Asparagus, and Coriander Crusted Fish

I gotta tell you, I am having a lot of fun writing for this blog. 
Tonight, I tried out two more recipes from Apicius.

The first dish wasn't so much as a recipe, but a technique for cooking asparagus. Usually, when I've cooked asparagus, I've either steamed it, or boiled it. I had never thought of doing it Apicus' way. In de re Coquinaria, Apicius tells us how to prepare asparagus


"Asparagus: in order to have it most agreeable to the palate must be peeled, washed and dried and immersed in boiling water backwards." (Apicius, 3, 3, 72)

cooking the asparagus

When Apicius says to immerse it in boiling water "backwards," he means to have it so that the stalks of the asparagus are underwater, and the tips are poking out of the water. This way, the stalks are boiled and cooked, and the fragile flower tips of the asparagus are spared from the boiling water. In order to do so, I cooked the asparagus in an old coffee can, which allowed me to have them easily stand upright. I didn't have any other pots that were deep and skinny enough to accommodate this. 


This worked out perfectly! The asparagus were delicious! Yum! The tips were relatively uncooked, and the stalks were cooked to perfection. 


Next, I cooked "Fish in Coriander Crust."


"Prepare the fish carefully, put in a mortar salt and coriander seed, crush finely, roll the fish in it, put in a baking dish, cover, seal, bake in the bread-oven. When cooked, remove, season with very sharp vinegar and serve"  (Apicius 10, 1, 4)


I used two tablespoons of coriander seeds, which I got from my gardening supplies. It's really nice that the Romans were so fond of coriander (cilantro), which is so ubiquitous in South Texas cooking. I had grown cilantro in my garden that had gotten out of control, and had harvested the seeds to share, and to plant next season. I cleaned them up, and roasted them on my skillet for 2 minutes at high heat, stirring constantly. I tossed them in the mortar and pestle, and ground them down with 1 teaspoon of salt. 

Grinding the coriander & salt

Now, this recipe might not be the most authentic, as I used salmon for the fish. The Classical Cookbook recommended cod, plaice, or haddock, but I really like salmon, and it was on sale, so I picked salmon. I know, I know, the Romans didn't have salmon, as far as I can figure this may not be the most authentic dish, but we're testing the coriander crust, not the fish itself. So, I rolled the fish around in the mixture of ground up seeds and salt, and put it in a pan with a dash of olive oil so it wouldn't stick, and covered it. I baked at 375F. The cookbook recommended 15 minutes, but it wasn't nearly ready then. It was ready by 25 minutes. Reader, one of the hardest parts of cooking is making everything ready simultaneously. It's difficult to have the meat cooked when the veggies and all other dishes are ready, and this time I failed at it because of the extra time needed to cook the fish. Therefore, I ate the asparagus first, since they were ready first, and then after another 10 minutes or so, had the fish. 
After taking the fish out of the oven, I sprinkled it with white wine vinegar. I had a little sticking in the pan, but it looked beautiful! 

The fish fell apart a bit because it stuck to the pan.

The fish was wonderful! I'd never put white whine vinegar on salmon, but it worked out quite well. The coriander acted as a breading, it was absolutely delicious! I would make this dish again in a heart beat! Nom Nom Nom! The coriander was a delightful contrast to the white wine vinegar. The dish probably wouldn't have worked as well without the white wine vinegar, which added a tartness that was a nice contrast to the herbal earthiness of the coriander crust. 


In all, this meal was a success. Both recipes were quite easy to make, and the ingredients were easy to obtain. I only wish I had known that the salmon would have taken longer to cook. I served the  Roman dishes with enriched white rice, which was a nice pairing. 

Julie and Julia and Julius.

Salve! I found this blog posting on Julie Powell's blog. Julie Powell is the Julie from the movie, Julie and Julia, the namesake of this very blog. In it, she discusses the challenges of cooking with the ancients. I thought this article was incredibly fascinating. I had no idea that there was a difference between lamb and mutton. Additionally, I wholeheartedly agree with her that we should take advantage of technological improvements as they are available, such as refrigeration, and food processors and blenders, instead of mortar and pestle. Do we need to lay out some ground rules for our cooking, like she suggests? Reader, if you'd like to comment on her questions she raises in the last paragraph, I invite you to do so in the comments section. ~Consul Spartacurtus~ The Trouble With Blood

by Julie Powell

A modern chef takes on the challenge of ancient cooking.

The author with a plate of turkey tamales she prepared following a recipe based on ancient Maya cooking techniques (Photo by Richard Bowditch) [LARGER IMAGE]

Winner Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes 2005 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards

Like many Americans these days, I fancy myself a fairly adventurous cook. And I've produced some (overly) ambitious stuff in my cramped kitchen, like quail in rose-petal sauce and chicken livers and eggs in aspic. So when ARCHAEOLOGY asked me to fix up some ancient menus, I figured, no problem. I'll hit up the Greeks and the Romans and that will be that. But I had no idea what I was getting into. Because it turns out Apicius, first-century A.D., isn't the unchallenged king of the ancient culinary world, after all.

