Seafood Minutal (Marine Fricassee)

Origin: Rome, Italy

Source: Apicius, 400

History

Minutal marinum belongs to a whole Roman dish-family, the minutalia, whose defining trait is announced in the name itself: Latin minutus, "made small," from minuere, "to lessen or mince." These are finely cut ragouts or fricassees, and the cookbook known as Apicius gathers them into a chapter of its fourth book, the minced dishes of fish and forcemeat of which this marine version is one. The method is consistent across the family: chopped protein and aromatics are simmered in liquid, then bound near the end by crumbling in tracta, dried disks of flour dough that dissolve to thicken the sauce and served as the Roman kitchen's everyday starch thickener. Here the protein is drawn from the sea: fish poached with leeks and coriander, small fish forcemeat balls, flaked cooked fish, and sea anemones (urticae marinae, literally "sea nettles"), all seasoned with pepper, lovage, and oregano and moistened with liquamen, the fermented fish sauce that underlies most of the corpus. Modern translators render minutal variously as "ragout" or "fricassee," a stew of small pieces. Every ingredient is Old-World and period-correct, with no New-World foods. The surviving book is a late anonymous compilation, likely fourth or fifth century, arranged in ten Greek-titled books and attached to the name of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a first-century gourmet whose authorship of the text cannot be demonstrated.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Put fish in a pot with liquamen, oil, wine and stock.
  2. Finely chop headed leeks and coriander; make small fish forcemeat-balls; pluck apart cooked fish flesh; add well-washed sea nettles.
  3. When all is cooked, grind pepper, lovage and oregano, moisten with liquamen and the dish's own juices, and pour into the pot.
  4. When it boils, crumble in tracta to thicken, bind and stir. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.

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