Patina of Pears

History

The pear patina survives in Book IV of the collection known as Apicius, the book headed *Pandecter*, the "many-ingredients" miscellany, among its patinae of fish, vegetables and fruit. A *patina* is both the shallow pan the dish was baked in and the baked egg dish itself, something between a soufflé and a frittata, and the book preserves dozens of them.

The method is characteristically terse and gives no quantities at all. Boil the pears and core them, then pound them with pepper, cumin, honey, *passum* — raisin wine — *liquamen*, the fermented fish sauce, and a little oil. Add eggs, make it into a patina, strew pepper over the top and serve. That is the whole recipe.

The jolt for a modern reader is the fish sauce in a dessert, but sweetness played against salt is the ordinary house style of this corpus rather than a quirk of this one dish, and the pear patina has become one of the more approachable Roman recipes to attempt.

Two things here we could not stand behind. An earlier version of this note quoted a modern cook on the fish-sauce surprise; we could not check the words against her book, so they have been removed. It also described the dish's place in the Roman dessert course and its standing as affluent rather than everyday fare, and gave an account of the compilation's authorship. Those we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• pears
• pepper
• cumin
• honey
• passum (raisin wine)
• liquamen (Roman fermented fish sauce)
• olive oil
• eggs

Instructions

1. Pound boiled, cored pears with pepper, cumin, honey, passum, liquamen and a little oil.
2. Beat in eggs and set as a patina custard.
3. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.