Wild Boar, Dressed and Roasted

History

Book VIII of the collection known as Apicius — the book of quadrupeds — opens with wild boar (aper), and this is its first recipe: the beast is sponged clean, rubbed with salt and roasted cumin and left overnight, roasted in the oven the following day, then finished with a pour of ground pepper, honey, liquamen, caroenum and passum. That closing sauce is textbook Roman taste, setting the everyday fermented fish sauce liquamen against the sweetness of honey and reduced grape musts (caroenum, passum). Boar was a centerpiece of elite Roman dining, and the surviving book gives it a chapter of some ten recipes. Its rise as a whole-roasted showpiece was recent enough to be remembered: Pliny records that the father of Publius Servilius Rullus first served a boar whole at his banquets, where earlier a boar had been cut into three parts and only the middle served, under the name of boar's loin; by Pliny's own day two or three boars might open a dinner merely as the first course. The literary apex is Petronius's Trimalchio, whose roast boar is carried in wearing a freedman's cap, dates slung from its tusks, and is slit open so that a flock of thrushes bursts out — satire of nouveau-riche excess, not a record of how the dish was actually cooked. As always the book bears the name of the 1st-century gourmet Apicius yet is a later anonymous compilation, not his authored work.

Ingredients

• wild boar
• salt
• roasted cumin
• ground pepper
• honey
• liquamen (Roman fermented fish sauce, aka garum)
• caroenum (reduced sweet grape must)
• passum (raisin wine)

Instructions

1. Sponge the boar clean, rub with salt and roasted cumin, and let it rest overnight.
2. The following day, roast it in the oven.
3. Once cooked, dress it with a sauce of ground pepper, honey, liquamen, caroenum, and passum.