Dark Age pork - a recipe from the 5th century скачать в хорошем качестве

Dark Age pork - a recipe from the 5th century

First of all, this dish is really, really tasty! My family urged me to prepare it more often. Vinidarius, probably a Goth living in Italy by the real name of Vinithaharjis, was the author of a small collection of cooking recipes, “Apici excerpta“, from the 5th century AD, at the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, a time that has been branded as the Dark Ages due to a decrease of written sources. This perception is not entirely correct and dates from a time when historians divided periods into good (enlightened) and bad (dark) periods, which often was simply based on the availability of sources. Vinidarius probably meant a whole suckling pig to be cooked that way - I’m simply using pork chops here (good quality pork from an ancient breed raised by a neighborhood farmer). You need: pork chops, black pepper, honey, onions, fresh or dried cilantro, meat broth and oil. The dish’s name, porcellum oxyzomum, suggests a sour dish made with vinegar (from Greek oxys - acid), but vinegar is not mentioned in the recipe. Maybe an originally sour dish changed in the course of time, maybe oxyzomum in this specific case simply means “marinated“. You can find more recipes in one of my historical cookbooks "GARUM - Recipes from the Past" or "From Eden to Jerusalem: Recipes from the Time of the Bible".