Make Your Own Cheese!

Today we will make some cheese. All you need is some whole milk and a lemon.
1) Pour the milk into a pot.

Slowly heat it until it is about to boil. Then add the juice from a lemon. The milk will begin to separate and look like this:

It separates into curds (solid stuff) and whey (liquid stuff). These are the curds:

Now pour into cheese cloth to collect the curds. What to do with the whey, you ask? Well, in Parma they feed it to the pigs and say that it makes their prosciutto taste the way it does. Isn't that awesome! There are two famous products from Parma, cheese and prosciutto, and the latter can't exist without the former. Wonderful. You, on the other hand, probably do not have a pig to feed your whey. 

Then gather up your cheese cloth into a little bundle.

and squeeze!

Voila! Cheese!

Now, if you want it to actually taste good, you can add herbs and spices to the first stage before you add the lemon juice. Stuff like salt and pepper and thyme really make this cheese taste good. You can also use zany stuff like goat milk for a taste of the ancient world! Cheese cloth is really for making cheese! Enjoy!

Thanksgiving and the New World

I missed some days of posts due to the Thanksgiving and all. So, I want to quick look at how Thanksgiving celebrates the food of the New World. The discovery of all these new foods was such a big deal for the Old World that the entire world should celebrate Thanksgiving and eat only New World foods! In fact, you could also only eat New World foods at Thanksgiving and celebrate foods from the New World that they did not have in the ancient world (except for the ancient Americas that is).

New World Foods for which I am Thankful!

turkey

corn

potatoes

sweet potatoes

tomatoes

squash, pumpkins and gourds

chilies and peppers

eggplant

chocolate

vanilla

pecans

First, a quick look at this list shows how different ancient Italian food was than modern Italian food because so many of the ingredients we think of as Italian did not hit that peninsula until the 1500s. Second, a Thanksgiving meal of turkey, cornbread stuffing, roasted sweet potatoes, roasted peppers and tomatoes, pumpkin pie, and chocolate pecan pie would be a true celebration of the foods of the New World! Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving!

Herodotus' Egyptian Stuffed Brisket

Herodotus is definitely the most fun place to look for ancient world recipes. Today we go to book II, section 40 of his Histories and make the dish he says the Egyptians made for the most important festival of their year. The Egyptians skin a bull and then, "they cut off its legs, the very end of its rump, its shoulder and its neck. Next, they fill the remainder of the bull's body with purified loaves, honey, raisins, frankincense, myrrh, and other perfumed spices, and then they roast it all." Tr: Waterfield

Herodotus' Egyptian Stuffed Brisket

1 brisket (12-15 pounds)

loaf of challah bread

honey

raisins

dried apricots

dried cherries

ras al hanout spice blend or cumin

olive oil

1) Ok, we are not going to use a whole cow. But to try to imitate the specified entire body, I substitute the brisket, which is essentially the breast of the cow. This is also coincidentally a great cut to stuff and slow roast.

2) Butterfly the brisket (cut it down the middle lengthwise so you can open it up like a book). Here it is pre-butterfly:

Here it is after being butterflied:

3) Now, rub it all over with olive oil. Then, cover it with a layer of the dried fruits and spices. Spices to add include salt, pepper, cumin, aleppo pepper, ras al hanout spice blend or any other moroccan spice blend. Really, whatever "perfumed spices" to you!

4) Now for the challah. I justify the substitution of challah for the "purified loaves" as follows. In response to Herodotus, an Egyptian priest named Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek (from this text, among other things we get not only the Egyptian dynasties, but even the name dynasty). In this text, Manetho claims that the Jews adopted all the Egyptian dietary laws, except that the Jews made the laws less stringent. So, I am saying that the closest we can get to the holy bread of the Egyptians is the holy bread of the Jews, in this case the challah. Also, it is a great bread for stuffings. So, tear up the bread into chunks and start layering on the meat:

When finished it should look like this and be ready to rollup:

4) Alright, time for the fun step! Grab that meat by the short end and roll it like a jelly roll! Don't be squeamish, just grab the sucker and rollrollroll!

When rolled it will look like this and be ready to be tied.

For tying the beef I recommend growing two more arms as I did in the picture below. It is much easier with four arms.

I just tie it with a series of knots like this:

And it is ready to be cooked!

5) Get your roasting pan hot on the stove. Then brown the beef all over in olive oil before transferring the the oven at 350 degrees.

Brown it all over

Here is beefy close up!

So, roast it around 4 hours. It should be delicious at this point. Pull it out of the oven and transfer to a cutting board. Here is a really fun step, pour honey over the hot roast! If you have earlier rubbed cumin on the roast, the smell of the honey hitting the hot, cumin-y crust of the beef is amazing! Then, make sure to let this giant roast sit for about 20 minutes. Then cut it into slices that will get a cross section of the whole rolled roast. Enjoy!

