In this recipe, we are going to prepare an Ancient Roman stew. It is very easy to make; you only need to mix all ingredients and let them cook for a long time. We chose this dish from the extensive collection of recipes attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius.
Ingredients
- 800 grams of beef cut into big pieces (It’ll be cooking a long time, so you can choose a tough, inexpensive cut).
- 1 onion. We like to use red onion, but you can use whatever you have on hand.
- Peeled, toasted almonds
- 1 date
- 1 tablespoon of honey
- 2 tablespoons of defritum (also spelled defrutum)
- 50 milliliters of red wine vinegar to help balance the sweetness of date, defritum, and honey
- 1 tablespoon of garum
- Black pepper
- Lovage
- Parsley
How to Make Copadia
- For a few minutes, toast the almonds in a pan.
- In the next step, make the defritum by pressing grapes in a mortar until the juice is extracted. In this recipe, we are using table grapes, but if they are in season, wine grapes are better.
- Now put the juice in a pot, straining it with your hand.
- The juice needs to simmer at a really low heat until it reduces by half. You can also strain after simmering it. The juice will have more flavor and come out sweet, but some grape varieties can retain bitterness instead of sweetness.
- Now coarsely grind the almonds and add pepper and lovage. Then grind everything very well. Finely ground almond will thicken the sauce, which will coat the stew.
- After grinding and mixing everything well, add the date. It will dissolve while cooking.
- Put some olive oil in the pot, and when it’s hot, add onion and cook until it is translucent, then add the meat and sear it.
- Now add all the liquid ingredients.
- Start with two tablespoons of defritum (you can adjust the quantity according to your taste), then one tablespoon of garum, and the 50 milliliters of red wine vinegar to balance the sweetness. Now add one tablespoon of honey. We are using one tablespoon of garum, but it can be added more or less according to your taste.
- Once the cooking has extracted some more juice from the meat, you can add the ground almonds and spices, and stir until everything is well mixed.
- The stew should cook for 3 hours, but it can be more or less, depending on the size of the pieces of meat and the cut you choose.
After three hours check the meat if it’s cooked. Remember: It is better to overcook a dish then to undercook it. When the stew is ready, put it on a plate and add the nicely chopped parsley.
Food Notes
- The recipe does not tell us what meat to use. It can only be assumed by the title that the meat needs to be cut into large pieces. We chose beef; the cooking time was three hours and there were many ingredients. Beef is the only meat that takes this much time to cook with all these ingredients. But all this time and energy will feel worth it when you taste it!
- Defritum is a concentrated grape must. In Ancient Rome, people used it as a sweetener.
- In Ancient Rome, it was very common to see different writers use different reductions. For example, the grape juice, or must, would sometimes be reduced to a third, sometimes to a half.
- Garum can be a little tough to find. So if you do not find garum, you can use Southeast Asian fish sauce. Garum is made from fish. It was kind of a fish sauce that was used all across the ancient Mediterranean. The sauce was produced from different species of fish, with or without spices.
- Black pepper and lovage were two spices widely used in Ancient Rome.
