Numidian Chicken

Origin: Rome, Italy

Source: Apicius, 400

History

Pullum Numidicum, "chicken in the Numidian manner," is one of a run of geographically labelled fowl dishes in Book VI of the collection known as Apicius, sitting beside preparations such as Pullum Parthicum, "Parthian chicken." Numidia was an ancient Berber kingdom of northwest Africa, covering the north of modern Algeria and reaching into Tunisia and Libya; Rome fought its king Jugurtha late in the second century BCE and absorbed the territory over the decades that followed. The same region lent its name to the guinea fowl, whose modern genus Numida is simply Latin for "North African"; the recipe itself, however, calls for ordinary domestic chicken, so "Numidicum" reads as a style label evoking that North-African world rather than a literal bird. The chicken is parboiled, seasoned with pepper and laser, and roasted, then finished in a pounded sauce of pepper, cumin, coriander seed, rue, dates and pine nuts, sharpened with vinegar and honey and bound with liquamen, oil and a little starch. That sweet-savoury play of dates, honey and vinegar is thoroughly Roman, and every ingredient is Old-World; the laser stands in for the prized silphium of Cyrene, which was harvested to scarcity, with costly Persian asafoetida as its substitute. The surviving book is a late compilation, perhaps of the fourth or fifth century CE, that carries the name of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a first-century gourmet, though it was almost certainly not written by him. Modern cooks note the dish's kinship with later Maghrebi sweet-savoury cooking, an appealing resonance rather than a demonstrated line of descent.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Boil the chicken, wash it, sprinkle with laser and pepper, and roast.
  2. Pound pepper, cumin, coriander seed, laser root, rue, date and pine nuts; temper with vinegar, honey, liquamen and oil.
  3. Boil, thicken with wheat starch, pour over the chicken, and finish with pepper.

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