Did you know that the common people of ancient Rome were not allowed to cook in their own four walls? For fear of fires, no fires were allowed to be lit in the apartment buildings. “People ate on the street, in taverns or at a kind of snack bar,” says archaeologist and kitchen historian Ursula Janßen.
For her cookbook “Garum. Recipes from History” she sifted through historical recipe books from the ancient Orient, ancient Rome, the Middle Eastern and European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For two months she cooked traditional recipes in her kitchen in Apulia, Italy, and made them suitable for modern tastes.
Historical dishes in a new form
“One of the main concerns 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, their recipes are interpretations of the original versions and always to be understood as “an approximation of the taste of the past”.
The cookbook “Garum. Recipes from history” by Ursula Janßen is available online.
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