More on Moretum, or "Pesto, the Hard Way"

A few years ago, I blogged about making my own moretum, a spreadable cheese food enjoyed by the Romans.

Today, I found a video on YouTube on the "How To Make Everything" channel that was about how to make pesto, the cousin of moretum, from scratch--including the making of a Roman-style mortar (called mortarium) and pestle.  It cost the presenter $263 USD but resulted in a wonderful educational experience.  The video is embedded below.  Enjoy!  Have a wonderful New Year, and I hope I'll be posting more often in 2023.

Moretum = Pesto?

On a whim, I recently decided to look up "pesto" in Wikipedia.  That Wikipedia entry may be read here. 

Homemade pesto. Source:  Wikimedia Commons

To my surprise, the Wikipedia article states that pesto has two forerunners, one of which is moretum, the Roman cheese spread I have previously written about on several occasions:

"Pesto is thought to have two predecessors in ancient times, going back as far as the Roman age. The ancient Romans used to eat a similar paste called moretum, which was made by crushing garlic, salt, cheese, herbs, olive oil, and vinegar (and sometimes pine nuts) together.   The use of this paste in the Roman cuisine is mentioned in the Appendix Vergiliana, an ancient collection of poems in which the author details the preparation of moretum.  During the Middle Ages, a popular sauce in the Genoan cuisine was agliata, which was basically a mash of garlic and walnuts, as garlic was a staple in the nutrition of Ligurians, especially for the seafarers."

The Roman era cheese spread contains the ingredients of modern pesto, if, as Wikipedia states, pine nuts were added (though pine nuts did not appear in Symilius's moretum).  On the other hand, there have been modern takes on pesto that forsake garlic, olive oil and vinegar altogether in favor of Asian and African ingredients with similar properties. The Food Network has a page of 50 different "pesto" recipes here.  Various recipes in this list feature ingredients such as grapeseed oil, coconut oil, sesame oil, peanuts, pistachios, almonds, lime juice and fish sauce.

What this information shows us is that food-related practices are very conservative, in that they change, if at all, very slowly over time.  Very old recipes may come in and out of fashion, but do not die out, as the story of gingerbread demonstrates.  What seems to matter more than the exact ingredients of a dish is the function the food plays in people's eating habits.  Whether you eat "pesto" or "moretum," you probably eat it smeared on bread, the way Symilius, the Roman farmer whose use of moretum was preserved in Virgil's poem, did.  That's as much continuity as a food historian can typically promise.  

Another Moretum Recipe

Cheese made from goat's milk, shown with crackers.
(Image found on Wikimedia Commons)

A while ago, I discussed and experimented with a recipe for moretum, an ancient Roman style of cheese spread. The recipe I used was based on a blogger's redaction of a recipe for moretum cited by Virgil in a poem about the cheese spread;  it was based upon Pecorino Romano, an ancient form of hard cheese, and used a lot of garlic.

A few months ago, in a post on the Medieval Cheese Forum,  I discovered a completely different moretum recipe, one more like the sort of soft, spreadable cheese I had mistakenly been expecting from Virgil.   That recipe can be found here. It is a redaction of a recipe attributed to Columella II, formally Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella.  Columella was a writer about agricultural subjects who was born in Gades, now Cadiz, on the Iberian Peninsula.  The recipe in question comes from his book De Re Rustica ("On Rustic Matters").  He wrote during the early Roman Republic; his date of death is reported as 70 CE.

Columella's recipe is based on goat cheese, as I had originally assumed Virgil's recipe to be.  He also includes a lot of fresh plants and herbs to moisten the final product, such as fresh mint, coriander, and parsley, along with a small, but full, head of lettuce and a small leek.

The existence of Columella's recipe indicates that there were many different types of moretum, starting with different types of cheese and, presumably, resulting in spreads with different textures as well as different flavors.  I plan to try out the redaction of his recipe when I have the opportunity.

EDIT:  (3/4/2019)  Over at Tavola Mediterranea, Farrell Monaco posted her own redaction of Columella's moretum recipe.  Now I have to try both recipes out!

Tavola Mediterranea

This week, I found a food-and-archaeology blog I had not encountered before:  Tavola Mediterranea.  TM is written by an archaeologist named Farrell Monaco, whose primary archaeological interest is the food of prior cultures in the Mediterranean.

Although she has posted about recent items, the real jewel of the blog in my opinion is her series of posts on the cuisine of ancient Rome, which includes clear redactions of the moretum recipes of Symilus and Columella. (Yes, she believes you need to use 4 bulbs of garlic to properly make Symilus's recipe!) If I thought I'd have enough time between now and Christmas, I'd make both kinds of moretum!   The embedded video in this post is Ms. Monaco's demonstration of the proper way to grind fresh herbs using a mortar and pestle.  Note that she is using a coarse-textured Mexican-style mortar and pestle; since Roman mortars had abrasive bits embedded in them, the style of mortar used by Ms. Monaco probably contributes to getting the desired effect.

For the more whimsical (or those interested in eras of antiquity greater than that of Rome), check out TM's post on how to make convincing cuneiform tablets out of gingerbread.

Thanks to Katrin Kania, whose blog inspired me to check out Tavola Mediterranea.

