[Sca-cooks] roman feast

euriol euriol at ptd.net
Fri Mar 21 05:29:13 PDT 2008


No apologies are necessary and I know you well enough that you would never
try to be mean. :)

I will confess that I did use sweet peas (again, lack of knowledge way back
then) for that particular feast. However, many of the varieties of fruits &
vegetables we have available to us now are modern hybrids. Do we refrain
from attempting something just because we do not have access to the
"period" variant? For example, I rarely see Pippins in the grocery store,
but see a lot of modern varieties of apples. Would the Romans have used
their variety of pea in a fresh state before it was dried?

Euriol

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:32:36 -0700, Lilinah <lilinah at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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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