Tiropatina (Milk-and-Honey Custard)

History

This milk-and-honey custard survives in Book VII of the collection known as Apicius (De re coquinaria), the anonymous Late-Antique compilation that carries the name of the 1st-century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius rather than his authored work. The dish sits among the book's homely sweets, and its name is a small puzzle: it joins the Greek tyros ('cheese') to patina (the shallow pan it set in), yet it contains no cheese. The method is spare in the usual way of this text: milk is sweetened with honey — the Roman sweetener, since cane sugar was unknown — then beaten with eggs, five to a sextarius (a pint) or three to a half, strained, and cooked gently in an earthen patina until it sets. It is finished, tellingly, with a scatter of pepper, the sweet-savoury pairing that runs through Roman cooking. Modern cooks and food writers routinely call it an ancestor of custard, crème caramel, or cheesecake; the honest point is a real technical kinship — a sweetened egg-and-milk mixture set by gentle heat — rather than an unbroken proven descent, and the closeness of its egg-to-milk ratio to today's custards is what earns the comparison.

Ingredients

• milk
• honey
• eggs
• pepper

Instructions

1. Temper milk with honey, as for milk-puddings.
2. Beat in five eggs per sextarius of milk (three per hemina) to form one smooth body.
3. Strain into a Cuman dish and cook over a slow fire until set.
4. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.