Roast flamingo anyone? (From The Northern Echo)

Roast flamingo anyone?

1:52pm Monday 14th June 2010 in

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A museum is preparing a feast fit for Caesar. And actually, flamingo and dormouse will be off the menu – but there will still be plenty of Roman delights, as Steve Pratt finds out.

THERE are no stuffed dormice on the menu.

Health and safety probably wouldn’t have approved anyway but that wasn’t why they’ve been omitted from the Roman feast about to be served up in the North-East.

As Roman expert Lindsay Allason- Jones says, “Once you have defurred and deboned, you’re left with something about the size of a cocktail sausage”. Boiled brains and roast flamingo have also been omitted, for reasons of taste and decency, from the menu for the feast being prepared by the Great North Museum: Hancock on Thursday, as part of Newcastle’s Eat! festival.

Instead, diners will feast on nettle soup, laurel and fig-braised pork ham, fricassee of veal and gnocchi a la Romana, served with leeks and young beets and pumpkin in stock with cumin. And no, gnocchi wasn’t a Roman dish. The chef, from the museum’s catering company, Sodexo, has added it for those who don’t want to go the Roman way.

The museum was prompted to hold the buffet-style feast because it has the main collection of Roman artefacts, including many cooking utensils, in the North of England.

However, these are too fragile to use in mass catering.

“The Romans loved their feasting and food was a huge part of their everyday life,” says Paul Weild, sales manager for Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums. “They sometimes had four or five meals in a day and for the upper classes lavish banquets were a regular occurrence.

We’re hoping to bring some of that Roman spirit and love of fine food to our event.”

That may be, but those slavering at popular images of Romans lying around in various states of undress gorging on exotic food and drinking to excess face disappointment. This picture, fostered by images in films and TV, doesn’t portray it as it really was, says Ms Allason-Jones, of Newcastle University, who has put together the menu for the 21st- Century feast.

The evidence suggests that, while some people did recline, most sat at a table in a civilised way. “It’s not good for your digestion lying on your side,” she points out.

They would have eaten off ordinary plates, with knives and spoons.

“People at our feast will be allowed forks, but the Romans didn’t have them. It was normal in the Roman period to take your own knife and spoon to a feast. Often they were designed to fold up so you could put them in your pocket.

“I’m hoping people will be able to put the artefacts on display in some sort of context. If you look at things in cases it’s difficult to imagine how they were used. It’s an interesting way of approaching food. The Romans were among the first people in Europe to take cooking seriously, to experiment and make sauces.”

The recipes come from a Roman cookbook compiled by Apicius, who was around during the reign of Tiberius early in the First Century AD. He was described by the philosopher Pliny as “the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts”

who “established the view that the flamingo’s tongue has a specially fine flavour”.

“His book is a gathering together of several people who wrote down their recipes,” says Ms Allason- Jones. “He was famous for his sauces. He was a man who really knew his sauces. I’ve used one or two recipes from the book, but some things we couldn’t put on the menu. Tastes have changed for things like boiled brains and roast flamingo.”

Nettle soup reflects the Roman way of using a great number of basic ingredients, often wayside herbs not much used these days. People were still using nettles for soup in the Second World War, she says.

The presence of leeks on the menu is important because the Romans introduced this vegetable to England.

There would be no leek trenches in the North of England without them.

“Their vegetable recipes are very good, interestingly they used a lot of herbs and spices.”

Ms Allason-Jones has tried many of the recipes herself – “and survived”, she jokes. “They’re very good and tasty. You do have to experiment to get them right because they don’t give you amounts or cooking instructions.”

One recipe she likes and often serves is for strawberries, Roman style – not with cream or ice cream but sliced and with black pepper. The Romans, it seems, used black pepper in a number of desserts.

The Roman army didn’t march on its stomach. There was no canteen.

Each group of soldiers living together in a permanent barrack tent would be responsible for cooking their own food, using rations brought from a central storeroom.

Each soldier would carry a pot, a bit like a billy can, and live on basic rations. “The information from seed and bone evidence in the North shows Roman soldiers had a good diet, and quite a varied one,” she says.

Very little of the food the Romans enjoyed is still served today. She doesn’t think that if you eat out in Italy you’d spot the Roman recipes.

The Newcastle feast will revive some of those recipes. “I’ve tried hard to produce a balanced meal that will not make people disgusted,” she says.

■ Tickets for the Roman banquet are £39.95 a person and can be booked on 0844-856-1074.