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Grate half a cucumber, and then squeeze it, to remove the excess water. To make the sweet and savoury dressing I pour a teaspoon of honey in a bowl with a mix of one tablespoon of each garum (fish sauce) and vinegar, then 30 ml of sweet red wine, and a generous pinch of black pepper. Of course, taste the dressing and adjust according to your personal taste!
Mix the ingredients and pour over the cucumber; at this stage you can cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours.
Apicius recommends the herb pennyroyal but if you don’t have any at hand add some chopped fresh mint! You can add a tiny pinch asafoetida powder too! Then generously drizzle extra virgin olive oil!
To serve as a starter, arrange one piece of dakos for each person, spread the dressed cucumber on it with generous amounts of the marinade in order to soften the hard rusk, then sprinkle some crumbled feta cheese and finally add a few drops of olive oil.
Marinated Cucumber Salad with Dakos
Serves 4
30 minutes
An unusual salad from the oldest surviving cookbook of the Mediterranean world, Apicius.
“Cucumber dressing” or simply, a marinated cucumber salad. This is such a different taste sensation, it’s quite hard to describe how it tastes!
Cucumbers in the ancient world were probably a lot more bitter than today's rather bland supermarket varieties, and the Greek word angurion gives rise to the word we use today for pickled cucumbers aka gherkin. There's also a hypothesis the ancient cucumber might have been something called snake melon, from modern day Armenia/Anatolia; a vegetable very similar looking to cucumber, but crucially different…!
- Ingredients
1/2 cucumber
4 tsp fresh mint
2 tbsp raisin wine (or any other sweet red wine)
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 pinch asafoetida powder (optional)
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
40-60g of feta cheese
