Laser Sauce (Laseratum)

History

The sauce called Laseratum is built around laser, the resin of silphium, one of antiquity's most prized seasonings and medicines. Silphium grew only in the wild around Cyrene in North Africa, resisted cultivation, and its trade made that city one of the Mediterranean's wealthiest. Valued for food, perfume, medicine and as a contraceptive, it was over-harvested and over-grazed until it vanished; Pliny the Elder claimed a single surviving stalk was sent as a curiosity to the Emperor Nero, and silphium is often described as the first recorded species extinction in history, though its cause is debated — over-harvesting and over-grazing in some accounts, climatic drying and desertification of its narrow Cyrenaican range in others. The recipe itself records that loss: it opens with laser Cyrenaicum vel Parthicum — Cyrenaic OR Parthian laser — the Parthian kind being asafoetida (a Ferula resin), the cheaper Persian substitute Romans adopted once true silphium became scarce, despite its inferior, sulphurous smell. Apicius directs the cook to dissolve the resin warm in vinegar and liquamen, the ordinary Roman fish sauce, or to compound it with pepper, parsley, dried mint, honey and vinegar — the sweet-sour balance typical of Roman taste; a second version layers costly Eastern aromatics such as spikenard, malabathrum and costmary. Because the surviving collection is a later anonymous compilation carrying the Apicius name rather than his own work, it cannot tell us he devised this sauce, but it preserves a flavour the Roman world was in the very act of losing.

Ingredients

• laser, Cyrenaic or Parthian (silphium/asafoetida)
• vinegar
• liquamen (fermented fish sauce)
• pepper
• parsley
• dried mint
• laser root
• caraway, dill, silphium, bay leaf, malabathrum, spikenard, a little costmary
• honey

Instructions

1. Dissolve Cyrenaic or Parthian laser (silphium resin) in a little warm liquid tempered with vinegar and liquamen.
2. Or grind pepper, parsley, dried mint, and laser root with honey, vinegar, and liquamen.
3. Or make a fuller version with pepper, caraway, dill, parsley, dried mint, silphium, bay leaf, malabathrum, spikenard, and a little costmary, blended with honey, vinegar, and liquamen.