At the meeting of my medieval cooking nerd group this month, I made a Roman dish that Apicius (my buddy!) gives about five thousand variations on. It’s called a patina, and it’s… basically an frittata. With different stuff in it.
In the original recipe, Apicius calls for nettles, but, surprisingly, my local grocery store did not HAVE nettles. Sally Grainger, a classicist (not a classist, that’s a different thing) and a cook who has done a lot of work with Roman cooking suggested spinach as a substitute.
I can do that!
The gist of the recipe that Apicius gives us is to take the nettles, wash ’em, chop ’em, then cook them down in garum (I’ll get to that) pepper, and oil. Then you drain them, put them in a clean pan, pour beaten eggs over them, and bake until they’re done.
Garum is a fermented fish sauce – it shows up in Roman food like, almost all the time. There are some people who say, “it’s like Roman ketchup!” which is… not accurate. It’s an ingredient, and used to make things salty and to deepen flavors (true fact – I use a few drops of fish sauce in pretty much everything, especially my pasta sauce). I know someone who said she made some in her backyard once, and the neighbors called the cops to look for the decomposing body. Now, that might not be a true story (she has a lot of stories that just seem unlikely), buuuuuuuut I also don’t want to risk it in one of the densest cities in the US, especially when I can get the moral equivalent for $3 in the form of Thai fish sauce.
Washing the spinach is vitally important, doubly so when you got it in a bunch and there’s still dirt and crud in there. So I washed, and roughly chopped, and washed again.
The I put a dash or so (maybe a half tablespoon?) of pepper in a pan with about an eighth of a cup of the fish sauce (you know, “enough”) let it get hot, and dumped in the chopped spinach. At this point, everyone else in the kitchen went “I smell a LOT of garum. Red, what the hell are you doing?” I let it cook until it was nicely wilted (less than five minutes).
Then I strained the spinach back into the colander, and poured off the peppery garum that was in there. I know that Apicius says to use a new dish, but I believe in economy of dish washing. I beat the eggs, put them and the spinach in the pan, and put it in the oven at 350 (when it doubt, always go with 350) until it was done, which I think was about 20 minutes, maybe 30.
Okay, so the thing I was most concerned about was the the garum taste would be REALLY strong (as was everyone else, given their outbursts earlier in the evening). I am happy to report that it was not! It was pleasantly salty and umami and the spinach wasn’t too spinachy but just spinachy enough.
Spinachy is a word.
Anyway, there’s a whole section of Apicius with recipes for patina. There are many with fish, and various veggies and fruits (there’s a pear one I want to try when pears are in season). It’s all variations on “take some stuff and some spices and probably some garum and bake it in eggs.” This could be a fun addition to your brunch menu!
Patina means “dish” as in the things you eat off of, not a food thing that you put in your mouth. (Oh my god, English is HARD.) The patina dish itself is the ancestor of a paella pan, and a Roman one looks like this:
Neat, right?
I think it’s neat.
Happy cooking!
Aaaah… fish sauce!! I bought a book of Ancient Rome recipes and there’s garum everywhere, I was scratching my head on how to work around it. You saved me the effort of googling for an answer, thanks
(Love your historical cooking posts, thanks for doing them!)
Very neat. Frittata, spanish omelete, koo koo I knew, now I know patina too.
I’m used to hearing “patina” in reference to metal oxidation, so for a minute I thought this was a recipe for surface-treating bronze or whatever with spinach. (The fact that it actually turned out to be in reference to a frittata-like food is far tastier-looking, I have to say.)
This sounds like it might be a good way to cook spinach—especially if you’re cooking the strongly flavored stuff and not the baby spinach—even without the eggs. I’ll have to try it.
Thank you.
I just read a Passover recipe that also calls for nettles but allows spinach or chard as acceptable substitutes. I’m planning to make it this weekend!
I’ll cook with spinach over nettles any day. (Have you effing tried picking nettles? No matter how you try to avoid it, they effing sting!)
Ahhh, Apicius. I named my KitchenAid mixer Apicius. I’ll have to try this one.
