals. More than that, it has provided life-saving nutrition in a nation ravaged by famine over the centuries. From 108 BC to 1911, China experienced 1,828 famines – that’s almost one a year. The one thing that enabled people to survive, that kept millions of families from starvation, was congee. Congee because of its warming and sustaining qualities and because it is made with rice.

Rice is one of the most important global foods, of which there are some 10,000 varieties. Eight thousand of these are grown for food and they have many advantages over cereal crops such as wheat and barley. Yields are higher and the moisture content is low which means rice can be stored for longer and used during periods of famine. In fact the Tang Dynasty – which lasted from AD 618 to 907 – made much of the value of storing rice by building storage depots near their newly built canals so the rice could be transported to areas of greatest need.

Understanding its usefulness, the Tang Dynasty oversaw a period in which the production of rice became a key part of the agricultural industry. Special tools were developed, as were irrigation systems for transferring water to different paddy fields. Rice was just one part of a flourishing empire, the most glistening period in China’s history. The economy grew, as did the military. Tax collecting became more efficient as every adult male was given an equal-sized plot of land together with an equal tax bill.

The elite loved their congee and so did everybody else – a poor family might get by on little else, after all. Different types of congee were made at different times of the day. On a cold winter’s morning the addition of meat – if you could afford it – warmed the body. At dusk in midsummer as the heat of the day faded, it was made with lotus seeds or hawthorn to cool and refresh. And with the addition of medlar, it would boost the immune systems of the old, feeble and weak.

There is a legend that the recipe for congee was first developed by a fisherman’s wife back in the very dim and distant past. According to this story, she took a boiling pot of rice on board her husband’s boat to provide them with food at sea. But they were assaulted by pirates and so she hid the hot pot under some blankets. Then, when the pirates had gone, she found that her rice, now cooled, had taken on a fragrant flavour and tenderer texture.






Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd: Uniphoto Japan

The Yellow Emperor, Huang Di, was the first to cook congee with millet.

Hence most recipes for congee today involve cooking the rice over a very high heat and then resting the pot for half an hour. Often accompanied by small portions of well-seasoned savoury dishes, its blandness works well as a foil for stronger flavours and if it wasn’t important stuff, there wouldn’t be an entire museum dedicated to it in Fanchung County, Anhui Province. I feel a pilgrimage coming on. After all, even Scotland doesn’t have a porridge museum.


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Dried fish (#ulink_dd38b257-edf2-5343-b563-4c7ada401951)

circa AD 800

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The Saga of Grettir the Strong

He [Atli] went to Snaefellsnes to get dried fish. He drove several horses with him and rode from home to Melar in Hrutafjord to his brother-in-law, Gamli. Then Grim, the son of Thorhall, Gamli’s brother, made ready to accompany him along with another man. They rode West by way of Haukadalsskard and the road which leads out to the Ness, where they bought much fish and carried it away-on seven horses; when all was ready they turned homewards.

The Vikings didn’t write cookbooks, which rather tallies with their image – too busy dashing off on raids to engage in more cerebral pursuits. While the Roman alphabet had spread across Europe, the Vikings tended to stick to a rather simpler system of lettering called the Futhark, the characters of which are runes. Runes have lots of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines which made them easier to carve. So when a Viking came to pillage, he might slash and burn your hut and then carve some victorious obscenity on your door. What he wouldn’t do was stop to check what local dishes you served for breakfast, before bringing out a pad and making a careful note of it.

In the late 700s, the Vikings outgrew their rocky, somewhat unfertile, land around Scandinavia and became restless. So they set off in their longboats in search of better territory, travelling far and wide in the process, from northern Europe to as far afield as Constantinople in the east and the shores of America in the west. In Britain, they raided the monks on Lindisfarne, off what is now the north-east coast of Northumberland. We know this from an account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which describes how in June 787 ‘ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter’.

The Vikings eventually settled in Ireland and Britain, in areas such as Dublin and York. And much evidence remains of their occupation, including their diet. Examination of latrine pits in York – less unpleasant when 2,000 years have passed – shows they consumed a wide variety of foods, including fruit and vegetables (carrots, turnips and cabbage), lamb, pork, gulls’ eggs, seafood and fish. They ate plenty of fish, in fact, and were tall as a result. And they had plenty of equipment to cook and eat it with: pots, frying pans and kettles, along with wooden plates and spoons and metal knives.

