Now I shall demonstrate how I go about the business of reconstructing a recipe- or try, at least. I’m the most interested in Roman cooking (I’m interested in Roman everything).
The biggest source we have for Roman cookery is a cookbook known as Apicius or De re coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking). It’s a series of recipes on everything you need for a Roman banquet, from how to clarify honey, to how to cook flamingo tongues. There are other food references through out Roman literature- Cato, Pliny, etc, but Apicius is the biggest single source.
But the original is in Latin. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read Latin all that well. One of the things you need to be aware of when working with translations is that you are also working with the translator’s biases. With Apicius, we are really lucky, in that there are multiple translations, and one REALLY good one. The newest translation is by Christopher Grodcok and Sally Grainger- Sally is a food historian and Christopher is a classicist. There have been translations done by purely classicists, who are not food people, and food people, who are not classicists. Having both is important to get the context in which the text was written, and the knowledge of how food works. It helps. There are also a number of books about Roman cooking that aren’t straight translations, but are other people’s interpretations of the recipes. One that I use a lot is A Taste of Ancient Rome by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa. She’s Italian, and her text is translated, and she’s a little conservative in trying new tastes. I use her as a starting point, rather than a gospel.
This recipe is one I hadn’t worked on before, so you get the narrative of the entire process from beginning to… well, it’s not “end;” it’s “I ran out of ingredients.”
The recipe is Apicius 3. 9.1. In Latin: Cimas: cuminium salem uinum uetus et oleum. Translation by Grainger and Grocock: Young Greens: cumin, salt, old wine, and oil.
You may note there’s a few things missing here: amounts and verbs. Most of Apicius is like this- you get a list of ingredients and sometimes some vague proportions or a verb or two thrown your way, but the question about what to do with these things is where the fun is.
The first thing to do here is figure out what “cimas” means. G&G translate as “young greens” with a note in the glossary that it generally means cabbage, sort of. There’s another word that refers to the round cabbages, so it might be broccoli. Maybe, although the Oxford Companion to Food ( A | K | G | AB ) says that broccoli was first described in 1724. Kale, however, is known as the “geenstuff of ordinary people in Europe” through the middle ages, so that’s a possibility.
According to Food in Antiquity, it’s probably something along the lines of broccoli or kale. Some people translate it as “Brussels sprouts” but those were not cultivated until about 500 years ago, so that’s wrong. Given that Apicius only mentions cimas (and assorted declensions of the word) and not the other Latin terms for cabbage, we can make a reasonable assumption that headed cabbage is probably not the thing.
At some point, however, you have to make a decision, and part of that decision is based on what is available modernly and at your local grocery store. I can get broccolini and kale. So I did that.
Cumin is easy, so is salt, oil is going to be olive oil, so… what does “Aged wine” mean? Wine that was bottled a while ago? Wine that you opened up and didn’t drink fast enough before it went off? It’s not vinegar, because there’s a word for that. I got a 2010 wine that was the $11-est bottle of wine at the store, because my bus was coming and I had to make a decision and it was red. Whatever. It’s wine, I’ll cook with it.
So we have our ingredients. (You note the fish sauce? Yes, that shows up in Roman food almost constantly. I didn’t use it this time; I just grabbed it out of habit.)
Broccolini is tender and sweet and lovely little veggie. Kale is….not. Giacosa suggests boiling the broccoli, so I went with that- just enough to cook it and get the bitter out, but not enough to make is soggy and sad. Even Captain America thinks the overboiling that happened in the 1940s was too much. Because it was and it killed all the nutrients and the taste and especially the taste.
As far as the sauce goes, Giacosa said “mix everything together!”
So I tried that first. It was… okay? I put too much oil in, which led to putting in more wine, and then salt and cumin (and then ground cumin), so it sort of worked? But you have to keep mixing the wine and oil together because SHOCKINGLY, they don’t blend.
So after some discussion and much standing around chewing on kale, I did another batch where I reduced the wine to (sort of) mimic the “aging process.” It was better. The flavors blended a lot better with the reduced wine.
I had a bunch of kale left over, so I went on another direction and used the oil the sauté the kale, then threw in wine, salt and cumin and let it cook down, just to see what would happen. It was pretty tasty, but I’m not sure it’s RIGHT. Generally in Apicius, when you get a bunch of ingredients that could make a sauce, it’s meant to be a sauce. The flavor profile worked- the cumin with the wine would do that- but I don’t think that’s what was intended.
The broccolini was tastiest, but broccolini was developed in 1993 (which I should have researched before I went shopping. See, I screw up sometimes). Broccoli probably would have been a better choice. The kale was, well, kale. It’s kale.
