From Apicius, Pullus Fusilis: Chicken With Liquid Filling

From Apicius, Pullus Fusilis: Chicken With Liquid Filling*

In the mood for Roman chow, I found a recipe from Apicius’ De re coquinaria that sounded good for a cold evening. It’s basically a chicken stuffed with minced beef and pork, some egg, ginger, oats, white wine, green peppercorns and pine nuts.

Two rather unusual additional ingredients:

• Liebstoeckl: this seems generally understood to be a celery-like root, so I used celery (would have used celery root if I had it, but I figured it’d be good for a bitterish note)
• Liquamen: a kind of fish sauce, and I had a bottle of Thai stuff around, so I used that

It was intriguing to see what are commonly considered Asiatic ingredients like ginger, green peppercorns and fish sauce in an "ancient" (like 5th cent. CE) European recipe. Then again, garlic, which is now considered stereotypically Italian, was originally Asian, too.

Anyway, I made the “dough” to fill the bird…



Then fried some up in a pan so I could taste it and correct the seasoning. A decent little burger; turns out, ginger and pine nuts are a killer combo...



After a few hours of roasting and a Romanesque carciofi on the side, this meal made The Wife happy. It was rather rich, though, kind of like having a roasted chicken with a side of meat loaf.



*For full recipe, check out: http://www.mit.edu/people/wchuang/cooking/recipes/Roman/Ancient_Roman.html#10, or Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, Joseph Dommers Vehling’s translation (this is what I had, though I can't vouch that it's any longer the best version). “Liquid filling” is probably a mistranslation; it was more a farce (a minced meat filling).

The ancient Romans were massive importers of Asian spices.

Pepper came out of India about 4,000 years ago, but appears not to have reached the Mediterranean until the 5th century B.C. It was the first Oriental spice to reach Europe, and it was an immediate hit. Moving from Greece to Rome, pepper was soon being added to almost every Roman dish, even desserts. Emperor Domitian built a special market, the horrea piperataria, to handle the trade. Pepper was deemed to be one of the “five essential luxuries” that made life worth living—and were the basis of the empire’s foreign trade. (The other four were Chinese silk, German amber, African ivory, and Arabian incense.)

Ginger was brought from India to Persia by Darius the Great in the fifth century B.C. After that, it popped up in each succeeding important civilization. (Ginger’s large, flattish rhizomes, commonly called “hands” in today’s spice trade, shipped well, and were therefore a popular and important commodity of trade in ancient times, even when other things weren’t traveling well.) It was so popular in Rome that the government counted on it for income—they taxed it so heavily that, despite being abundant, it was 15 times the cost of black pepper—but it still sold briskly.

Romans were actually the first Europeans to discover that the monsoon winds could cut down on the time it took to sail to India.

So yeah -- Asian spices were used big time in the ancient world.

P.S. You're the first person I know of who has cooked something from Apicius. Very cool.

Wow! This is going on my list of "Why everyone should read LTH Forum" posts.

The combination of Hammond's initiative in even thinking of taking on this recipe, his terrific photos, and his witty commentary, topped with Cynthia's erudition supplying a fascinating mini-history lesson for context is just perfect! I shouldn't be muddying up this over-the-top thread with my banal enthusiasm, but I couldn't let this go by without expressing my thanks. Jaw-droppingly good.

Cynthia wrote:The ancient Romans were massive importers of Asian spices.

Empire has its benefits.

What's most surprising to me is that some of these Asian-type spices are no longer typical of what I understand to be Roman food. For instance, ginger and fish sauce are not what we think of as Italianate ingredients, so my question: what happened? How is it that such ingredients, so common in 5th century Roman food, seem no longer to have much of a place on the Italian table?

My guess: the Sack of Rome, followed by various plagues, leading to general deterioration of Roman culture, until at some point in the Middle Ages the population of the formerly imperial city had fallen to around 10K. At this point, the culinary slate was somewhat "wiped," to be revived anew with new world ingredients like peppers and tomato.

