[Sca-cooks] roman feast

Lilinah lilinah at earthlink.net
Thu Mar 20 19:32:36 PDT 2008


Euriol wrote:
>The first feast I ever worked on I did a course of recipes based out of
>Apicius. The most frequent comment I had was that the food seemed so
>ordinary. If I recall the menu I did for the course it was:
>
>Herbed Peas
>Fried Carrots
>Chicken in Cream Sauce over Pasta
>Cucumber Salad
>Red Snapper with Red Wine Sauce
>Pinenut Custard

And i testily responded:
>Peas? Barely period for the 16th C.

Let me clarify and apologize. I've been something of a cranky pants lately :-(

Peas... i jumped to the conclusion that by "peas" you meant fresh, 
green, peas-in-the-pod type peas, which are indeed a 16th century 
development. Of course, dried peas certainly existed for a loooong 
time, and *that* is what the Romans ate. I just took a narrow view of 
the word. Sorry.

Grocock and Grainger note on p. 210 that the peas (pisam) used would 
be dried and probably "marrowfat peas" which when well cooked form a 
thick peas-pudding consistency and can be beaten smooth. Marrowfat 
peas, something of an Englishism (as opposed to an Americanism), are 
mature peas that have been allowed to dry out naturally in the field.

I could have been more expansive and sounded less mean...

Hey, Euriol, i wasn't really feeling mean, and i hope you know i 
didn't mean to sound so mean.

(trying to find a golden mean...)
--
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

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



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