A Digestive Spiced Honey (So Lettuce Does No Harm)

History

This is not a dish so much as a remedy eaten at the table: a warming electuary of cumin, ginger, fresh rue, fat dates, pepper and honey, the cumin first steeped in vinegar and then all bound with honey; a half-spoonful is taken with vinegar and a little liquamen, or plain after dinner. It survives in the household-preparations book (Book I, the "Careful Housekeeper") of the collection known as Apicius — a later, anonymous compilation that carries the 1st-century gourmet's name rather than his authorship. Its logic is Galenic. Roman and Greek physicians sorted every food as hot, cold, wet or dry, mapped to the body's humours, and treated eating as a way to keep them balanced. Lettuce was reckoned cold and moist — cooling; Galen recorded that in old age lettuce eaten in the evening was his only remedy against insomnia. That same cold nature was thought to burden the stomach and breed wind (the recipe's inflatio), so a pungent, heating spiced honey was the counter-dose. Martial teases the fashion by which lettuce, which once closed a meal, had migrated to its start; and the collection answers with this purée "to prevent the harmful effects of lettuce." The sweet-against-sour of honey and vinegar is ordinary Roman taste, and garum here is everyday seasoning, not exotic flourish.

Ingredients

• ounces cumin (Ethiopian, Syrian, or Libyan)
• ounce ginger
• ounce fresh rue
• scruples plump dates
• ounce pepper
• ounces honey
• vinegar
• liquamen (fermented fish sauce)

Instructions

1. Measure cumin 2 oz, ginger 1 oz, fresh rue 1 oz, plump dates 12 scruples, pepper 1 oz, honey 9 oz; use Ethiopian, Syrian, or Libyan cumin.
2. Pound the cumin and soak it in vinegar; when dried, bind everything with the honey.
3. When needed, mix half a spoonful with vinegar and a little liquamen, or take half a spoonful after dinner.