Oldest Cookbook in the West | APICIUS | Ancient Roman Mussels

In Mitulis, ancient roman mussels. Not those mussels, these mussels. Today we are cooking from the oldest surviving cookbook in the west, Apicius' De Re Coquinaria, or On the Subject of Cooking. Dating from the 4th century it gives us a glimpse into what Romans were eating at the height and during the decline of the Roman Empire. So today I'll show you how to make one of its simpler recipes, and we will look at the history of this most important ancient cookbook. This time on Mix liquamen, chopped leek, cumin, possum, savory, and wine. Dilute the mixture with water, and cook the mussels in it. Seems pretty straightforward as long as you have all the ingredients, and there are two that are probably missing from your cupboard. First liquamen. Now by the 4th century liquamen had become synonymous with garum, or ancient Roman fermented fish sauce. We made a quick version of that last week, and I will put a link in the description if you want to make it yourself. Now if you don't feel like making your own garum at home, and making your house smell like fish for an entire week, then you can of course use Colatura di Elici, and I'll put a link in the description to where you can buy that online, or any of the eastern Asian fish sauces that you can get at an Asian market. Now those sauces are going to be slightly different than an ancient Roman garum. They use different types of fish, they use different amounts of salt, and different herbs, but that's okay because frankly the kind that we made last week is not the traditional fermented garum either, which takes months to make, and you're probably not going to do that at home. The second ingredient you probably don't have is possum, not to be confused with this little scamp. Possum was a thick sweet wine originally from Carthage. It's made with dried grapes, or raisins, and grape must, and someday I would love to make it, but for today I'll pass him. Instead I'll use probably the closest thing that you can find today, which has been Santo, but you can use any kind of sweet fortified wine from Spain, or Portugal, or Italy. They're all going to work just just fine. So with those ingredients, or their alternatives in mind here's what you'll need. Two pounds of live mussels, one tablespoon of either the liquamen, garum, or fish sauce, an eighth of a cup of possum, or one of your sweet wines, a fourth of a cup of dry white wine, or more. I ended up using probably closer to a half a cup. We just need to get some liquid in there. You can do water, or more wine. I chose more wine. One cup of chopped leek, one fourth teaspoon of cumin, a half teaspoon of dried savory. I'll link to that in the description as well, and then some water. About three quarters of a cup, and like I said you could use more wine, or more water. It's all going to depend on the size of pot you have because you just want to have like you know that much liquid on the bottom. So we'll get there. First make sure to wash and clean your mussels. Now when you get those mussels home if any of them are open give them a little squeeze. If they close on their own great. If they don't chuck them out. It means they're dead. Also some of your mussels might have these little strings on them called a beard. Pull that off. You don't need it. It's where the mussel would have latched on to a rock, or whatever. Then in a large pot mix all of the ingredients, your wine, and liquamen, and herbs, and spices, and the water, and here's where you want to make sure that there's about a half an inch of liquid at least because you don't want it to completely boil away. So go ahead and add more wine, or water, or whatever you want. Then place the pot over medium-high heat, and wait until it starts to simmer. Once it's simmering add your mussels, and put a lid over the pot for about five minutes. Now while your mussels steam go ahead and pour yourself a glass of that wine, and let's take a look at how this recipe came down to us after more than 1500 years. I often lament the fact that more recipes from antiquity haven't made it to us, but if we're only afforded one cookbook for lack of a better term I'm sure glad that it is the Apicius De Re Coquinaria, and that's because of the breadth of recipes that it includes. I mean you've got your recipes for the average Josephus like plain leeks, or roasted parsley puree, but then you go all the way up to the most lavish dishes like fried spiced peacock risollis. Now the book as it comes to us today is actually from two 9th century manuscripts that were copied, and they were probably copied from the original 4th century manuscript when the Roman Empire was you know still chugging along. The first was created in Tours, France and now resides in the Vatican, and it's covered in highly illuminated decorative manuscript so probably not meant to be used in the kitchen. The second version is a little bit more practical and was copied by seven monks at a monastery in Fulda, Germany and can now be seen at the New York Academy of Medicine. Now there's actually kind of a third version as well. It's actually the earliest one and is a highly abbreviated version called the Apicii Excerta Avinidario or A Pocket Apicius by an illustrious man named Vinidarius who was probably an Ostrogoth living shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. Now one of my favorite things about the De Re Coquinaria is that it has something that is missing from most recipe manuscripts really for like the next thousand years, and that is a table of contents. Ah what a novel idea or rather what a reference book idea. It's neatly divided into ten liber or books starting with Epimeles, The Careful Housekeeper or at least that's how it's translated by Barbara Fowler and Elizabeth Rosenbaum in The Roman Cookery Book. Link in the description. It's a great book. Also I kind of love that translation because it reminds me of one of those now super outdated commercials from the 1950s. The Careful Housekeeper is something every good wife should have in her kitchen to keep the home running smoothly for her husband. So what kinds of things do we find in The Careful Housekeeper? Recipes of course. There's one for spiced wine surprise, and for Roman vermouth. Perfect for that Viacloc Martini, but then there are also non-recipes. Things like instructions for how to keep grapes fresh, or turn salted