‘Corvinus? What the hell are -?’ Then he saw Perilla, and swallowed. Yeah, well, I knew the feeling.
‘How much are you getting?’ I said.
‘Just the usual agent’s fee, consul. Ten per cent of the gate. But it’s a public service. You heard old Titus Luscius downstairs the other day, his wife feeds him on beans four days out of five, and the fifth it’s chitterlings. I just thought –’
The plump woman turned round again. ‘If you two don’t shut up,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you bloody chitterlings myself.’
‘Right. Right.’ I let go of Gabba’s arm. ‘Sorry, lady.’
‘Sauce!’
‘Sauce,’ Meton said. ‘Well, ladies, if you want to raise everyday braised meats like these’ - he indicated the cutlets on the skillet sitting on top of the charcoal stove in front of him - ‘right into the dinner-party bracket you can’t do better than a fish pickle sauce. Here it is, very simple, I made it earlier. Grind the herbs and spice very finely, that’s thyme, caraway, lovage and pepper, a good three-fingersful pinch of each. Me, I’d go for black peppercorns every time, but use white if you prefer a milder taste. Oh, and one small tip here: if you’re on a very tight budget, or you want something more traditional, try using dried myrtle berries. They’re not the same, but they’re a lot cheaper, and a few juniper berries mixed in work wonders where flavour’s concerned, especially with stronger meats such as goat, wild boar or venison, when I’d add them anyway. Lovage - well, I’d use the seeds here myself for preference, but I’ve nothing against the leaves, fresh or dried, or even the root, if you must. And if you can’t get lovage for any reason, or again if you prefer something a little more subtle, then use celery, the seeds or the leaves, not the stems. Once you’ve done the business with the mortar and pestle, add the result to a mixture of finely-chopped shallots and dates - again for you budget-watchers figs are a good alternative, but the taste’ll be quite different - then stir in the fish pickle, Spanish if you can find it and afford it, naturally, but the factories in Pompeii are producing some pretty good stuff these days, so I’d give that a try if you see it in your local market. If you’re in doubt I’d go for the mackerel-based version, the average quality tends to be higher, although anchovy pickle has a lot to be said for it if you know your source. Blend with some honey, a little of the meat stock and some olive oil, pour over the cutlets half way through the cooking time - here we go - and –’
– at which point, across the crowded room, our eyes met and held.
‘Ah,’ Meton said.
And dried.
Silence. Then three dozen other pairs of hostile eyes swivelled in my direction...
‘But, Marcus, he was talking! Really talking, not his usual monosyllabic grunt-and-mumble.’ Perilla steadied herself against the carriage’s windowsill as Lysias hit yet another pothole. ‘And holding the entire audience spellbound. Meton was! Don’t you find that interesting?’
‘Personally, lady, I found it frightening. They’d’ve lynched us if we hadn’t got out in time.’ I wasn’t exaggerating, either: when Meton had corpsed, and it became obvious why, the audience had turned distinctly nasty. Forget your stories of German Frauen wading into battle tooth and nail beside their husbands, a crowd of Latin matrons with their blood up’ll have them beat six ways from nothing every time, and that plump woman had had fists the size of hams. ‘It just shows you, where food’s concerned you don’t argue. Especially with a roomful of housewives caught in compositio interrupta.’
‘Well, I think Gabba was right. Meton’s performing a public service and we should encourage him. Not just live demonstrations, either: there must be a huge market out there for cookery books. If we could get him to write some of his recipes down and hire a few copyists –’
Gods! ‘Read my lips, lady,’ I said. ‘We’d be unleashing a monster. The world is not yet ready for a celebrity chef.’
She smiled and ducked her head. ‘Perhaps just Castrimoenium, then.’
‘Yeah.’ I settled back into the cushions. ‘I’ll compromise on that.’
We drove home.
_______________
Author’s Note
A brief word, for those who might be interested, on Roman cookery.
The foremost extant cookery book is the De Re Coquinaria - which just means ‘On Cookery’ - by Apicius. There are three historical candidates for authorship spanning just over a hundred and fifty years, between the times of Julius Caesar and the Emperor Trajan, although it’s more than likely that no single one of them, if any at all, was actually responsible for the complete work as we have it (the source manuscript is late fourth/early fifth century AD, when ‘Apicius’ was long established as the gastronome par excellence). What is clear, though, is that all three took their food very seriously indeed, especially the second, Marcus Gavius Apicius: Seneca and the scholiast on Juvenal mention the fact that he set down in writing a collection of his favourite recipes, Athenaeus tells the story of how he made a special voyage to Libya to compare the vaunted Libyan prawns in size to those of Campanian Minturnae (they came nowhere near, so he sailed back without landing) and both Martial and Juvenal use him as the subject of satirical epigrams (he is supposed to have spent sixty million sesterces on his stomach, then committed suicide because he reckoned the ten million he had left was insufficient to keep body and soul decently together). Interestingly enough, Tacitus also links his name - as a notorious debauchee - with the young Sejanus. Quite a character, obviously.
There are translations available. The one on my reference shelf (which may well be out of print, but is excellent if you can find a copy) is ‘The Roman Cookery of Apicius, Translated and Adapted for the Modern Kitchen’, by John Edwards (Century, 1984), and is where Meton’s recipe for fish pickle sauce is taken from (try it! For the fish pickle itself, Indonesian nam pla or anchovy sauce are good modern equivalents). Also, English Heritage do a very nice little book called ‘Roman Cookery: Recipes and History’ by Jane Renfrew, which may be more accessible (the foreword is by Lloyd Grossman). You might even like to stage a proper Roman dinner party, using mattresses for the three couches and a tablecloth spread on the floor, although if so it will hopefully not involve an incident such as occurred at one of ours when the Roman mantle made by a female guest from some old curtains embarrassingly and progressively disintegrated over the course of the evening...
My thanks, especially, to Harry Hine of the School of Classics at St Andrews University, and to his colleague Jill Harries, for their help with the Julian law. Any mistakes I’ve made over the interpretation of its terms and application are, of course, due entirely to my own ineptitude.
Illegally Dead (Marcus Corvinus Book 12) Page 23