As Vikings were more talkers than writers, sagas passed down in their oral tradition weren’t transcribed until late in the twelfth century. The Saga of Grettir the Strong is one such tale. Written in the thirteenth century by an unknown author, it tells the story of a bad-tempered Icelandic Viking called Grettir Ásmundarson. Among the various acts of arson and murder committed by the outlaw we learn how his rival, Atli the Red, travels to somewhere called Snaefellsnes where he buys a large quantity of dried fish. Atli is attacked on his return; most people get attacked at some point in Viking sagas, but that is not the point. Much more relevant are the words ‘dried’ and ‘fish’. Which, written a mere 500 years after the event is, I’m afraid, the closest we’ll get to an authentic Viking recipe.






Topfoto: The Granger Collection, New York

Landing the herring from Scandinavian waters: a woodcut from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus.

Indeed fish is one of the few foodstuffs mentioned in the sagas, and there is no reference to how it was prepared and eaten. We need to wait until a bit later for this. Olaus Magnus, who wrote about the culture and history of Scandinavia in his 1555 tome A Description of the Northern Peoples, gives us an idea of how fish was dried, and it’s not unlikely that the method would have survived unchanged from the Viking period:

When you come in towards the shore [north of an area called Vasterbotten], such an abundance of fish is to be seen as its base on every side that you are dumbfounded at the sight, and your appetite can be wholly satisfied. Some of the fishes of this sort, sprinkled with brine from the sea, are commonly spread out over two or three acres of the flat level ground at the foot of the mountain, to be parched and dried by the wind; some, chiefly, fish of the larger kind, are hoisted on poles or spread out on racks, to be dehydrated by the sun and air. They are all reserved for consumption at home or for the lucrative profit of tradesmen.

The drying fish, as you might imagine, emitted quite a smell. ‘From the foot then of this crowned mountain there rises such a stench of fish hung up to dry that far out to sea sailors as they approach are aware of it flying out to meet them,’ Magnus goes on. ‘As soon as they perceive that smell when struggling beneath the darkness of a storm, they realise it is necessary to preserve themselves and their cargo from impending shipwreck.’ This use of smelly fish as an alternative to lighthouse illumination did not last the centuries, but the treatment of dried fish, known as lutefisk, did. ‘The dry stockfish [cod] is put in strong lye for two days, then rinsed in fresh water for one day before being boiled,’ records Magnus. ‘It is served with salted butter and is highly appreciated, even by kings.’

But while food and the act of eating is rarely mentioned in the earlier sagas, much is made of the importance of hospitality. There were no inns so when a Viking showed up on your doorstep, you fed and watered him, according to the Hávamál saga: ‘Fire is needed/ By him who has come in/ And is benumbed in his knees./ Food and clothes/ Are needed by one/ Who has travelled across the mountain.’ Although etiquette also demanded – according to a note elsewhere – that guests stay no more than three days. The Völuspá saga paints quite a sophisticated picture of entertaining at home. A table set for dinner is described in once instance: ‘The mother took/ A broidered cloth,/ A white one of flax,/ Covered the table.’ Clearly the upper echelons of Viking society got out their Sunday best for visitors. And what they ate represents another rare mention of food: ‘Shining pork/ And roasted birds;/ Wine was in the jug;/ They drank and talked;/ The day passed away.’

The sagas don’t touch on smoked fish, but this is was another method of preserving fish that would have been used at the time. Swedish archaeologists have actually recreated a Viking smokehouse at the open-air Museum of Foteviken. Herring hang on timber beams as smoke slowly wafts over them. But you didn’t need a smokehouse to smoke fish. Viking dwellings had an open hearth in the middle of the floor so any meat or fish hung near it would have been smoked naturally.

Over the centuries both dried and smoked fish became entrenched in Scandinavian food culture. Comparisons made between kitchen equipment that was buried with a woman entombed in Oseberg in Norway in AD 834 and the household recommendations of 1585 by the Swedish count Per Brahe for his wife, show how remarkably little had changed – both in the food eaten and how it was prepared – over the course of seven centuries. The Vikings might have bullied their illiterate way around northern Europe, but without them would you be able to seek respite in a plate of smoked herring in an IKEA food court today?





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