Spiced Wine Marvel (Conditum Paradoxum)

History

Conditum paradoxum opens the collection known as Apicius, a late-antique compilation of roughly the fourth or fifth century AD that gathers Roman recipes under the name of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a first-century gourmet whose name became a byword for fine living; the surviving book was almost certainly not written by him, and the link to the man cannot be proven. It belongs to the conditum family, the spiced wines of Roman and later Byzantine tables, and its epithet paradoxum, from the Greek for 'contrary to expectation,' is rendered by translators variously, Wikipedia giving 'surprise spiced wine.' Spiced and honeyed wines were central to Roman drinking: mulsum, wine sweetened with honey, was the customary aperitif poured at the start of a formal meal, prized by the elite and credited with medicinal virtue. The method is the recipe's signature. Fifteen pounds of honey are boiled down into wine over a low fire, checked with a splash of wine whenever it threatens to boil over, then cooled and reheated a second and third time and skimmed the next day, before pepper, mastic (the piney resin of Chios), bay leaf, saffron, and wine-softened dates are ground in and eighteen sextarii of smooth wine poured over. Every ingredient is Old-World and period-correct; pepper and mastic were costly imports that marked a wealthy household. Such conditum bases were meant to keep and travel, the very next recipe in the book being a portable traveler's version, so the concentrated, honey-heavy result was as much a storable syrup as a wine.

Ingredients

• pounds (pondo) honey
• sextarii wine
• ounces pepper
• scruples mastic (resin)
• dram bay leaf (folium/malabathrum)
• dram saffron
• date stones
• dates
• sextarii smooth wine

Instructions

1. Put 15 pounds of honey into a bronze vessel over 2 sextarii of wine, and cook the honey down into the wine over a low fire of dry wood, stirring with a stick.
2. If it boils over, restrain it with a splash of wine; it also subsides when taken off the fire. Let it cool, then relight; repeat a second and third time.
3. Take it from the hearth and skim it the following day.
4. Add 4 oz pepper, 3 scruples ground mastic, a dram each of bay leaf and saffron, five roasted date stones, and dates softened in wine, grinding to a smooth paste.
5. Pour on 18 sextarii of smooth wine and finish over live coals until it boils.