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Smoked Pork with Honey & Wine Sauce

Brining/Salting the Pork

This is a long recipe/procedure that requires planning a couple of days in advance. Go to your favourite butcher. Preferably you should get organic meat and from a heritage breed of pig (they always taste better and have super delicious fat that you won't waste!) order some pork shoulder/butt about 2 to 2 1/2 kg. The upper shoulder is a deeply flavourful part of the meat. Order it with the bone-in for a fuller taste!

Get a big enough container or a pot, put enough water that will submerge the pork butt. Put the salt in and dissolve it; enough so you have a nice salty brine that reminds you of the sea! Coarse sea salt is good (5 tsps).

Put the pork in, and in the fridge and let the salt work its magic for 24 hrs.

If you're not so keen on brine bath or this seems excessive, simply salt the pork generously all over, cover it and refrigerate overnight. Salting really depends on your personal preferences of course!

The Dry Rub:

The next day remove the butt from the brine; pat dry, and make small holes all around it with a small sharp knife.

Start on the rub mix:

1 tbsp coriander seeds

1 tsp aniseeds

2 tsp fennel seeds (3 if you can't find aniseed)

2 tsp of cumin seeds

1 tsp of yellow mustard seeds

1 tsp of ground cumin

1 tsp of black pepper

a big handful of freshly chopped thyme

Roast the seeds. Finely chop the thyme. Pound the roasted seeds in a pestle and mortar, till they resemble fine bread crumbs. Mix with thyme. Take half the mixture and add garlic that you have pounded into a paste. Usually two fat cloves are enough at this stage.

Now with this half mixture (plus garlic) rub the pork all over, massage it and make sure the mixture goes in all the holes that you've created earlier. Get it back into a container and let it marinade and the spices to get to know the pork for at least a couple of hours.

The Papyro-Inspired BBQ Sauce

Meanwhile make your ancient Greco-Egyptian BBQ sauce:

600-800 ml of white wine

400ml white grape juice

80/120 ml white wine vinegar (subject to taste)

2 tbsp of grape molasses

1 tbsp of dark, Greek forest honey

Bring to boil, turn the heat down so the mixture is simmering. Add the remaining half of the herb mixture.

Continue to simmer and till you have thicker mix, a syrupy type of liquid, usually it takes around 30 to 45 min

SMOKING THE PORK BUTT

Light the bbq; smoke the meat as you would, on a low temperature and indirect heat as much as possible. Use the wood chips of your preference, but something like oak or hickory works best though. This will take 4-6 hours. In the last hour you would like to wrap it up tightly, cover it with half the sauce and increase the heat so it can cook thoroughly! Once cooked let it rest covered for an hour before unveiling it to the table and pull it apart with forks. Mix it with the rest of the ancient bbq sauce, and serve with cabbage salad.

For the cabbage salad: Simply wash and finely chop the cabbage. Rub it with salt and let it release all the excess moisture. Chop a handful of fresh coriander, mix it with olive oil. Warm in a little pot 30ml of honey and 30ml of red wine vinegar so it is a little reduced and sticky; this will be the base of our dressing. Put the cabbage in a salad bowl sprinkle with a little asafoetida (the closest relative to the ubiquitous and now extinct favourite condiment of the ancient world, Silphium!) Top it with olive oil and coriander mix, toss it well. Dress it with oxymeli (honey vinegar) Serve it, alongside the pork!

I'd eat the smoked pulled pork with the fruity aniseed-y BBQ sauce in hot pitta flatbreads just as an ancient Greek would do; wrapped tightly to keep all the magical juices in!

Enjoy!

Smoked Pork with Honey & Wine Sauce

Serves 4

25 hours

How far back is far enough that you can go in order so you can legitimately call a recipe "authentic"? Is it authentic if it's from your grandmother? Or your great grandmother? What if it's a recipe passed down through the generations of one's family since the 18th century? 200-300 years is that far back enough?

Well, it turns out that we can have authentic recipes that trump all these by a couple of thousand years!

We don't knock our granny’s recipe naturally, but really, this one is so old, that we go back to the height of the Roman Empire, two millennia ago, yet, with ingredients and techniques so incredibly familiar to us, you'll see why I have to consider it as 100% authentic!

A happy accident of the dry climate and a pile of ancient rubbish gave a rare glimpse of the ancient Greco-Roman Egyptians' life alongside their food and cooking! The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

This part of Egypt, doesn't received much rain at all. The town that prospered for over 500 years, during the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, relied on a complex system of canals for its water, which were fed from the river Nile.

This also meant that the town didn't flood every year with the rising of the river, as did the districts next to the riverbanks, which brought the rich mud to grow crops that the Egyptians were fed with. With the Arab conquest of Egypt, the canals fell into disrepair and disuse, and the town of Oxyrhynchus faded away slowly at first, and the reduced to a small village at round 1000AD. Eventually the garbage dumps of the Ptolemaic and Roman citizens of this big, prosperous and rich city were gradually covered with the desert sand and forgotten for another 1000 plus years. Aside from contracts, loans, and lists of various goods and merchandise, private letters were abundant and amongst all these, some small, tantalising fragments of their food, recipes, and cooking! These fragments seem to be from long-lost ancient cookbooks from legendary authors that are mentioned on ancient sources by name, world renowned chefs of their time, which sadly we don't have any surviving texts from.

A delightful smoked pork stew with a sauce made from a plethora of familiar herbs and spices, plus the reduced juice of white grapes.

My take on this ancient recipe is basically keeping the exact ingredients as they are, but transforming it to a slow smoked pork on the BBQ with a lovely sticky white wine, grape juice/must/molasses and vinegar! Athenaus and Archestratus would've been proud!

Served with another ancient staple, the cabbage, transformed into a popular Ancient Athenian salad from 380 BCE.