Hammond

Regarding the name of the dish, the two main extant manuscripts call it pullus fusilis but this could very well have been a misreading or miscopying already present in their common Vorlage for pullus farsilis and virtually all editors (starting in the 16th century) emend to the latter. I do not know offhand if the former appears as the name of an attested Roman recipe elsewhere but that can be checked. In any event, fusilis I would not translate as 'liquid' tout court but perhaps rather as 'molten' or 'batter-like'; fusilis was used in reference to molten metals and so to my mind -- if its use here is at all correct -- perhaps indicates a very wet stuffing that does not fully set, in other words, not a liquid but a thick paste or porridge-like mixture. That said, I think the correct name most likely really is pullus farsilis, 'stuffed chicken'; the inclusion of eggs and wheat (oats are wrong) and meat bespeaks a basic, firm meat stuffing of the familiar sort.

*

Fish sauce was a basic ingredient of Greco-Roman cooking and there is no reason whatsoever to think it is not completely native to the area. Ginger was introduced to the Mediterranean from South Asia, as reflected in the (allegedly -- i.e., I haven't looked into this myself, though on the face of things it sounds reasonable) Indic origin of the name taken up in Greek and Latin.

It is, I think, a little misleading to characterise garlic as 'Asian'. Like so many other early domesticated plants, it likely comes from the northern side of the Near East, i.e., southeastern Turkey, western Iran, the northern part of the Mesopotamian world (we know it was cultivated in Mesopotamia and also in Egypt from an early date). It was introduced to Europe early on and was surely 'nativised' thoroughly in various places across the Mediterranean world long before the days of the Roman Empire -- and I wouldn't be at all surprised if some varieties of garlic were native to Europe and already in common use long before the arrival of the domesticated variety. That said, it seems all but certain that refined Roman cooking, like refined modern Italian cooking, was very judicious in the use of garlic. It appears very infrequently in the Apicius recipes.

*

DH,

The subject of the relationship between Greco-Roman cuisine and the cuisine of Italy in subsequent periods is extremely complex and simple explanations with reference to a couple of big events don't really explain anything. Of course, the collapse of the Roman empire was a development with enormous ramifications for all aspects of culture but the effects were themselves complex and not the same in all places. Similarly complex is the rôle of the rise of Islam with its effects on trade in the Mediterranean.

Anyway, my perhaps grumpy sounding tone here is just a reflection of my connexion to this mateial. This is the sort of topic that serious culinary historians work on painstakingly and, in fact, this particular subject is something that I've been working on for quite some time (to be measured in years). It's an historical subject that demands research in period documents in the original languages, as well as the basic interpretive skills that the scholarly approach to history demands. Done right, it's hard, skilled, badly compensated labour...



Antonius

Antonius wrote:In any event, fusilis I would not translate as 'liquid' tout court but perhaps rather as 'molten' or 'batter-like'; fusilis was used in reference to molten metals and so to my mind -- if its use here is at all correct -- perhaps indicates a very wet stuffing that does not fully set, in other words, not a liquid but a thick paste or porridge-like mixture. That said, I think the correct name most likely really is pullus farsilis, 'stuffed chicken'; the inclusion of eggs and wheat (oats are wrong) and meat bespeaks a basic, firm meat stuffing of the familiar sort.

Porridge-like consistency pretty much describes the texture of the stuffing.

I had this dish again for lunch and like it quite a lot. Looking through my Vehling translation, I came across several other dishes that combine ingredients in somewhat unpredictable patterns (at least by my frame of reference). For instance, green beans with cilantro and cumin (202) – don’t believe I’ve ever had this conjunction of flavors, but it sounds like it could be good.

One big drawback of trying to cook from Apicius is that the ingredients are somewhat challenging to source; I’m not sure where I would get flamingo or dormouse on the west side.

Antonius wrote:It's an historical subject that demands research in period documents in the original languages, as well as the basic interpretive skills that the scholarly approach to history demands. Done right, it's hard, skilled, badly compensated labour...

Three characteristics that make it, from my perspective, somewhat unattractive.

Hammond