Apicius' Pine Nut Sauce

First, everyone please check out my friend Dominic Galante's Blog, Historias Apodeixis,  which you can access by clicking on the link over there on the right! It is really interesting and covers lots of cool stuff so can give you a break from reading only blogs on ancient foods.

Second, lets cook more dishes by Apicius! This is an incredible dish from Apicius' ancient Roman cookbook that is originally specified to go over hard boiled eggs. However, once I had cooked it at this restaurant I used to work at back in Montana and so the recipe had got put into the box of recipe cards and then I went out on tour with the band. When I got back weeks later, the sauce was on the special sheet being served with scallops! Turns out Dominick, my boss and great friend who will be discussed further later, had no idea the recipe was 2000 years old but just thought it looked really good and should go with seafood! I agree with Dominick that it tastes great with seafood.

Apicius' Pine Nut Sauce

1/4 cup pine nuts

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/4 cup honey

pinch of salt or dash of Thai fish sauce

pinch of black pepper

1) Toast your pine nuts. I like to do this either in the oven, but it can be dangerous because you can forget. So, I recommend using a saute pan on low heat and lightly dry roast them.

2) Put them into a mortar and pestle.

Then grind them up to an oily powder

3) Now in a mixing bowl, or in the mortar itself if you have a nice big one, combine the honey, vinegar, pine nuts, salt, and pepper. Instead of salt, one can use thai fish sauce because it is basically garum, the fish sauce Romans put on everything, and that is what is actually specified in the recipe. 

4) Whip with a wire whip or fork until it is homogenous. A blender works quite well if you have one.

Now you have one good sauce. And, honey and vinegar do not go bad - so it will last quite a while in the fridge. For scallops, I like to sear the scallops in very hot olive oil and then add some of the sauce to the pan for the last bit of the cooking process. Just enough that the sauce gets hot. The sauce is strong, so a little can go a long way. 

Really this sauce can be served with anything, hot or cold. What you can notice about this sauce is that it is a sweet and sour sauce and really the ancient predecessor to the modern Italian sauce, agrodolce. 

Circe's Famous Magic Potion!

Lets return to the Odyssey and remake the potion Circe used to turn Odysseus' men into pigs! We enter the story in book ten of the Odyssey, where Odysseus and his men have landed on Circe's island. Half his men go to explore and find the hut of the witch Circe and,

"She brought them inside and seated them on chairs and benches,

and mixed them a potion, with barley and cheese and pale honey

added to Pramneian wine, but put into the mixture

 malignant drugs to make them forget their own country.

When she had given them this and they had drunk it down ..." (Odyssey X.233-237. Tr: Lattimore)

Okay, lets make this potion which also happens to be one of my all time favorite desserts!

Circe's Magic Potion

1 pound tub Ricotta (a really good, fresh one from 

your local Farmers Market or Whole Foods like place)

Roasted Barley Grains (for instructions, see yesterday's post)

Honey

Moscato (Elmo Pio brand is cheap and available in West Philly)

Poppy Seeds

1) Empty ricotta into mixing bowl.

2) Add some roasted barley grains. Not too many. These are just to give a good texture. Add honey. How much honey will depend on how sweet you like your desserts. Also, a really good ricotta will need less honey to taste outstanding.

3) Add some poppy seeds. Really just enough for color because, see, these are the malignant drugs! Or at least, um, symbolize the malignant drugs.

4) Now, after mixing all those ingredients, it is time to add the wine. Now, there are two equally delicious ways I have done this. First, just add enough wine until it is the consistency of soft serve ice cream and serve the dessert in bowls with spoons. Second, and more accurate to the text, add wine until it is the consistency of a thin milk shake and serve in a glass to drink. 

When I served this, people said it was strangely reminiscent of tiramisu. And they loved it! Or they lied to me about it! Well, either way they are pigs now.

Now, besides being an incredible dessert, this dish interacts interestingly with the dish from yesterdays post, the madza. If we take the madza as a main staple of the archaic Greek diet, this magic potion can be seen as the deconstructed fantasy version of that everyday dish. The fundamental ingredients in madza are barley and water with honey, wine, and cheese as the optional ingredients. It is then eaten in a dry, hard-tack like state. This magic potion, however, is also made from barley, honey, wine, and cheese - but the ratios are so skewed that not only is it not dry, it is drinkable. The focus has shifted from the barley and water to the optional 'flavor' ingredients, but it is still the same ingredients. Homer has taken an everyday item for the listener and idealized it into a fantasy version.