meat sweet, or one of my favorites to make an ounce of sylphium last indefinitely, and someday I want to do an entire episode on sylphium because it is now known as the Lost Roman Aphrodisiac, but I digress. There are also instructions which I would really like to try someday on how to turn red wine into white wine. It involves adding egg whites and bean meal to the wine and leaving it overnight. One, not sure if it works so I'd like to try. Two, why would you ever want to do that unless maybe your villa had just had new white marble put down? I don't know, but I think my favorite instruction from The Careful Housekeeper is Ut mel malum bonum facias. How to make bad honey good. You will make bad honey good for selling as follows. Mix one part of bad honey with two parts of good honey. That's it. It doesn't seem quite right, kind of shystery but interesting. The other nine books are marked by ingredients, or style of dish. You've got the Meat Mincer which is all about making risoles and sausages. The Gardener which of course is about fruits and vegetables. There's a book on fish, a book on birds, and one book called Tetrapus which means the quadruped. I like that name. The book also includes some kind of home remedy medicinal type instructions. One for urticae or stinging nettles says take the wild nettle when the sun is in the sign of Aries against illness if you wish. I don't think I trust that because first it doesn't specify what kind of illness this is for, and second that little addendum the if you wish at the end. It's like he's trying to you know not get sued for malpractice. Here's a prescription take take eight of these each night if you wish, and if it kills you that's on you. Now as I said before Dedicoquinadia has recipes that run the gamut from your simple pottage that any family you know poor middle class family could make all the way up to the most opulent dishes that only the very, very wealthy and frankly adventurous diner would want to try. There's a recipe for a sauce specifically to be used on boiled ostrich. There are instructions on how to truss and serve flamingo, sow's udder stuffed with sea urchin, and there's even a recipe for how best to serve dormouse. Now it may seem an odd juxtaposition going from boiled ham on one page to dormouse on the next, but that's because the recipes didn't come from one source. There were many sources that made up this book. See the Dedicoquinadia is attributed to Apicius, but if Apicius had any recipes in this book it was probably only those most lavish and kind of weird. Most of them came from later cookbooks and books on agriculture, so why did Apicius get all the credit, and frankly who was this guy? In the first century during the reign of Tiberius there are several accounts of a man named Marcus Gavius Apicius. He was known for being quite the food lover to the point of ostentatious gluttony, but it seems that anyone who was anyone in ancient Rome at the time consuls, senators, advisors to the emperor and getting an invitation to dinner at Apicius's villa was a must. Food was his thing. He wrote several cookbooks that stayed in circulation for centuries, and plenty credits him for devising a method to make something like foie gras but from pigs by feeding the pigs dried figs, and then slaughtering them via an overdose of honeyed wine. Apicius also advised that the best way to serve red mullet was to drown it in a bath of fish sauce made from other red mullet which seems a little like psychopathic to me, but I don't want to impose my modern values on historical figures. Still seems creepy. He swore that flamingo's tongue, most superb, and he advised Drusus who was the son of the emperor Tiberius that he should not eat cabbage tops because they were for the commoners. Frankly this guy kind of seems like an ass, but I think that my favorite story of Apicius is that when he heard someone boast that the shrimp from the Libyan coast were larger and sweeter than those in his own hometown of Miniturne, Apicius hired a boat, sailed across the Mediterranean Sea, and when he got there some fishermen showed him their catch and he was just like, I've seen bigger, and turned his boat right around didn't even get out. Sadly all of this opulence led to quite the tragic end for poor Apicius. As Seneca wrote having spent a fortune of 100 million sesterci on his kitchen, spent all the gifts he had received from the imperial court, and thus swallowed up his income in lavish hospitality Apicius found that he had only 10 million sesterci left. Afraid of dying in relative poverty he poisoned himself. Now while it's always hard to do like an exact exchange rate from ancient money to modern money, 10 million sesterci would still be like between three and five million dollars, so killing yourself over it, kind of a drama queen. Anyway after his death the name Apicius became synonymous with opulence and a love of food, and that's why 300 years later when the De Re Coquinaria was written the author gives full credit to that first century gourmand. Now as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, let's get back to the After about five minutes take a look, and if most of the mussels have opened you're good to go. Now if they haven't give them another minute, but you want to make sure that any mussels that haven't opened you don't eat. They're dead, but once they are ready go ahead and take the pot off the heat, and dish up your mussels. Nice to include a little broth with them. All right here we go in Metulus, ancient Roman mussels. Let's give them a shot. So if you don't have one of those fancy little forks that they have at restaurants, which I don't, and what I do is I actually use one of the shells, click click, to pull out the mussel from the other shell like so, and you can eat it. They're nice, really you're getting a lot of the mussel flavor. I mean the liquamen or garum, I mean it adds salt to it. It definitely you know kind of tastes a little oceany, but but it's not fishy at all. I do wish I had some some butter. I miss butter, but they're really really quite good. I can and will be eating this entire bowl. I look forward to making more of Apicius' recipes, and if you have one that you want to see me do just let me know in the comments. Maybe steer away from the dormouse and flamingo, but you never know. So make sure to hit that like and I will see you next time on Tasting History.