Artist impession of how Pullum Frontoniaum may have looked in olden Roman times

Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour 45 minutes
Skill level: Easy
Serves: 4-6 people, or one person over a week

Ingredients

• 1 free range organic chicken – 1.5 kg approx
• olive oil – 100ml
• liquamen – 200ml (or 200ml wine + 2 tsp salt)
• 1 ‘branch of’ leek – chopped
• fresh dill, saturei, coriander, pepper to taste
• defrituma – little bit of (or 200ml of red grape juice – reduced)

Right, let’s start by defining some of these ingredients.

Liquamen: A salty fish sauce. However, the thing to remember about Liquamen is that in fact it would not have tasted very fishy. Some suggest for 2 oz (50 ml) Liquamen substitute 1/2 tsp salt plus 2 oz (50 ml) white wine.

Saturei: No direct English translation although in Latin it’s called ‘Satureia Hortensis’. It’s a violet or white flowered kind of labiate plant which grows mainly in Southern Europe. It’s used as a spice plant, especially in bean dishes. No real substitute then.

Defrituma: A thick syrup made from grape juice (aka grape must) which was boiled in a lead pot until it had reduced by one-half. Some food sources today see this as a predecessor to balsamic vinegar. As a substitute for this lead-infused toxin I’d suggest using fig or grape syrup or possibly the grape juice concentrate used in winemaking. However, we rather cleverly reduced down some grape juice.

Mix together the white wine and salt.

Heat a good slug of olive oil in a large frying pan and add the chicken. Pour over some (half) of the salty wine mixture and gently brown the chicken – gradually turning through 360 degrees to ensure an even colour.

Remove the chicken from the heat and stuff with some of the leek and herbs.

Scatter the remaining leek on the bottom of a large oven-proof dish (or idealy a rare and intact cumana) and place the chicken on top. Pour over the remaining wine mixture and herbs.

Place in a pre-heated (220 C) oven for the prescribed time – a 1.75kg = 1 hour 40 minutes.

Meanwhile make your Defritum by simmering the grape juice until reduced to a thick sticky goo.

It’s burgundy, it’s grapey, it sticks to the platey – it’s defritum

When the chicken is done, moisten a plate with Defritum, put chicken on it, sprinkle pepper on it, and serve.

Out of the oven, before plating up

Sitting proudly by the herb garden on Gwydwr’s nice Quimper plate

Verdict: It was delicious, moist, lightly herby and full of flavour. The leeks in the basting liquid were a superb addition, though to be sampled sparingly as they were exceptionally salty, but went very well with the chicken. Blogger D hadn’t eaten chicken in a very long time, having sworn off the stuff unless it was organic free-range. Blogger R doesn’t eat animal, so Blogger D was left to have chicken sandwiches all week, much to her delight.

Drink: Some fine ales during the cooking and some Kingston filtered water during the eating.

Entertainment: Father Ted on dvd, or the Guardian website.

‘Ok, here’s the culinary challenge … for my lecture in September I wish to distract the audience as much as possible with nonsense and pretty pictures. So, to make it a bit more lively I want not just to talk about trade and distribution and the Roman economy (like I am supposed to) but also talk about the cultural side of cooking ie what influenced the cooking pot forms and how this ties in with cooking traditions … bored yet? It gets better …’

A broken cumana

‘…one of the North African cooking forms is a direct copy of an Italian form – a shallow frying pan thing that was also, we think, used in the oven as a baking dish. There are no literary references for the North African dish, however, there was this famous Roman called Apicius who actually wrote a cookery book, and in the method for some of his recipes he says to use a ‘cumana’ which is a dish from Cumes (the place of the dig near Naples I was on) and these are more commonly known as Pompeian Red dishes as that is where they were first discovered by archaeologists. For your interest, they were called Pompeian Red wares because the interior has a glossy red coating ie non-stick, and the North Africans were in fact the only ones to imitate this. I digress.

Basically, it would be a hoot if you could cook one of Apicius’ recipes that uses the non-stick frying pan approach and photograph it, I could show it in my powerpoint. What would be even more wicked would be if I sent you a photo of one of these dishes and you/Richard photoshoped the food into it…. And it could all appear on Yumblog. I attach his list of recipes. The one highlighted (Pullum Frontoniarnum) would be the best for my lecture as it uses this pan I think, but basically anything that is fried or oven baked in a shallow pan would work. Conference starts 22 September, so plenty of time.

Anyway, just a thought …’

Several broken cumana … or is it cumani? cumanum?

This is the recipe:

• 1 fresh chicken – 1-1.5 kg approx
• olive oil – 100ml
• liquamen – 200ml
• 1 branch of leek
• fresh dill, saturei, coriander, pepper to taste
• defrituma – little bit of

We will of course be taking up the challenge …