Rarely, might I submit, does the common-or-garden Classics teacher open the How To Spend It supplement of the FT Weekend, read a review of a two Michelin-star restaurant and think ‘Lovely, I’ll have me some of that please.’
And that’s not exactly what happened over Christmas when said supplement ran a piece on Heston Blumenthal’s Last Supper in Pompeii, a new ‘exhibition menu’ which promised ‘edible history’ to the deep-pocketed patrons of his restaurant Dinner, in Knightsbridge.
The menu came about through collaboration with Dr Paul Roberts, curator of the recent Ashmolean exhibition I had reviewed for this blog, and – mirabile dictu – my dear deep-pocketed brother joined the two dots and offered to take me as a belated birthday present.
Mirabile factu, last weekend I found myself face-to-fork with some very high-end garum.
Let’s take a look at the goods and then we can get down to the serious business of Apicius and the Cena Trimalchionis.
1. ‘Carbonised’ bread
Roman-style loaf, coloured with edible charcoal (tasted of charcoal) and made using ancient varieties of spelt flour and grano arso – a burnt-grain, perfect participle wheat flour from Apulia (Puglia).
This came with butter mocked up as lava rock (squid ink colouring) and magma (the oily red blobs made from a reduction of prawn-head juice).
2. The fishy course
Big juicy mussels smoked then pickled then plated with garnish (lovage, oyster leaf, purslane – all of which I’ve had to Google) and a cream of mussels and GARUM . That’s the green layer at the bottom.
3. The Apicius course
Turnip: buttered, truffled, topped.
Duck: stewed in wine, served with a pearl-barley mixture of duck heart, gizzard and liver.
This is the only dish to draw extensively on Apicius’ De Coquinaria.
4. The ritual offering
Presented as libum and served with the waiter’s historical explanation, this was a baked goat’s curd cheesecake topped with white-wine gel, grapes, honey ice cream, crystallised almonds and frozen ash.
Very delicious.
As a Classics teacher three things intrigued me:
1. How does Heston do his garum?
He imports it from Naples… In the south of Italy, in the heart of the ancient anchovy industry, they produce a modern-day garum called colatura di alici. It’s the by-product of preserving anchovies in a wooden barrel (right). Salt and fish are stacked in alternating layers and over time the anchovy jus percolates down through the barrel. This run-off is then tapped at the base of the barrel and flown to Knightsbridge post-haste.
Was it tasty? Yes, although it is primarily a seasoning and so in the general mush of one’s mouthful it’s a little hard to pick out. The green sauce was certainly tangy in the sour sort of way that fermented fish juice would suggest, I imagine?
Bear in mind it’s used in the sparing way you would use Worcestershire sauce, or Asian fish sauce like Thai Nam Pla. Crucially, however – lest you offend a Neapolitan – Roman fish sauce is made by fermenting rather than boiling fish, as per the Asian method.
2. The Platonic ideal of turnip-ness
My brother made the remark when tucking into his turnip that the very best fare from the very best kitchens is characterised, partly, by the definition of flavours. The ingredients will be fresh and interesting, yes, but crucial to a successful dish is that you can taste each flavour clearly and each flavour – be it turnip or garum – will represent maximally that ingredient. The mussels were so good because they approximated so closely what a top chef considers to be the ideal of mussel-ness. They aspired to the perfect, unchanging abstract of Mussel-ness which exists somewhere in Plato’s Realm of the Forms.
Is an artist like Heston Blumenthal simply striving for proximity to the Platonic ideal of each ingredient?
3. Food as fashion as folly
Blumenthal has built his career on witty and experimental cuisine. Dinner, for example, is most famous for its ‘meat fruit’ (right) and its bacon-and-eggs ice cream.
Watching the clientele of Dinner last weekend (as my brother had bagged the seat facing the kitchen), I cast my mind to Petronius and the rarefied world of Pompeii’s elite villas.
Many there were special occasion visitors like us. Some tables had a professional air of people handling business. And some were clearly international super-rich, like the table of two mums plus five children who spent most of the meal on their phones, bored (and I don’t blame them).
How does this picture of extravagant cuisine compare to the infamous Cena Trimalchionis of Petronius’ Satyricon?
More technical
Less interactive
Less cultured
Consider this extract from Satyricon 33 (tr. Heseltine):
We were still busy with the hors d'oeuvres, when a tray was brought in with a basket on it, in which there was a hen made of wood, spreading out her wings as they do when they are sitting. The music grew loud: two slaves at once came up and began to hunt in the straw. Peahen's eggs were pulled out and handed to the guests. Trimalchio turned his head to look, and said, “I gave orders, my friends, that peahen's eggs should be put under a common hen. And upon my oath I am afraid they are hard-set by now. But we will try whether they are still fresh enough to suck.” We took our spoons, half-a-pound in weight at least, and hammered at the eggs, which were balls of fine meal. I was on the point of throwing away my portion. I thought a peachick had already formed. But hearing a practised diner say, “What treasure have we here?” I poked through the shell with my finger, and found a fat becafico rolled up in spiced yolk of egg.
The equivalent of the wooden hen would perhaps be the gleaming ice cream trolley which stood proudly in the corner of Dinner, ready to whisk up with liquid nitrogen whatever glace du jour was required.
Impressive to watch, but hardly the hands-on experience Encolpius enjoyed. And instead of stimulating genial rapport between guests, summoning Heston’s trolley is an act of slightly competitive consumption.
Finally, the culture quotient of Dinner doesn’t really compete with the impromptu verse which Trimalchio sprinkles over his banquet. From ch. 55:
We applauded his action, and made small talk in different phrases about the uncertainty of man's affairs. “Ah,” said Trimalchio, “then we should not let this occasion slip without a record.” And he called at once for paper, and after very brief reflection declaimed these halting verses: “What men do not look for turns about and comes to pass. And high over us Fortune directs our affairs. Wherefore, slave, hand us Falernian wine.”
That last pentameter- quare da nobis vina Falerna, puer! – I’d been hoping to deploy during the meal. We were, however, served by very slick professionals and Falernian, disappointingly, wasn’t on the wine list.
What both Trimalchio and Heston have in common is the belief that a dining experience, a convivium, can be a multi-sensory experience. What we see, smell, hear as we eat all contributes to the experience and the most creative cuisine can serve narrative fantasy as well as sensational grub.
