Seasoned Mushrooms a la Apicius

As I said before, I held a little housewarming for some friends. And lucky me, I forgot to tell everyone there would be food, so everyone had already eaten by the time they got there. And so I spent God knows how much money on food so that I would be stuck eating most of it. At least the beer and wine didn't go to waste.

One thing I like to make for parties is a recipe that wowed my friends in Riverside. Sadly, I cannot claim the credit for it. The real credit goes to an Italian guy who lived about 1,500 years ago. Caelius Apicius may have named himself after famous 1st century AD gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius* on purpose - those silly Romans! - and wrote down what many Classical scholars consider to be the world's earliest (or earliest-known) cookbook, De re coquinaria. I have found a few modern conversions and adaptations (mentioned below), and I have wanted to try so manyof them. It's especially weird to see a whole cookbook of Italian cooking with nary a tomato or pasta to be seen; at the time, those were still isolated respectively to Mexico and China.

One of my favorites is this one, seasoned mushroom stems, which uses olive oil, honey and garum - which exists only today in the very similar fish sauces of Southeast Asia - along with lovage as a seasoning for mushroom stems. The original recipe is as follows:

Boletos aliter: Tirsos eorum concisos in patellam novam perfundis, addito pipere, ligustico, modico melle; liquamine temperabis; oleum modice. (Apicius 315)

A translation from the original Latin by author Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa is in the book A Taste of Ancient Rome, translated from the Italian into English by Anna Herklotz (see for yourself on Google Books; scroll down to page 65). It goes as follows:

Another recipe for mushrooms: Put the chopped stems in a clean pan, add pepper, lovage, and a bit of honey; mix with garum; [add] a bit of oil. (Author's addition; Gozzini Giacosa, p. 65)

My own version of this, which I adapted from the wonderful Classical Cookbook and by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, is as follows: for each pound of mushrooms (I use portabellas, but criminis are fine too) use one cup each of honey, olive oil and fish sauce, plus a few sprigs of lovage (or if you can't find that, fresh celery leaves). Boil everything but the mushrooms and then throw in the mushrooms, and reduce the liquid by half.

After years of making it off the top of my head, I found that I was way off the actual recipe as converted into modern measurements by the authors. Again, Apicius gave no exact measurements so anything a modern chef or author could come up with would be an approximation. But Giacosa recommends for each pound of mushrooms: 2 T of olive oil to 1 T of fish sauce (garum) to 1/4 tsp of honey - that's more like a 2 to 1 to ¹/₁₂ correspondence. Add to that a handful of lovage for each pound of mushrooms. Also the recipe calls for mushroom stems, not entire mushrooms. I still like mine - they are wonderfully tangy, salty and a little sweet all at the same time. But I'll have to try the somewhat closer one at some point. It saves on olive oil, honey and fish sauce.

This is all you need to make this - 1/2 lb of mushrooms is quite easy enough. Again, use the leaves from the celery - just the leaves.

Source:

Gozzini Giacosa, Ilaria. A Taste of Ancient Rome, translation and adaptation of De re coquinaria by Caelius Apicius, translated from the Italian by Anna Herklotz (1992: University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)


* pronounced "MAR-kus GAH-wee-us uh-PICK-ee-us"

An Unconventional Use for Fish Sauce

Whether it's called nam pla (in Thailand) or nước mắm (in Vietnam), fish sauce is one big condiment in Southeast Asia. In the US, it's primarily found in restaurants sweetened with little julienned strips of carrots, maybe pepper flakes, and the occasional small slices of green onion. I have been using it for years, though admittedly not often. When I'm not cooking Vietnamese or Thai food, I get some extra use from it in recipes that I get from The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger. This book adapts ancient Roman recipes for the modern day, as faithfully as possible - and these recipes all come from a time long before pasta, tomatoes or potatoes were ever introduced into Italy.

So the next question on your mind might be: how authentically Roman is Southeast Asian fish sauce? Turns out that scholars had been scratching their heads trying to recreate the ancient process for making garum, a fermented fish gut product that was used in Rome as often as ketchup is here. Long story short: nothing the culinary archaeologists did worked, but it hit them that garum and Thai / Vietnamese fish sauce were actually made in much the same way (though, disturbingly, Thai / Vietnamese fish sauce, according to the above link, is probably not as strong as garum, because they don't throw in the guts of just any fish into the mixture in Southeast Asia; the Romans would just throw in guts from any fish). Why recreate garum when it's being made in Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillippines?

The recipe I use most often is adapted from one for mushrooms. Just bring equal parts of olive oil, honey and fish sauce to a boil, add lovage or celery leaves, and throw in sliced up mushrooms - about 1 to 2 cups of the sauce per pound of mushroom, depending on how much of the sauce you really like (I like more). This recipe works very well with portabello mushrooms.