Roman Recipes for Modern Cooks

Sally Grainger’s Roman Recipes for Modern Cooks spins decades of experimentation with ancient recipes into delicious culinary gold. These fresh interpretations of 34 dishes taken from Latin texts offer the perfect blend of ancient and modern, celebrating authentic flavours thousands of years old. Setting aside more outlandish Roman luxuries such as dormice, crane, or flamingo, these recipes are down-to-earth classics: Duck with Turnips, Cheesecake, Salsa Verde with Mullet, Kidneys Stuffed with Pesto, and Cumin and Honey-roasted Root Vegetables. Sally entered into classical studies after years as a pastry chef and organised banquets to remedy how poorly understood Roman fare was within the field. As a food historian, chef, and experimental archaeologist, she was uniquely positioned to break from the tradition of scholars trapped in libraries. Inspired by the cookery sites of Pompeii, she and her partner, Chris Grocock, a mediaeval Latinist, hand built a Roman kitchen in their garden, setting the stage for rigorous trial and error leading to epiphanies through recreation in situ. Sally has published a co-translation of the Roman cookbook Apicius, which inspired her own Cooking Apicius, as well as The Classical Cookbook and The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World, in addition to a blog and YouTube channel, A Taste of the Ancient World. Filled with historically inspired line drawings by award-winning illustrator Joana Avillez, Roman Recipes for Modern Cooks is a uniquely delightful cookbook with an ancient twist.

Joana Avillez is an illustrator who grew up in the fish market in New York City. She holds a BFA in painting from The Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in illustration from The School of Visual Arts. Her illustrations can be found in the New Yorker, Vogue, the Paris Review, and the New York Review of Books, among other places, including a new illustrated edition of Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of The Harbor.

This video was originally published on A Taste of the Ancient World, Sally’s YouTube channel.