Did you know that the common people of ancient Rome were not allowed to cook in their own homes? For fear of fires, no fires were allowed to be lit in the tenement buildings. “We ate on the street, in taverns or at some kind of snack bars,” says archaeologist and culinary historian Ursula Janßen.
For her cookbook “Garum. Recipes from History” she examined historical recipe books from the Ancient Near East, Ancient Rome, the Middle Eastern and European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For two months she cooked the traditional recipes in her kitchen in Apulia, Italy, and made them suitable for modern tastes.
Historical dishes in a new form
“A main concern of the book is to make the dishes edible in the present and to serve them in a form that suits us,” explains Janßen. Therefore, her recipes are interpretations of the original versions and should always be understood as “an approximation of the taste of that time”.
The cookbook “Garum. Recipes from history” by Ursula Janßen is available online.
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