Also, a little amore for matteo.

Back in the day, when I was married, I saw a programme on television about Roman cooking. It showed a recipe for dormouse. Apparently, the Romans had a bit of a thing about chowing down on the little fellas.

So, I think to myself, that'd be a heck of a talking point at a dinner-party. The plan stalled when the missus told me that if I bought some mice from the pet-shop with the express purpose of killing and cooking them, then I'd better learn to sleep with my eyes open first.

And that was that. Of course, now that marriage is but a memory, maybe I could finally find out what they taste like. It could be that divorce never tasted so good.

You've just reminded me of the rather good prank phone call from some minor comedian of the sixties. He calls up a pet shop asking if they can sell him a good "cooking monkey" and after a bit of discussion they decide he might be better off getting several spider monkeys and making a soup with them.

This monkey's going to change my life...

...hmmm, I can't wait to eat that monkey.

Is this a weblog, then? Why would you not post this on the Mothership?

/confused

/double-confused

Mighty bird, please elaborate.

Well, stav, file this under "something I could have posted to metafilter but then realized that the links were actually to sites that had been around a while (like, since 1998...), and since I didn't feel like reading 20 comments from people saying things like "this is the best of the web????", I didn't post it there, but posted it here instead.

If you want to post it there, be my guest. Don't forget to give emcee a via.

As someone who is very active in historic recreation, I've done quite a bit of work with Apicius and De Re Coquinaria, along with lots of other pre-1600 sources.

The trouble with Apicius, mostly, is that its hard to get a good translation of him. The most common translation, by Vehling (1936, now published by Dover books) took a lot of liberties with the source material that may or may not reflect both Vehling's personal culinary tastes and the mores of the times.

A better translation is The Roman Cookery Book: a critical translation of The Art of
Cooking by Apicious by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum, which offers both the orignal latin and an annotated English text.

Here's another version of De Re Coquinaria online.

Lots more info on Apicius and translations, from historic food junkies

Roman food, in general, has a reputation for being very salty and fishy, mostly due to the vile reputation of Garum, which many recipes call for.

I'd like to talk in more detail about specific dishes, but it would take all day and I have to go to work now.... *sigh*

Good post.

Thanks for those very meaty links, anastasiav. Gode Cookery's one of my all-time favorite sites. I'd love to hear more about your interest in historic recreation as well.

I'd love to hear more about your interest in historic recreation as well

Well, I'm in the SCA, which means a lot of people make fun of what we do, but I enjoy it. If you still want to know more, feel free to ask.

We were actually planning on going to an SCA event in Vermont this weekend where a friend and I would be cooking extravagant documented meals over an open fire, but I'm thinking the 48 degrees and raining weather for the entire weekend is going to end that plan before it begins.

The big challenge of historic cookery is sorting out the "recipes" (such as they are). Surviving manuscripts are almost always more in the form of notebooks than of what we think of today as a recipe ("Take a half cup of sugar and two eggs").

For example, here's something I was planning on cooking this weekend:

"a goos in hogepotte. -- Take a Goos, & make hure clene, & hacke hyre to , & put yn a potte, & Water to, & sethe to-gederys; than tak Pepir & Brennyd brede, or Blode y-boylyd, & grynd y-fere Gyngere & Galyngale & Comyn, & temper vppe with Ale, & putte it ther-to; & mynce Oynonys, & frye hem in freysshe grece, & do there-to a porcyon of Wyne"

Basically, then, taka a whole Goose and cut it up and put it in a pot with water and boil (sethe) it, then take peper and brown bread (or else boiled blood, which I won't be uisng) and ground fair ginger and gallingale and Cumin, and add some Ale and put all these things together. The mince onions and fry them in lard, and add wine..

... and ... as you can see, its not really clear what form the end product should take. Using other hogepotte recipes from other period cookbooks (Goose in Hotchpot was a fairly common dish) I have decided that the bread, spice and onion mix is basically a sauce for the goose, but its equally possible you're supposed to make the whole thing more like a stew, or pan fry the Goose in the spice mixture.

Part of what I like about period cooking is the way you must experiment and cross reference to produce a good finished product. You also need to balance the humors of your food (cold and moist, cold and dry, hot and moist, hot and dry, etc) to make the total meal as healthy as possible for those eating it, and depending on the season, but I'm not so good at that yet.

The Gode Cookery guys are in the SCA as well. I'm frankly quite hesitant to talk much about my involvement in the SCA on MeFi related things (although I've been doing this for 15 years and am proud of the things I've done in the SCA) because its an easy target for people to be very snarky about and I've been taunted about it in a pretty merciless way in the past.

However, the think I love about the SCA is that way that people are free to do what they want to do and learn at their own pace. Many other reenactment groups provide a "basic kit" that leads to a higher level of initial authenticity, but less incentive for new members to learn and research for themselves. Many people join the SCA because they think it will be "a fun party" or because the fighting looks so cool, but many stay and become more involved because the opportunity to acquire new knowledge is basically limitless. As a wise man said, "As long as we would rather have wearable shoes than perfect theories about shoes, academic standards are the wrong measure for our work. The measure of a paper is not the measure of a shoe". Its funny to me that academic medievalism has such a high reputation, but recreational medievalism, not so much

Great thread whether with a blue background or one with ........even more apt carrots.
anastasiav, I gather this is SCA - antipodean ignorance. Sounds like a complete blast! Thanks also iconomy - great links that I'll pass on to my Romantophilic nephew and his father (I'm a philistine because I didn't know that 'ides' only comes as plural --- damn scrabble!)

wow, this reminds me of an incredibly old cookbook i once had--
after being in motion for almost 24 hours, i'm even more happy to be chair bound.
iconomy: i feel the same way about posting anything there anymore, weighed against the probable fuss.
mofi posts, besides helping the monkeys, is in part running commentary.