Some years ago, I found that one could order garum online, though when I tried to get some for a feast, the company was sold out. Then I left the SCA and had children and… um, it’s been a while. But you reminded me! So I looked it up and sure enough, it’s still available:
https://www.zingermans.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=P-COL
(I’m not associated with them, and I haven’t actually tried it.)
Nettles don’t taste of much to me, Mr Jazz summed it up well ‘they taste green’. You do need to use good gloves, I’ve a pair of suede gardening gloves that are supple enough to pick the tops off and thick enough to protect me. And you only want the top few tender leaves as tehy et stigny further down. I have used them in potato soup and been given them in scrambled egg, both ok, but I don’t think they are worth seeking out, if you have some in your garden sure have a go.
The mangled bit should read ‘they get stringy’. I blame the dog, he was barking!
Ah, nettles. . . I never realized they were food. only a painful source for yarn! “The Wild Swans” is the only reference I’d encountered before. The Google tells me that nettles are still a source of yarn. Perhaps Elyse could do a companion piece on knitting with nettles.
(Please don’t hate my ellipsis.)
By coincidence, my brother just posted a pic to Facebook of his first spring nettle harvest. They are quite tasty, if you like things like spinach and collard greens. The go nicely in soups, as well.
This sounds like a very easy and versatile recipe. Kind of the Roman version of quiche. Definitely something to try when I have culinarily adventurous company coming next month… Thanks RHG!
hate cooking. I refuse to cook. I don’t cook. I won’t cook. (Props to my hub who proved my misogynist asshole dad wrong when he said no man would ever marry me if I didn’t learn how to “take care of my man.” Fuck you daddy, you was wrong LOL.)
AND YET DESPITE MY ANTI-COOKING BELIEFS, I STILL READ THIS POST AND HAD ALL THE EDUTAINMENT!
Redheadedgirl, you is magical, you is!
1. The village my ex-husband lived in when he was in Viet Nam made fish sauce from scratch (and from fish heads and guts). I believe the dead body story.
2. Nettles are a healthy early spring green vegetable. Made into tea (fresh or dried), they are good for allergies. And, yes, they taste green. Spinach is probably a better bet.
I second Jacqueline on the “I hate to cook, and yet still got edutainment from this post”. Might even cook it someday.
@Maite WHOOT! Im not alone in my rage face against sustenance preparation! I think the bitchery has a talent at making anything they write about sound fun. THEIR HTML IS CODED WITH CRACK I SWEAR!
I am of Southeast Asian descent and we always add a dash of fish sauce to our eggs. Get yourself some Red Boat fish sauce if you ever come across some. It’s delicious and not as “fishy” smelling.
BTW RHG if you are coming to RT here in the ATL next month, get somebody to drive you over to the Dekalb Farmer’s Market. (Heck, find me and I’ll do it myself!) You’ll thank me later. (Your wallet may not, but you will.)
Oh lord, garum. Anyone who claims they know for a fact what garum was … is simply not as well-informed as they think. (History is like that. The more you learn, the less you know. If instead you’re studying ancient India, “soma” is the same way.) Conjectures have ranged all the way from something like Vietnamese fish sauce–is that the same as Thai fish sauce? I dunno–to something more like Worcestershire sauce–which normally contains anchovies, little-known fact, though you can get vegetarian Worcestershire. Even soy sauce gets a look-in.
When I hear the name Apicius my first impulse is to run and hide, but that’s just because I worked on the book for Project Gutenberg years ago when I was just learning the ropes, and to this day it lives in my memory as The Apicius Atrocity. But it does mean I’ve got it handy on my hard drive, should I ever find myself in the mood for a thrush stuffed with lark’s tongues.
I just finished reading A Feast of Sorrow, a novel about a (fictional) slave who helped (historical) Apicius creating his cooking school and write his cookbooks. It was pretty enjoyable if you’re interested in cookery OR ancient Rome, especially if you’ve read the classic I, Claudius by Robert Graves – it shows a similar time period in Rome but from the POV of a slave rather than a member of the imperial family. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30753699-feast-of-sorrow