Putting Ancient Recipes on the Plate

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/putting-ancient-recipes-plate-classical-recipes-cooking

by benbreen • 9 years ago

80 20 9 years ago

quickben• 9 years ago

Ha, that bread, panis quadratus; the entire village where I grew up makes it like that, usually minus the string, but they cut it finely on the top, add the sun and all.

Who would have thought it's from Roman times.

AdmiralAsshat• 9 years ago

How is it? It looks delicious.

bcaulfield• 9 years ago

Italian village? Where you from? Romania?

coldcode• 9 years ago

Sign me up for a restaurant that makes ancient recipes. Would you like 2700 year old beer with that 2000 year old bread?

bpicolo• 9 years ago

On the average you'll find them much less tasty than your modern palate is used to. Maybe if they spruce it up with modern standards like salt (which was uber-luxury then).

DonaldFisk3• 9 years ago

The recipes of Ancient Rome were quite heavy on herbs and spices, so they were anything but bland. Instead of salt, they used liquamen/garum, which is a fermented fish sauce similar to colatura/nuoc mam/nam pla. I've cooked quite a few of them. My web page (from around 20 years ago, with lots of dead links) is at http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/Apicius.html

The complete text (in Latin) of Apicius's De Re Coquinaria is here: http://users.ipa.net/~tanker/apicius.htm

In addition to Apicius, there are recipes in De Agri Cultura by Cato.

DonaldFisk3• 9 years ago

I like Ancient Roman food (the oldest complete recipes available), used to cook it quite often, and have served it to family and guests. It isn't to everyone's taste, possibly due to unfamiliar herbs (e.g. rue, lovage), spices (e.g. asafoetida), and their putting fish sauce in everything, including sometimes puddings.

muninn_• 9 years ago

Any good recommendations for recipes to check out? Preferably a big list? :)

vram222• 9 years ago

Interesting. First time I've heard that someone actually does that - cooks with ancient recipes. Cool.

fish sauce

Garum?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

Edit: Okay, saw your other comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16205619

vram222• 9 years ago

asafoetida

Asafoetida (called hing in Hindi) is an interesting spice. I think it is a resin of some kind. It is used a fair amount in Indian cuisine.

amyjess• 9 years ago

Honestly, I just really want to try gruit beer. I've never been a fan of hops, so I've always been really curious what unhopped beer tastes like.

(edit: I mean, I already drink a lot of malt-forward lightly-hopped beers like scotch ales, sweet stouts, and bocks, but I really want to try a beer with no hops at all)

Endy• 9 years ago

That makes two of us!

staunch• 9 years ago

I absolutely love this stuff and nothing has stoked my interest in it as much as the Townsends (formerly "Jas Townsend & Son") channel on YouTube

Townsend "explores the 18th century" through food. There's a lot of similarities to 1st century Roman cookery, which it must be (at least distantly) related to.

https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson

marak830• 9 years ago

Oh thank you for that, I have recently been cooking the recipes from an old book I found approx 150 years old(from the English side of the family).

It's difficult to say the least(mostly due to weird measurements).

snambi• 9 years ago

oh my god... that green stuff doesn't look right.

dang• 9 years ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments?

mallow• 9 years ago

I tried this recipe long before it appeared on HN. I utterly failed!! :( The bread was good but there was no way to keep the shape. And it was just so massive.

DaniFong• 8 years ago

yes!

Putting Ancient Recipes on the Plate

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