So that’s how that goes. If I were to make this for people, I’d take kale, blanch it, and make a dressing of 4:1 wine and oil, and season with ground cumin to taste. Am I 100% certain that I got this interpreted accurately? Nope. There’s no way to do that. But I feel like I have a reasonable guess, and it’s tasty (as tasty as kale can be).
And that’s my method. Figure out your terms, make guesses on your verbs, and then experiment, and don’t be afraid to go, “Yeah…. that’s not right.”
Thanks for visiting the Historical Kitchen, where there is some guesswork and often deliciousness. Next month: Just what the hell is ratafia, anyway?
Are you sure that’s kale? The picture looks more like collard greens. I find that certain vegetables are compatible with cumin, it’s great with a mixture of sauteed onions, tomatoes, corn and yellow squash.
I agree, it does look kind of like collards. Fun segment, thanks for sharing! 🙂
Agree, those look like collards (or the really boring forms of kale). Why mature greens? “Young greens” sounds like baby kale. So make the sauce, and toss the baby kale with the sauce still piping hot, so that it wilts. Or use (mature) dragon kale, chopped and sauted in the sauce to wilt.
This is really fascinating! Personally when I hear “young greens” I think of what we would call field greens, like, “go out in your yard and pick whatever is just sprouting”. Have you thought of trying this with dandelion greens? They’re apparently a staple of Italian peasant cooking; my Italian grandmother used to cook with them all the time, just saute them in oil with garlic. They might work well with this recipe.
I love this! I am a huge fan of historical cooking and back in my rare book days I once handled a copy of the 1498 first printed edition of Apicius.
Re. wine. I’m not at all expert on Roman stuff but I seem to recall that wine was much thicker than it is now and was generally diluted with water before being drunk. Would the wine therefore have been more like a syrup?
Love this column, I love ancient cooking and will look for these books.
But I agree with the others — that isn’t kale — that is clearly collard greens. Not as tender or tasty as kale. Collards are rubbery and require longer cooking.
You would probably LOVE the You-Tube series, “The Supersizers Eat. . . Rome” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swhEbBDwM0I ). They go back and make Roman (and if I remember, other cultures’) foods. Very interesting and very entertaining.
This was really fascinating, but I agree: That isn’t kale. At least not the kind found in Swedish stores. They tend to have a curly edge. Oh, and one thing that struck my mind was that the closest equivalent to old wine might be vinegar? Though I don’t know latin, so I am probably wrong.
One thing that might make it easier is to pour the sauce into a clean jar or bottle, since then you can shake it before pouring into on the veggies. 🙂
First, yup, I’m a dumbass who trusted the labeling in the grocery store (since I don’t eat kale on the regular and never buy it.. well, whoops). Mea culpa.
“Young greens” is only one translation option, and I am limited to what I can get easily, so just going for “baby kale” is not necessarily an option. As I said, at some point you just have to make a decision and go with what you can get.
As for the vinegar option, I did not go that direction because vinegar shows up in other recipes as “Acetum” so if Apicius meant vinegar, he would have said that.
This is entirely the wrong time of year for “young greens” and for kale in general. Like the other members of its family, kale becomes more bitter the higher the growing temperature is. (Which is why you only want to eat Brussels sprouts that were harvested after the first frost — they are much tastier.) So it really is a Spring/Fall/Winter veggie. Modern Romans eat very much in season — I imagine ancient Romans even more so. This was probably a dish eaten in early Spring, which, for the Romans would’ve been February or possibly even early March. This dish will have an entirely different taste in season.
Might be some good idea for how to make fish sauce on greens taste yummy in the SE Asian cuisine – thinking specifically of Hot Sour Salty Sweet cookbook by Alford and Duguid.
And too bad the show is over, but the Pompeii exhibit that had been touring North American museums (we saw it at the last stop in Seattle) had a section about garum! I hadn’t known the Romans even liked fish sauce, let alone exported it all over the world, until visiting the exhibit. And Pompeii was a major producer and exporter of garum/fish sauce even as far as troops in Britain who wanted a taste of home. (So, Burger King in Bagram, fish sauce in Londinium, the more things change …)
I was thinking baby greens too, like arugula or endive or spinach, but @EC Spurlock’s idea about the dandelion greens is brilliant.
I can’t stand kale. Also, I’m Italian and for what’s worth was taught to cook Italian by my grandmother who never learned to speak a word of English and she would never ever have used kale. What she did use extensively was spinach. Was it possible that cimas was spinach?
Almost certainly not. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, spinach didn’t arrive in Europe until the 11th century, when the Moors brought it to Spain (and the Wiki entry has it hitting the Mediterranean area around 827 CE).
