Fictional Feasts: Roman Pork with Cumin in Wine
This dish is listed in Apicus (a collection of Roman recipes) as Aper Ita Conditur meaning ‘seasoned wild boar’. Wild boar being a little hard to get hold of in my neck of the woods, I’ve opted for a couple of pork loins instead. Apicus is thought to date to the 1st century A.D. and is generally geared towards the higher classes of Roman society, including some rather exotic ingredients like flamingo.
In my novel Sign of the White Foal, military men like Arthur would have been used to fairly coarse fare when on campaign, but I wanted to create something that he might have been treated to as the guest of some Romano-British lord keen to secure his support against Saxon raiders.
The original recipe reads;
WILD BOAR IS PREPARED THUS;
IT IS CLEANED; SPRINKLED WITH SALT AND CRUSHED CUMIN AND THUS LEFT. THE NEXT DAY IT IS PUT INTO THE OVEN; WHEN DONE SEASON WITH CRUSHED PEPPER. A SAUCE FOR BOAR: HONEY, BROTH, REDUCED WINE, RAISIN WINE. (Project Gutenberg)
I’ve found that a lot of these old recipe books are a little light on information like quantities and cooking times meaning some guesswork is required. A good reconstruction of this recipe can be found at The Romans in Britain which is a great resource for everything about Roman cuisine. I replaced myrtle or juniper berries with rosemary. It’s not too clear when rosemary became naturalised in Britain – it may have come with the Romans or it may have been introduced by 8th century monks – but on the basis of flavour, it is a common enough substitute.
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I wanted to make this into a meal for my family, so I found a good reconstructive recipe for Roman Bread (as well as a great blog post about it) at Tavola Mediterranea. This type of bread is called Panis Quadratus due to the four cuts across its diameter resulting in eight sections. A popular theory concerning the deep groove running around its edge is that these loaves were bound with string during their rising and baking. The purpose of the string may have been to hang them up in the shop or as a handy way for customers to carry them home.
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But what about vegetables? Coquinaria has some interesting things to say about broccoli and, as that is one of the few vegetables my kids will actually eat, Roman style broccoli it is! I dressed it with toasted cumin seeds, olive oil, salt and wine.
Overall, not a bad meal. The pork went a little dry so I’d watch the cooking time on that and the bread was a bit on the heavy side. I don’t know how heavy Roman bread was but perhaps it could have done with more kneading.
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Sign of the White Foal is the first book in the Arthur of the Cymry trilogy; a retelling of the Arthurian legend in post-Roman Britain.
