[Sca-cooks] roman feast

[Lilinah]

OK, this has been sitting in my out box for quite some time, but i 
decided to send it anyway.

cailte wrote:
>yeah, i can see a lot of spin on the ingredients and how
>they are cooked (in both senses of the word) in the
>vehling.  but it's fascinating reading.
>
>except for the cumin.  never did like cumin.  boy, did i
>transplant to the wrong part of the country!

Have you tried pan roasting/dry frying whole cumin seeds before 
grinding them? While i generally have no problem with cumin, i find 
it has a much more agreeable flavor after it has been "roasted". 
(there has got to be a better word... Adamantius? anyone?)

When i made the Apician Peach Patina with Cumin Sauce (Cuminatum in 
Patina de Persicis : Patina of Peaches in Cumin Sauce [Apicius, Book 
IV, Chapter II, Recipe 34 in F&R]) for my Greco-Roman feast, i 
roasted the cumin seeds before making the dish (peaches in a sauce of 
lovage, parsley, mint, cumin, black pepper, honey, fish sauce, wine 
vinegar). The peaches were absolutely superb and the dish was 
fabulously yummy, as weird as the ingredients may sound to some. I 
had no precedent for this in Roman cooking and i confess i did it 
only to improve the flavor of the dish.

The recipes doesn't specify exactly which cumin sauce to use. There 
are quite a few in the book. Besides cumin, nearly all include black 
pepper, fish sauce, and wine vinegar. Most include mint, lovage, 
parsley, rue, and honey. And a few include bay leaf, malabathrum, 
coriander, or old wine.

Faas in his book "Around the Roman Table" included the Peach Patina 
recipe and one of many cumin sauces (p. 242), but did not bother to 
"redact" the recipe, merely commenting, "This is a curious recipe. 
Boiled peaches in perfumed olive oil sounds fine - but with cumin 
sauce? A challenge to the chef."

Side Bar:
According to Gernot Katzer's terrific spice pages, 
Malabathrum/malabathron is the leaf of Cinnamomum tamala and 
Cinnamomum tejapata, and also called tejpat and Indian bay-leaf
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Cinn_tam.html
Unfortunately, in my haunting of the many local Indian/Pakistani 
markets, all i've found is that ordinary bay leaves are sold as 
tejpat :-(

Has anyone actually found *real* tejpat?

Anyway, back to cumin and roasted spices:
In "Cooking Apicius", Sally Grainger's companion book to her husband, 
Christopher Grocock's book "Apicis" (long title snipped but recently 
much mentioned on this list), she recommends roasting various spice 
seeds, although not peppercorns (p. 21-22). She doesn't give a 
clearly Roman reason, however. She says, "With the exception of 
peppercorn, spices benefit from the release of their fragrance by 
roasting before they are ground."

In any case, i suggest giving a try to dry roasting the whole cumin 
seeds before grinding them and seeing if it makes cumin more 
palatable to you.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilinah