Parthian Chicken: or, More Roman wine-soaked recipes!

We at A Book of Cookrye are now signing up for the Historical Food Fortnightly! Yes, every two weeks, those who are daft enough to sign up get to do a different challenge that involves dredging up really old recipes and finding out why they're forgotten. Will we do all of them? Eh... maybe. We'll see.
This fortnight's challenge is... roasts! And guess what we at A Book of Cookrye are about to do to some unfortunate animal! Yep, despite the utter disappointment that was our last ancient Roman wine casserole, we're making... an ancient Roman wine chicken! That's right, we're going to be baking a chicken in a massive pan of wine. It seems we never learn from our mistakes, and are doomed to forever bake things in excessive amounts of wine in the name of antiquity and those poorly translated plays we read in English class.

The Classical Cookbook, Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, 1996

Parthian Chicken ¾ c wine (we recommend red wine for a prettier colored sauce) 3 tbsp fish sauce ¼ tsp asafoetida powder 1 tbsp cilantro, finely chopped ½ tsp celery seed* 2 tsp caraway seeds 1 chicken Heat oven to 350°. In a casserole just big enough to snugly fit the chicken, mix all the ingredients. Dip both sides of the chicken in the sauce so it's coated all over, then put it in breast-side down. Cover and bake to an internal temperature of 160°. Uncover the chicken about halfway through to crisp the skin. Put black pepper on each serving (it makes more difference than you'd think) and spoon some of the pan sauce over it. *The cilantro and celery seed are our substitute for celery leaf, which the book recommends as a substitute for the lovage in the original recipe. adapted from de re Coquinaria (ca. AD 300) via The Classical Cookbook, 1996

We're trying to figure out why we're even trying another wine-soaked recipe after the last one tasted... like wine. Furthermore, this is right after one of our friends, well into his 20s, had his first glass of the stuff. His assessment: "It tastes like rotten grapes!" We at A Book of Cookrye can't dispute this. So why, since we don't really like wine anyway, are we doing this?

Oh boy. Rotten grapes.

On the bright side, this recipe has far less than a pint of wine. Also, we're not heating it up into a foul-smelling hot fish-wine concoction as we did the last time. Instead... we're adding these.

Be glad you can't smell this picture.

All right, let's back up and explain just what's in this picture. On the left, the stuff that looks like an unnerving pee sample is fish sauce. On the right, the little shaker with barely any English on it is asafoetida powder. And now, let's catch up those of you who don't know anything about the food of ancient Rome and didn't read the introduction of the cookbook we pulled this recipe from.
Fish sauce was used in place of salt in a lot of Roman recipes. It was, more or less, the same as the fish sauce used in Asian food today. It smells absolutely foul when you open the bottle because it is made of fermented fish. The chapter on "Unfamiliar Ingredients" promises us that it cooks down to a really nice, mellow flavor even though it smells terrible and tastes like salted roadkill when you open the bottle.
Asafoetida was used a lot as a spice in ancient Roman foods. If you say asafoetida out loud, you'll notice the word "fetid" is in the middle of it. This is not a coincidence. The smell more or less attacks you when you open the little shaker. For the record, we got this at an Indian supermarket. It is sold as a powder called hing ( for those who wish to procure it, the word rhymes with the first syllable of "ingress"). The store stocks it with the medicines, which is why we could not find it when we were patrolling the spices. Someone eventually came asking if we needed help after we'd been pacing back and forth on one aisle glaring at all the illegibly labeled shakers for about fifteen minutes. When we said we were looking for asafoetida for adding to a chicken recipe, he looked at us as if we had just asked if sufficiently large bulk purchases came with our choice of his children who have reached age of consent. Nevertheless, with great reluctance he led us to the medicine section and handed us the shaker seen above. We will warn those who wish to experiment with spices now sold in Indian medicine stores that this is not the time to shake them promiscuously all over your culinary perpetrations.

All right, that's the spiced wine ready to go.

As a last recipe note, the original recipe calls for some spice called lovage which no one sells around here. Purely for the heck of it (not that we can afford their prices anyway), we went to the hoity-toity gourmet grocery and asked if they sold it. We got this response:

This gif dedicated to Our Mom of Cookrye, who can recite the entire movie.

The chapter on Unfamiliar Ingredients says we can use celery leaves as a substitute for lovage. That may work in the UK (where the book was published), but here in glorious America they cut the leaves off of the celery prior to selling it. We would have had to buy three very large bunches of celery to get enough leaves to make up a spoonful. What does anyone do with that much celery? So we did like a lot of people do in the store: pinched one of the very few available leaves off of the celery, tasted it, and that is how we came up with our approximation of cilantro and a pinch of celery seed.

We at A Book of Cookrye have to tell you, this made the kitchen smell foul. The combination of fish sauce, asafoetida, and the surprisingly prevalent wine fumes added up to a foul mess that expanded into a rotting presence in the kitchen. It wasn't strong, but it was there. It expanded and took over the entire room. We worried it would go up the vent and travel through all the ducts.
Now, the original recipe quoted in the book makes it look like they're using a whole chicken. The modernized instructions use cut-up chicken pieces. We at A Book of Cookrye decided to go with a whole chicken for 2 reasons: it's so much easier to cut it up after it's cooked than before, and a roast whole chicken just looks so much more impressive on a platter even though all you do to cook it is shove it in the oven and leave it there.

The casserole came with a lid, but it wouldn't close over the chicken.

We were having flashbacks to the fish-wine pie as the oven began producing smells. The entire kitchen smelled like hot wine. Well, I say the whole kitchen smelled like hot wine and here I must admit I lied- I'd spilled some fish sauce on the counter and the stink it radiated had fouled up half the room. When part of the kitchen smells like rotten fish and the rest like hot wine, one loses faith in the recipe. We kept desperately opening the oven, hoping that it was starting to smell like chicken in there and it just hadn't spread to the rest of the kitchen yet.
Things got even worse as it baked. The asafoetida made itself known. Have you ever had anything good come of a recipe that made your kitchen smell like rotten fish, rotten grapes, and feet? At some point you start to think it's a good thing these recipes are now in the back of the library and not lurking in people's kitchens.

You know, it's funny. When one says they're making "chicken baked in spiced wine," it sounds so lovely. Spiced wine- that's some dainty thing with a cinnamon stick in the glass that gets handed around on BBC Christmas specials. You don't think it'll involve rotten fish and things from the back end of the Indian medicine counter. The stink this produced made us wish that, as in the days when this recipe was first published, the kitchen was a separate building. However, in the last 30 or so minutes, all the foul smells in the kitchen changed to the aroma of some damn good chicken.

Great. The chicken looks like it survived a flood.

You know what? This is pretty good. Like, really good. As in, not only did we save the leftovers, but we just put them on a plate instead of trying to hide the taste in a cheese casserole (not that you could with this recipe, anyway). It definitely tastes different than any other roast chicken we've ever made, but was so good we'd do it again. Besides, it's really easy.

All right, here's our Historical Food Fortnightly homework!
The Recipe: Parthian Chicken
The Date/Year and Region: AD 300ish, Rome
 How Did You Make It: See above! Or, in short, dumped the wine, fish sauce, and spices into a casserole, stirred it real quick, inserted the chicken, and baked.
Time to Complete: About 15 minutes plus baking time.
Total Cost: The chicken was already in the back of the freezer with the price tag worn off, and most of the spices were already buried in the cabinets. The cilantro was $1 for three bunches, the caraway was $1.25, and the fish sauce was 67¢ for the mini bottle.
How Successful Was It? A lot better than the smells in the kitchen led us to believe. We're keeping the recipe. It's nothing like anything we'd make today, but really fricken good. Using a casserole barely big enough to jam the chicken definitely made it better since more of the spiced wine soaked into it.
How Accurate Is It? Not bad for someone trying 1700-year-old recipes without a museum budget. We had no lovage, and since there aren't many spices in the recipe it probably made a noticeable difference. The original text quoted over the modern recipe is for a chicken baked whole rather than in pieces, so that's what we went with. However, we have no idea what a "Cuman dish" is supposed to be, so we have no idea if inserting the chicken into a casserole is the same as arranging it in a Cuman dish as directed in the original.

Kykeon, or It's not breakfast without wine

You know what? It's been a while since we brought out the recipes from the days when you could have naked people all over the town temple. Therefore, we at A Book of Cookrye are going to once again use a lot of wine and present... kykeon!
What's that? You've never heard of kykeon? I got a copy of The Classical Cookbook from the library, which has an extended history with each recipe, so prepare to learn more than you thought you wanted to know about it. Hey, it's described in the Iliad, so if it's good enough to march all those soldiers into an English class 3,000 years later, it's good enough for us!

The Classical Cookbook, Andrew Dalby & Sally Grainger, 1996

I'm sure Cato's recipe is good (most of the recipes I've done from this book are), but I wanted to taste what they were having in the Iliad. You know, wine and barley and all that. Therefore, let's open another bottle of wine because it's time to start the day!

The holy barley meal.

Enough wine to moisten it... I think.

Once again, since no one makes this anymore, there's no one to ask if I'm doing it right.

I had to add a lot of wine to get it to stop cooking onto the bottom of the pot.

And now, the cheese!

Behold, goat cheese. It took a lot of stirring to melt.

And as they said, the melted cheese thickened it a lot.

A lot.

So the porridge had turned into dough. Everyone messes up every now and then. I nevertheless tried it and... This stuff is good. I don't particularly like wine, I'm not all that into cheeses, and I don't care for porridge-stuff at all. But somehow putting together all of them added up to something amazing. And I have to add that I was full for hours.
The next day, I took out the rest of it to reheat. Since it looked like dough anyway, I decided now was as good a time as any to jump forward a few centuries in the history of bread. We're going from when people first discovered that grains are edible after boiling them soft to when they discovered you can turn your mush into flatbread! (However, because I cannot turn a pancake, we're also going to jump forward to when the oven came into being.)

All right, we're jumping forward thousands of years to the toaster oven.

Baked until crispy, we had this:

Not every attempt at bread ends up looking like misshapen raw hamburger patties.

And you know what? Cheese-wine flatbread is also amazing. It totally made up for making the kykeon way too thick to begin with. I would raise a toast to ancient cooks, but I used up all the wine making this.

A trip to ancient Rome involves most of a wine bottle

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we present a special treat! Do you like wine?

Apician Patina    Crust: 2⅓ c flour Cold water 2 tbsp olive oil Pinch salt    Filling: 1¾ lb. mixed meats* 4 eggs Pepper to taste 1 tsp. lovage† 1 tbsp. fish sauce‡ 1 c strong red wine 1 c raisin wine§ Peppercorns 3 oz pine nuts For the crust, mix the flour and salt. Add the oil and mix with your hands until it's evenly mixed together. Add the water a little at a time until it comes cleanly off the bowl. Wrap or put in a plastic bag and refrigerate at least an hour or two. Grind all the meats. If using giblets, boil them for several minutes. Beat the eggs with the oil. Add the pepper, fish sauce, and lovage. When mixed, stir in the wine. Add the meats and put over low to medium heat until warmed through. Divide the crust into however many layers of casserole you figure on having and roll it out. Grease a covered casserole and put a sheet of crust into it. Ladle some sauce on top, put in 3 or 4 peppercorns, and sprinkle with some of the pine kernels. Repeat this for all the layers and put a final sheet of crust on top of it all. Pierce the top with a fork. Bake for 30 minutes at 400°, covering the pan for the first 20. *the book suggests a mixture of chicken, fish, and "sow's paps" which I looked up and... people sold that? †Since no one uses that these days (at least not around here), the usual substitute is celery leaves. ‡This was used most places we would use salt. It smells foul out of the bottle, but when cooked goes really mellow and nice- just ignore the stink when pouring it out. §As you might expect when considering how many raisins you'd have to juice, this stuff is bloody expensive. I used more red wine since I already had the bottle out.

Apparently a "patina" is a dish of whatever sort of filling (sweet, savory, whatever) with eggs broken in to set it. I wonder if this has any relation to the word "patina" in its present meaning. Stranger things have happened. The word hearse comes from a long etymological chain starting at the Latin word for rake (the gardening tool, not the 17th-century dandy).
This comes out of this lovely book which I got out of the library. No, it's not out of special collections like these have been, but it was a nevertheless really fun surprise when I was going up and down the aisles waiting for traffic to let up so I could go home.

Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa writes a really eloquent introduction saying that Roman food does not resemble Italian food of today, and her husband wondering how they got along without tomatoes motivated her to begin researching what they ate. Furthermore (and I really like this sentiment), she did not seek to adapt recipes to modern taste but to present them as would have been served at the time.
As one would suspect when an empire takes up the entire Mediterranean coast and a lot of land reaching out in most directions, they did not eat really bland food and wait for the first shipment of tomatoes and chocolate. Which brings us to today's special ancient treat!
This recipe stood out to me when I was flipping through the book. Use of recognizable animal parts aside, the combination of ingredients seemed intriguing. Pine kernels? Wine? Fish sauce? I could see how it might add up to something tasty, but couldn't imagine what it would be like. Therefore, I had to find out. I figured of all the recipes in this book, this is one of the few that Apicius (the author of the Roman cookbook this came from) named after himself. You have really be proud of a creation to name it after yourself. I was so excited when I saw this, and was practically giddy when I finally could make it tonight.

Never made pie crust with oil before.

I've read that refrigerating pie crust for a while would make it roll out a lot easier and possibly make me revise my current method of rolling it into a sheet, attempting to lift it up, and sticking the little bits that come up into the pie pan until I've assembled a crust that lines it completely. That's why I made the crust an hour or so before I started the rest; it's got nothing to do with realizing we were out of eggs and running off to the store.

Stirring the flour and oil together yielded a few lumps that did not mix in. Setting aside the spoon and using my hand worked a lot better.

Behold, a lot less flour than I usually get all over the place!

That got wrapped in wax paper and shoved in the fridge to rest and do whatever it's supposed to do so it becomes easier to roll out. Meanwhile, the modern instructions said to boil whatever giblets I use "for several minutes." A suggested time or sign of doneness would have been nice.

Half a liver and two kidneys. Yay?

 All right, a brief detour. I'm not going to launch into an overview of Roman cuisine, but I will say that an awful lot of the recipes call for various animal organs. I don't mean they say things like "the organs will do if the meat cannot be used," they specify which should be used where. Relatively recent (as in 20 years or so) cookbooks still suggest using "variety meats" or "sweetbreads" to  stretch your budget. So I figured this recipe should be relatively easy to buy the meat for. Also, since I was already venturing into foods unknown, I figured I ought to really go for it and therefore use something besides the same ground meat that goes into everything.

Have you tried to buy liver lately? I'm going to guess no because none of the supermarkets sold any recognizable animal parts.

I blame recipes like this.

I even went to the really fancy one specializing in hard-to-find ingredients for fancy foods that has not just an in-house meat counter but a fricken butcher shop. There were none in the display, but maybe they have them in the back and were planning to, oh I don't know, grind them into sausages or something.

Me: "Do you have kidneys?"
"No, sorry."
(Being several stores into my search, I'm getting a bit astonished at no one having any, so this slips out): "What? Then who does?"
"I could special-order it for you..."

I'm not opposed to special-ordering things I really need, but I am not going to pay shipping and surcharges on a kidney.
Going to the Asian store, I did in fact find all manner of animal organs in the meat case, but they were shrink-wrapped into very large trays and the guys behind the counter would not divide any of them for me. And what if it turns out I don't like pig uteruses? What'll I do with the rest of the 1½ pounds of them?  So I ended up sticking to things I've heard of being used- they do steak and kidney pie in England, don't they? And... er, I've heard liver used to be common here? Therefore, I came home with those two.
By the way, I briefly considered taking a picture just to show I'm not making pig uteruses up but decided I did not want to be the person in the fricken grocery taking pictures of the shelves. However, for animals that have such large litters, they were really small.

Oh... brother.

But that aside, I'm trying to get over squeamishness over eating recognizeable animal parts, and figured grinding and seasoning the hell out of them was a good place to start. The last time I voluntarily ate liver was when I had my wisdom teeth yanked. The ensuing weeks prominently featured milk, Ovaltine, liver, and a blender.
I'm going to make a suggestion for anyone doing recipes involving turning whole pieces of fish into minced or ground fish. (Yes, I added fish. I kind of liked the "throw in a little bit of all the meat you'd have waiting to be used" aspect of this recipe so I pretended I had a lot of little meat pieces lying around from other things I'd made.) Do not do said mincing or grinding at the start. You will have raw fish radiating fish stink into the kitchen until you finally get around to using it. Just start cooking and don't even get the fish out of the refrigerator until it's time to use it.

Meanwhile, I couldn't get lovage so I used the suggested substitution of celery leaves. My sister-in-law got some celery for dinner a day ago and I snapped the leaves off and jammed them into a water glass before she used it.

Y'know, this looks like it'd have made a really good omelet.

Like the last time I made a meat casserole pie thing, I didn't realize how much a certain ingredient was used to excess until I measured it out. The original recipe doesn't specify an amount, but Ms. Giacosa thinks I should put this much in:

I will admit that this is the only substantial change I made to the modern recipe: it calls for one cup each of raisin wine and red wine. As logically follows from considering how many raisins one must use to make a bottle of it, raisin wine is really expensive. So I used red wine for the whole thing. I wasn't thrown by using this much of it at first. Another Roman recipe I've liked enough to repeat is chicken stewed in a covered pan of spiced wine. So I calmly dumped in the wine. It turned the eggs purple.

But this is where I start to get worried about the fate of my patina. The next step in the modern instructions was to add the meat and heat it up. It made sense- I figured this was to start the meat cooking so that it comes out of the oven fully cooked and safe to eat. However, I had made this little analysis before putting a pan of eggs, fish, and wine on the stove to heat. Have I mentioned the windows in the kitchen don't open?

As my cousin might say, "Who ate it before we did?"

At this point, I was beginning to fear for this creation. I felt strangely isolated. It's one thing to make food completely foreign to you- you can find books everywhere about it with pictures and detailed instructions to reassure you every time you wonder "Is it supposed to look/smell/taste like that?". But today we're making things that aren't just foreign by location but foreign by time. The one picture for this recipe (that was supposed to show the pan to use) is missing and there's no one I can ask "Does it usually look like this at this point?" So I proceeded on with nothing but one book to guide me through things the likes of which I've never made before which was too much for the one vent over the stove to handle.

It went from interestingly purple to sad and grayish too.

I'd figured the crust layers would soak up the excess liquid and be sort of like a pot pie, but I had my doubts upon seeing how runny this was. Look at that layer of crust sort of barely floating there:

Sadly for my ancient Roman fantasies, it looked terrible, and the pine kernels I was meant to sprinkle over it made it kind of unnerving. It looked like something was breeding in the fish wine.

Incidentally, refrigerating crust makes a lot more difference than I thought. I went from barely being able to lift a two-inch piece off the counter to dangling the dough over my hand like so:

That's my hand and about 6 inches of air between the bottom edge and the countertop.

Despite the unnerving smells in the kitchen, I thought the crust-making was absolutely spiffy. I even did the fork-piercing of the top layer while it was still on the countertop and could stretch it to expand the holes without it ripping!

However, my brief period of "Yay this works!" happiness ended when I had to put the top layer on and then get the whole into the oven. The recipe calls for 30 minutes at 400°, but being somewhere between cautious and paranoid about raw meat, I let it bake a lot longer and only removed it when a meat thermometer said the chicken (which has the highest cooking temperature of everything in there) was done.
The wine gravy had boiled up onto the top crust and dried there. Usually it's appetizing when all the lovely things in a casserole have welled up through the top and left deposits of tastiness on it, but somehow this looked...off.

Food fit for a Caesar?

I tentatively stuck a spoon into the edge and tried it. It tasted like solid wine. Even the fish (whose smell still hadn't left the kitchen from making this) wasn't perceptible. Maybe the raisin wine which is supposedly sweeter would have made a difference. Maybe, as my mom suggested, it would have tasted different to people who drank wine like we do water. But I'm more inclined to think that Ms. Giacosa got the measurements wrong. It doesn't make sense to add any of the other seasonings if you're going to put in so much wine you can't taste any of them. It was near-inedible to anyone who doesn't really love wine.

And the pine kernels still look... wrong.

And so, this was discreetly consigned to the trash. However, I'm still up for trying it with less wine. Also without the fish until I get the amounts right- I don't want that smell in the kitchen unless the finished food is worth putting up with it.

I then made this in an attempt to cover up the smell of fish.