With a honey & red wine vinegar dipping sauce laced with copious amounts of Greek Oregano and Black Pepper!

Continuing our series of recipes from The Delicious Legacy Podcast host Thomas Ntinas

I know it sounds a little bit Asian this dish! Garlic, ginger, pork and prawn, fish sauce...! Surely it's Vietnamese right?

Well, I've always found the far Eastern cuisine very interesting, fragrant, complex yet delicate. The ancient Mediterranean cuisine from what has survived in texts, seems to have very similar tones woven into it.

A recipe inspired partly from Apicius (the oldest surviving Greco-Roman cookbook written sometime in the 4th century CE but based on recipes from at least the 1st century BCE), partly from Archestratus (the Greek Sicilian gourmand who according to a legend “circumnavigated the world to satisfy his hunger”), partly a need to create something when I needed 'finger food' for an event. Of course, this dish, with the use of vine leaves, is firmly established in the modern Greek kitchen and also all over eastern mediterranean. Vine leaves are edible, succulent, delicious and used for stuffing since Classical times (or even before that!)

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. 

A chickpea patty. A vegetarian burger inspired by ancient Greco-Roman ingredients adapted for modern street food! But it could have worked equally well on the 'Thermopolia', the ancient Roman equivalent of fast food joints, which existed in most busy and bustling big cities of ancient Italy.

Why ‘Cicero's’ though? Because the Latin for chickpea is 'ciceris'. Was the noble and wise Marcus Tullius Cicero so down to earth and humble to be named after the common legume?

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, and scholar who played an important role in the politics of the late Republic. Plutarch explains that the name was originally given to one of Cicero's ancestors who had a cleft in the tip of his nose resembling a chickpea. However, it is more likely that Cicero's ancestors prospered through the cultivation and sale of chickpeas!  

Back in the day of my pop-up events, I needed to cater for a large number of vegetarian friends and customers, of course. I wanted to create something ancient inspired but being able to serve it on a street food form too, and also pack lots of flavour and something unique with ingredients that are: a. underused in my other recipes b. rarely used in modern cuisine! The story of Cicero was too good not to be used and inspire me and also the multitude of different spices that were utilised in ancient Roman recipes by Apicius! Enter lovage and celery seeds! Originally I was going to use fresh lovage leaves and lovage seed, but I've found the taste of lovage leaf extremely strange for the modern palate when it's raw and very very strong! I opted for the seeds only. Coriander and parsley were used a lot in ancient Greece and Rome, especially fresh coriander, but also coriander seeds. Since we are familiar with these from modern Asian and Mexican cooking, I chose not to include any in my spice mix here, but if you fancy my all means go for it! They are most suitable herbs!

I tend to serve it in a modern bun as it holds quite well this way. You can serve it on its own though with a salad for a healthier option perhaps. I've created a ‘smoked’ yoghurt sauce with chopped fresh coriander, olive oil, bit of salt, vinegar and something spicy, like lots of black pepper and mustard to go with it. Hope this will inspire you to create something similar in your kitchen!