[Sca-cooks] Apicius' Patina de piris

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Sue Clemenger:
>I'm not familiar with the recipe....what's in it, besides eggs?
>--maire
>
>lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
>>
>>  In my local cooking "guild" several people have tried to make Patina
>>  de Piris in Apicius. So far everyone has thought it smelled, looked,
>>  and tasted unpleasant, and had an unpleasant mouth feel.
>>
>>  Also the recipe doesn't say what to do after one adds the eggs - are
>>  they cooked like an omelette, baked in the oven, or stirred in like a
>>  sauce?
>>
>>  Has anyone here had success with this dish? And if yes, what are your
>  > suggestions for success?

"Boil and core pears, pound with pepper, cumin, honey, passum,
liquamen, and a little oil. Add eggs to make a patina mixture,
sprinkle with pepper, and serve."

This is from the Flower and Rosenbaum translation of 1958...

I've never made the dish, but it seems reasonably straightforward. If
you're having textural problems, it may be either that you simply
don't like the dish the way it was originally intended, or maybe the
pears need to be cooked longer, or perhaps a different variety than
you're using is what was intended.

Flower and Rosenbaum have translated other patina recipes which
describe the cooking process in a little more detail than this one
does; a patina is a dish, generally earthenware or bronze, and the
cooking method seems to be to either by partially submerging the
patina in the ashes on the hearth or cooking-bench (Romans seem to
have used a sort of raised wood/charcoal grill table, with a gridiron
on top to be used as both a grill and a rangetop), or in some kind of
hot water bath, the way you might bake a modern cheesecake or
custard. The object is to achieve long, slow, steady heat, and while
there may have been some kind of cloche or cover involved, it seems
pretty likely that patinae cooked in the home were made without
benefit of an oven. It's probably a matter of experience with the
fire used, just as there are medieval and renaissance egg recipes
which call for eggs to be roasted in in the shell or in dishes, and
then there's the one which calls for eggs to be cracked into a well
made in a hot pile of coarse salt; clearly it is possible to cook
these dishes without burning them or curdling them, you just have to
figure out how.

For seasonings, I would be aggressive with pepper, less so with
cumin, a little heavy with the honey and passum (which is one of
those sweet wine syrups, but I forget which one), and as for
liquamen, it's surprisingly pleasant in dishes where you would expect
it to be awful. Just remember it is, in part, used in lieu of salt in
Roman cooking; that should be a guide; think of the little pinch of
salt you might put in pumpkin pie filling.

You might try cooking it in a bain-marie, or maybe an improvised one
made, say, from a large, deep skillet with some hot water, with a
smaller casserole dish set in it; the water should come pretty high
up the sides, but not high enough to slosh in if the water boils.

HTH,

Adamantius