Why not give the Mongolian Empire's Hu Szu-hui a chance to strut his stuff? This court physician can be credited with showing us what in Xanadu did Kublai Khan dine on while decreeing his stately pleasure dome. In 1330, Hu presented the Mongol emperor Wenzong, the great-grandson of Kublai Khan, with an enormous dietary manual, Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor's Food and Drink, containing more than 200 recipes, and much advice concerning the medicinal values and health dangers of foods. (The full translation of this book, along with extensive commentary and the complete original text, can be found in A Soup for the Qan, by Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson.) In his dishes, from lamb-stuffed eggplant with basil-garlic yogurt sauce to deep-fried fish cakes flavored with mandarin orange and the bitter spice asafoetida, he was creatively combining flavors from the wide sphere of Mongolian influence, from Baghdad to Beijing, centuries before the words "fusion" and "cuisine" were ever used in the same sentence.

Ready to cook ancient cuisine? Click here for Julie's adaptations of ancient Maya, Mongolian, and Mesopotamian recipes.

Or what about the nameless cooks who scribbled down their tips in cuneiform in seventeenth-century B.C. Mesopotamia? Millennia before "tall food" became all the rage in today's chic bistros, chefs in the cradle of civilization were, if the clues they left on clay tablets are to be believed, dismembering tiny game birds, roasting the legs, and braising the bodies before carefully reassembling them atop a round of flatbread and garnishing them with watercress.

The Maya were not lacking for culinary achievements either, as we know thanks to European observers, archaeological evidence from trash heaps, and a direct culinary heritage that can be traced forward to many of today's Latin American cooking traditions. They made good use of the many foodstuffs native to the New World, such as tomatoes, maize, turkey, and chile peppers, to create a complex and flavorful cuisine, and the tamales and salsas (not to mention chocolate!) they invented today grace tables the world over.

Long before superstar chefs started experimenting with trout ice cream or tomato foam, adventurous foodies from Mongolia to Mesopotamia to Mayapán were paving the way. I decided to retrace their culinary steps as best I could, and re-create some of their most appealing dishes for a group of brave guests.

The author and her guests dig into an ancient smorgasbord.
(Photos by Richard Bowditch) Click to view larger versions.

The first difficulty a twenty-first-century home cook runs into when attempting to explore cuisines hundreds or thousands of years old is in establishing the ground rules. Does one make use of refrigeration? (The answer, after a brief but definitive analysis of logistics: an emphatic yes.) What about mutton, one of the most common meats throughout the Old World but now almost impossible for the common consumer to obtain in this country? Would I be cheating if I settled for lamb? (In America today, sheep are slaughtered almost exclusively before the end of their first year, making them technically lamb. Anything older is very, very tough--to buy, I mean, although I presume it also presents a challenge to the incisors.) And what about all those archaic food-preparation methods? I possess neither a horse under whose saddle I can shove meat for tenderizing, as the Mongols did, nor a yard into which I can dig a six-foot-deep hole to cook my turkey Maya-style. And then there are the Sumerian recipes that call for blood. Is it safe to cook with blood? Is it even legal?

Julie Powell received a 2004 James Beard Award for food journalism. Her book chronicling a year spent cooking out of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Vol.1) will be published in 2005 by Little, Brown.

ISICIA OMENTATA (a kind of Roman Burgers)

Isicia Omentata

Isicia omentata: pulpam concisam teres cum medulla siliginei in vino infusi. piper, liquamen, si velis, et bacam myrtam extenteratam simul conteres. pusilla isicia formabis, intus nucleis et pipere positis. involuta omento subassabis cum caroeno.
Translation:
Finely cut pulp of pork is ground with the hearts of winterwheat and diluted with wine. Flavor lightly with pepper and broth and if you like add a moderate quantity of myrtle berries also crushed, and after you have added crushed nuts and pepper shape the forcemeat into small rolls, wrap these in caul, fry, and serve with wine gravy.

(Apicius, 2, 1, 7)  

Ingredients: 

------------

500g minced meat

1 French roll, soaked in white wine 

1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper 

50ml Liquamen 

(can be replaced by 

1/2 tsp salt and a little white wine) 

some stone-pine kernels 

green peppercorns

a little Caroenum 

Baking foil  

Instructions: 

------------- 

Mix minced meat with the soaked french roll. 

Ground spices and mix into the meat. 

Form small burgers and put pine kernels and peppercorns into them. 

Put them into baking foil and grill them together with Caroenum.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/ethnic/historical/ant-rom-coll.html#3