ALITER IN STRUTHIONE ELIXO - original Roman recipe for cooking ostrich, by Marcus Gaius Apicius.

450g ostrich
4 tblsp honey
2 tblsp rd wine vinegar
3-4 tblsp olive oil
4 stalks thyme
2 stalks savory
handful of lovage or celery
2 tsp wholegrain mustard
beef stock
Brown the ostrich in the oil; add spices and cook for a few minutes. Add liquid stock, vinegar, honey, mustard and finely-chopped herbs. Cook gently until ostrich is tender, adding more liquid if necessary.

Ostrich qualifies as fast food - ita vero!

Seafood Fricassee - Minutal marinum - a seafood fricasee by Marcus Gaius Apicius

Ingredients:
500g fish fillet (salmon or whatever you prefer)
250ml white wine
500ml beef broth or stock
3 leeks
100ml oil
Fish sauce or salt
Coriander, pepper, lovage, oregano
Fllour to thicken the sauce

Put the fish in a pan with the fish sauce or salt, oil, wine, beef broth, chopped leek and coriander. Cook approximately 30 minutes on a gentle heat. When done add lovage and oregano and bring back to boil & thicken sauce with flour. Sprinkle pepper on the fricasse and serve.

It is not in the recipe but I add garlic too.

This recipe for Patina de piris was written by Marcus Gaius Apicius. It is effectively a pear soufflé

Ingredients:
1kg pears
6 eggs
4 tblsp honey
100ml sweet grape juice or sweet wine
a little bit of oil
50ml fish sauce (from Oriental supermarket) or 1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
ground pepper to taste

Cooking Method & Instructions:
Peel, core and chop the pears. Steam, microwave or poach until soft.
Mash the pears with pepper, cumin, honey, sweet grape juice, fish sauce (or salt) and a little oil. Add eggs, beat mixture and put into a casserole dish. Cook approximately 30 minutes on a gentle heat. Serve with a little pepper sprinkled on the souffle.

I prefer to use salt rather than fish sauce as that is one authenticity step too far!

The original recipe in Middle English from 1390 is as follows:
Take crustes of brede and grynde hem smale. Do þerto powdour of galyngale, of canel, of gyngyuer, and salt it; tempre it vp with vyneger, and drawe it vp þurgh a straynour, & messe it forth.
(N.B. þ is equivalent to th)

Translated into modern English:
Take crusts of bread and grind them small. Add powder of galingale, of cinnamon, of ginger, and salt it; mix it with vinegar, and pass it through a strainer, & serve it.

Pour this onto roasted meats, especially game, beef or mutton. I prefer to make it with claret and red wine vinegar as was more usual in Tudor times. I do like this delicious sauce and may well be cooking it for Christ-tide.

Take a pottle of Cream, and boil in it a little whole Cinnamon, and three or four flakes of Mace. To this proportion of Cream put in eighteen yolks of eggs, and eight of the whites; a pint of Sack; beat your eggs very well, and then mingle them with your Sack. Put in three quarters of a pound of Sugar into the Wine and Eggs, with a Nutmeg grated, and a little beaten Cinnamon; set the Bason on the fire with the Wine and Eggs, and let it be hot. Then put in the Cream boiling from the fire, pour it on high, but stir it not; cover it with a dish, and when it is settlede, strew on the top a little fine Sugar mingled with three grains of Ambergreece, and one grain of Musk, and serve it up.

Original recipe rom The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby - 1671

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