Interestingly, the interaction with the madza does not stop here. After Odysseus' men drink the potion, they become pigs and then their new diet is specified, they eat only two different kinds of acorns and cornel buds - all scavenger foods that were viewed by the archaic Greek as both less tasty and less civilized than the madza. So, in this passage we see Odysseus' men first eat a meal that is a fantasy version of everyday fare for the listener and then get immediately reduced to eating food much worse than the listener's everyday fare, and this food is presented as fit only for animals - but we know was eaten also by men in times of famine, i.e. when there was no barley for madza. Perhaps this reinforces to the listener to be happy with what they have?

So, in this marvelous passage, we get Circe's deconstructed madza (I love this term because it reminds me of a few years back when 'deconstructed homey meals' were all the rage at fancy restaurants) and the acorns for the destitute - and a great dessert for us to eat today! Enjoy! 

Madza - the everyday food of the ancient Greek

For this dish we leave whimsy behind and look at what the average ancient Greek on the street ate every day - the barley cake! Attested in, amongst others, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Hesiod, Aristophanes, and Archilochus, the madza was a cheap, easy to make, bread product that involved no baking and essentially lasted forever.

Madza

barley

water

olive oil

honey

white wine

salt

1) With normal bread, one grinds the grain, mixes it with water and other liquids and then bakes it. But, with madza one bakes the grain and then grinds it and mixes it with liquids! The madza does not need to be baked again, after kneading it into patties it is ready to be eaten. I like to roast my barley in a wok. Presumably, the Greeks used ovens.

So, roast the barley until it looks dark and roasted, but also tastes good. It tastes oddly like honey smacks cereal, just less sweet. A nice medium heat with lots of stirring is the key here. It can take longer than expected if you put alot of barley into the wok. It will look like this when done:

2) Transfer your freshly roasted barley into a mortar and pestle. Those giant stone ones you can get in Chinatown are the best. Brass and marble ones come next. 

3) Now, grind away!

4) Eventually it will be a very fine flour, or you will give up and it will be a chunky flour!

5) Now, the only other essential ingredient is water. And lots of kneading! All authors who talk of the madza talk about the kneading. If you want your madza to taste better, you can add a variety of flavor enhancers such as oil, honey, wine, milk, or even cheese (I recommend a feta or ricotta for two different yet both delicious alternatives). 

Above is the mixture before kneading.

Below is the kneading. I am clearly a very lazy barley grinder.

Once you have kneaded yourself some little patties of dough ... you are done! Yep, ready to eat. And, as long as you did not add milk or cheese, these little guys will last a very long time. 

This was what people really ate in ancient Greece, the everyday food of the everyman. Often mocked in literature, these madza supplied the calories needed to survive for many people and surprisingly taste pretty good! So, go buy some barley and get roasting!

Tomorrow: Circe and her fantasy madza!

Cato's Advice for the Sick

I have a sinus infection so I thought I would see what Cato advises me to do to get better. Not surprisingly, it revolves around cabbage, seeing that  out of a book on how to be a farmer (De Agri Cultura from 165 BC) of only around 77 pages, 6 pages are devoted to the medicinal properties of cabbage. This might strike you as strange, and in fact I do not think anyone has ever read this book and not thought that it was strange.
So, on to Cato's advice!
1) Rest assured, cabbage is the most medicinal vegetable.
2) Eating it is good for easing digestion, purging the digestive tract, headache, eye-ache, swollen spleen, painful internal organs, sore joints, insomnia, colic, and melancholy.
3) Using it as a poultice is good for wounds, swellings, sores, boils, tumors, dislocations, bruises, ulcers, and removing a nasal polypus.
Clearly, cabbage is really awesome stuff. And it is cheap! Cato says (157.8) "Cabbage is not expensive, and even if it were, you should try it anyway for the sake of your health!" Cato, famed curmudgeon that he was, cares about you and your health!
But, what is way more amazing to Cato than the powers of cabbage is the powers of the urine from someone who eats cabbage habitually. Yes, folks, the urine. and I quote (157.10), "If you save the urine from a habitual cabbage eater, heat it, and bathe a man in it, you will quickly make him healthy with this cure. This has been tested. Also, if you wash babies with this urine they will never become sickly!" He goes on to say that bathing the eyes, head, neck, and women's privates in cabbage-eater-urine is a very healthy thing. I love his insistence that he has scientifically tested this seemingly insane idea.
So yes, bathe your babies in pee so they will never be sick! Immortal words from the pen of Cato himself. I guess a quick usable recipe for other sick people out there:

Cato's Healthy Cabbage 

Cabbage

salt

vinegar

Cato says that absolutely nothing is more healthy that cabbage that has been chopped, washed, dried and served with salt and pepper. If you are feeling up to it, add red wine vinegar, and/or coriander.

So, eat your cabbage and get healthy! Please do not really bathe your babies in pee.