Trends in cuisine and the evolution of food is always changing, so what an Italian woman made two generations ago and what a Roman cook made 1500 years ago don’t have a lot of similarities. And given the way food cultivation is always changing, what the Romans would recognize as cimas may not exist anymore- we can only make educated guesses with the resources available to us.
For what it’s worth, in South France today, what’s commonly understood as vinaigrette is about two-thirds olive oil, one-third vinegar, and a sprinkling of salt and maybe pepper, and that’s it. No emulsifier, a lot of people don’t even use mustard. It’s also fairly common to boil certain types of vegetables (like artichokes or leeks) and then serve them warm with vinaigrette. I don’t know how old that custom is, but that Roman dish did remind me a lot of it! Plus that sounds a lot like something you could make quickly in a very low-tech kitchen, so that makes sense I suppose?
Just an idle supposition 🙂
Apicius sounds a lot like Escoffier; just a list of the ingredients and good luck. 🙂
Very curious what aged wine means.
I studied Latin as a kid, and by studied I mean got kicked out of school. So my translation skills are useless. Google translate thinks that a good English translation of the Latin cimas is invisible, which isn’t much of an improvement.
But if we’re just picking stuff and going with it, I would probably choose mustard greens, as I think that’s the closest thing we have to the cabbage precursor?
Dandelion greens are best before the plant has flowered, so you’re talking early spring indeed, but I agree, young greens sounds springy.
Side note: collards can be great, you just have to stew them with bacon until they taste like bacon.
A note regarding kale: there are many greens I am not fond of, and I used to say that included kale. Until my husband (the main cook in our house) found a recipe for creamed kale. He cooks the kale in a deeee-lish cream and garlic sauce (we use full fat cream). One day we ran out of kale but had some fresh spinach and decided to try creamed spinach with the same recipe; while the tasty flavour was there, wilted kale holds some texture while the wilted spinach was just too slimy. The moral of my story is: if you think you don’t like kale but want the vitamins, try cooking it in a sauce so all you taste is sauce, and maybe try it in spinach recipes where you really wish the spinach would keep some texture.
If anyone wants the creamed kale recipe I’ll ask hubby, but he probably found it on the internet anyway.
Actually, Martha Rose Shulman’s vegetarian recipes for collard greens are so good, you’ll never want to cook them with bacon again. Especially the one with black-eyed peas. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/series/recipes_for_health/collard_greens/index.html
The leafy vegetable looks like what in the UK would be called Spring Greens, they don’t form a head, but the leaves at the top of the plant are loosely bunched. They are less bitter than kale, though not as sweet as cabbage. They are a member of the very varied Brassica oleracea species whose cultivars include cabbage, cauliflower, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts and kholrabi. Wild cabbage was certainly around in Roman times as were at least two cultivars, though exactly what the cultivars were is, as RHG says, open to debate. /lecture over – sorry, the idea that all of those vegetables are the same species amazes and fascinates me!
I applaud the endeavor, but my feelings about kale are irreparably hostile. ‘young greens’ chez nous would basically be spinach or arugula, and historical accuracy be damned.
I would just be ecstatic that the recipe didn’t include garum.
Hi,
My wife sent me this link as I’m interested in both Rome and cooking. Great idea here.
I’m thinking that this is a recipe for braised baby cabbage. The translations I found (on the internet) for the word cima (also spelled cyma) put baby cabbage at the beginning of the list of options, for example:
“spring shoots of cabbage/similar; hollow sphere (L+S); spherical layer, stratum”
The secondary definitions all describe cabbage shaped things. Baby cabbage would also be more of an upper class treat, since you’re eating the cabbage without letting it develop to full size and value.
Old wine would be aged wine, and probably a sweet white wine, which was the favorite of the Roman upper classes. (They would have loved a sauternes.) Cheap wine was red, and almost turning to vinegar at the bottom of the price scale.
I would interpret this recipe to use whole, halved, or quartered baby cabbages (tennis ball to softball size). Saute them a bit in hot olive oil with cumin tossed in, then add a few cups of a sweetish white wine, cover, and braise on low until tender. Remove cabbages to a serving platter then reduce liquid by 3/4 to thicken. Pour over cabbages and serve.
They might not grind the cumin, since it would release plenty of flavor if added first to the hot oil. Reducing the liquid would thicken it up to a thin syrup consistency and emusify the oil better.
If I ever see baby cabbages in the local stores (not holding my breath), I might give this a try and let you know how it worked out.
Could cimas possibly be rapini greens? Also, I’m wondering if aged wine is simply wine that is no longer drinkable because it had been exposed to air for a few days, but isn’t yet quite vinegar… Just a thought.