Garden Suckling Pig

History

The dish called porcellum hortolanum — the 'gardener's suckling pig' — survives only in the collection known as Apicius, the late-antique compilation (c. 4th–5th c. CE) that carries the name of the 1st-c. gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius but was almost certainly not written by him. It is among the most elaborate recipes in the book: a whole piglet is boned out through the throat 'in the manner of a wineskin' and packed with a garden's worth of fillings — chicken forcemeat, thrushes and figpeckers, small Lucanian sausages, pitted dates, bulbs, shelled snails, mallow, beet, leek and celery, coriander, pine nuts, whole pepper, and fifteen eggs bound with peppered liquamen — then sewn up, par-hardened, roasted in the oven, and served split down the back under a sauce of pepper, rue, fish sauce (liquamen), passum and honey thickened with starch. The fermented fish sauce is ordinary Roman seasoning rather than an exotic flourish, and the honey-and-passum dressing reflects the sweet-savoury house style of the corpus, not a quirk of this dish. As an ostentatious stuffed showpiece it belongs to a recognised Roman banquet tradition: the porcus Troianus, or 'Trojan pig,' a hog made pregnant with other animals 'as the Trojan horse was pregnant with armed men,' which the moralist Titius attacked as a symptom of his luxurious age (reported by Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.13.13). Petronius stages the same theatre in the Satyricon, where Trimalchio's apparently un-gutted pig is slashed open at the table to spill a cascade of sausages and blood puddings to applause. Whether Apicius's hortolanus pig is literally a porcus Troianus is a modern identification rather than the text's own label — the recipe names no Troy. Like most of the collection, it documents affluent dining and its taste for spectacle, not the everyday Roman table.

Ingredients

• suckling pig
• forcemeat chicken
• thrushes
• figpeckers
• forcemeat balls
• Lucanian sausages
• dates
• onions/bulbs
• snails
• mallows
• beets
• leeks
• celery
• cabbage sprouts
• coriander
• whole peppercorns
• pine nuts
• eggs
• peppered liquamen
• rue
• passum (raisin wine)
• honey
• oil
• wheat starch

Instructions

1. Bone the pig through the gullet like a wineskin.
2. Fill it with forcemeat chicken, thrushes, figpeckers, forcemeat balls of its own flesh, Lucanian sausages, pitted dates, onions, shelled snails, mallows, beets, leeks, celery, boiled cabbage sprouts, coriander, whole peppercorns, and pine nuts; pour over fifteen eggs and peppered liquamen, then add beaten eggs.
3. Sew it up, brown it, and roast in the oven; then split it along the back.
4. Make the sauce: grind pepper, rue, liquamen, passum, honey, and a little oil; boil and thicken with wheat starch, and pour over the pig.