Apician Patina (Layered Meat, Fish and Pastry)

History

This recipe survives in the collection known as Apicius, De re coquinaria — a later anonymous compilation (c. 4th–5th c. CE) that carries the name of the 1st-century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius rather than his demonstrable work. It is one of the dishes the text itself marks as his: patinam Apicianam, a patina made 'in the manner of Apicius'. A patina was first a piece of kitchen equipment — a round, shallow earthenware or bronze dish — and the name passed to the food set in it. Why attach Apicius's name at all? Because 'Apicius' had become the byword for the gourmet, remembered in ancient anecdote for extravagant, even ruinous dining; a dish this piled-up — pieces of cooked sow's udder, fish fillets, chicken, and figpeckers or cooked thrush breasts, chopped and bound with raw egg, sauced with pepper, lovage, the fish sauce liquamen, wine and sweet passum, thickened with starch, then layered in the pan between pastry sheets with whole peppercorns and pine nuts and capped with a pierced top sheet — wears the label 'Apician' as a mark of luxury, not as a signature traceable to the man. The sweet passum set against the liquamen is ordinary Roman taste rather than a quirk, and the udder, figpeckers and imported pepper mark it as affluent kitchen work, not everyday fare. Its stacked lagana have made it a favourite candidate for an ancestor of lasagne, though that link is loosely drawn and the sheets were closer to unleavened bread than to pasta. Like the rest of the corpus the recipe gives neither quantities nor times.

Ingredients

• sow's udder (sumen)
• fish flesh
• chicken flesh
• figpeckers (ficedulae, small birds)
• thrush breasts
• eggs
• oil
• pepper
• lovage
• liquamen (Roman fermented fish sauce)
• wine
• passum (raisin wine)
• wheat starch (amulum)
• pine nuts
• pasta sheets (lagana / diploides)

Instructions

1. Chop cooked sow's udder, fish, chicken and thrush breasts finely; keep figpeckers whole.
2. Make a sauce of pepper and lovage with liquamen, wine and passum; thicken with starch; bind meats with beaten eggs and boil in it.
3. Ladle in layers into a pan with peppercorns and pine nuts, a pasta sheet under each layer.
4. For each sheet add a ladleful of filling; pierce a top sheet and lay it on top.
5. Sprinkle pepper and serve; use the proper bronze pan.