Roman Garlic Grinding

Fragment of an ancient Roman mortarium
found in Herfordshire, England.   From the
National Roman Fabric Reference Collection
(Dore & Tomber 1998,Museum of London
Archaeology Service Monograph 2)

In my last post on moretum, the highly garlicked ancient Roman cheese spread, I speculated about whether the Romans used anything like my French garlic plate to pulp the garlic used in making it.

After a surprisingly brief amount of digging, I've learned that the answer to my question is "yes", though the Romans do not appear to have made special garlic plates. Instead, in making mortars, ancient Roman potters would embed sand, sharp pebbles, bits of broken pottery, and the like into the mortar's interior surface, so that the simple act of rubbing the pestle over food stuffs placed in the mortar would result in shredding and pulping.

Wikipedia has a good picture of an ancient Roman mortar, which was called a mortarium, here.  Judging by that picture and others I've found, Roman mortars were wider than many modern examples, and had broader, flatter bowls.  For the truly curious, an on-line atlas containing detailed information about multiple potsherd finds all over the Roman Empire, with good pictures, may be found at potsherd.net.  For the edification of readers of this post I've added a picture of a potsherd I found on potsherd.net.  This sherd was found in Herfordshire, near what had been Roman Verulamium (now St. Albans) and is believed to be a fragment of a Roman era mortarium.  The picture gives a good idea of the quality of grit and roughness created by Roman potters on the bottom of mortarium bowls.  Click on the picture to view it in a much larger size that better displays the roughness of the surface.

So Symilius, Virgil's cheese-and-garlic-loving farmer, probably did shred his garlic, simply by pounding it in a rough-bottomed Roman mortar. The pragmatic Romans clearly saw no need for a separate plate for garlic grinding when the humble mortar, used for grinding so many things, could serve.  Because it too would have been pounded in a mortar, any celery used would also have been shredded as I speculated, probably improving the moretum's texture.

Now the only question I have is why are modern mortars smooth bottomed?  Wouldn't it be easier to grind herbs in a mortar if the bottom of the mortar contributed to the grinding action?  Or doesn't it matter how mortars are made in the 21st century, when you can simply buy a food processor and have anything you like ground, chopped, or pureed automatically at the touch of a button?

EDIT:  (5/19/2016)  I think I've figured out the answer to my own question.  A rough-bottomed mortar is clearly superior for grinding/shredding/pulping wet items like garlic cloves and celery pieces.  But if you're trying to grind seeds or nuts into a fine powder, the coarseness of the surface could get in the way.  For example, it might trap larger seed bits, making it harder to properly pulverize them.  Thus, I hypothesize that mortars became smooth-bottomed at the point when they were used more to grind seeds and nuts than to grind garlic and wetter herbs.

The Final Moretum Experiment

Garlic grater (note the label "Ail", French for garlic)

In my refrigerator, I still have the Pecorino Romano I'd bought this past summer when I was busily experimenting with different recipes for making moretum, an ancient Roman cheese spread described by Virgil.  So I decided to do a final, more open-ended moretum experiment.

I used about a quarter pound (about 113 g) of my half-pound sized chunk of cheese for this recipe. I chopped the cheese into bits, as I had done for the Oro Antico I used in my last experiment.  I was surprised at how easy the task was.  I had expected the cheese to be rock-hard but it was still fairly soft, even after being in my refrigerator's meat drawer for over six months. Pounding, however, still worked better than grinding for turning the cheese bits into a paste.

Next, I added above 4 or 5 large cloves of garlic--more than a third of a bulb.  To prepare them for mixing, I used the tool shown above:  a small ceramic plate, which had been scored in the center (the green part) with criss-crossing lines before firing, to roughen the surface.  Rubbing peeled cloves on the rough section turns garlic into a paste very quickly.  

After that, I chopped up two ribs of celery and added them to the mix.  Some grinding was necessary to mix in the celery and it was hard to blend it into the paste.  I realized afterward I should have used the garlic plate on the celery as well, to help turn it into a paste before mixing it with the cheese. However, the grated garlic worked pretty well to help the other ingredients cohere into a spreadable paste.  In fact, I achieved a moister and smoother paste than I'd managed with my last batch. I needed significantly less olive oil to complete the transformation of my ingredients into cheese spread.

And that's all I used.  I didn't have parsley in the house and thus didn't add any (though Symilius, the cheese-eating "hero" of Virgil's poem, added celery instead of parsley, as Stella Anderson noted here). Nor did I add salt, since the Pecorino had plenty.

Having combined the ingredients, I thought I was done until I looked at Virgil's poem again and saw that Symilius also adds a "little of his scanty vinegar" to his moretum.  Both Stella and the author of Pass the Garum had included a tiny amount of vinegar in their redactions, which for some reason I had forgotten.  So I tried adding a bit of balsamic vinegar to my moretum, on the theory that such a vinegar might have been added to provide a bit of sweetness, giving the mixture the sweet-and-sour flavor so enjoyed by the Romans. Not so.  Even though I accidentally got more than a few drops of vinegar in my cheese mix, I could taste no discernible difference after I had added it.

Finally, Symilius also used ground coriander seeds in his moretum. I had ground coriander seed available, so I added some to my batch after it had been in the refrigerator for about a day, but half a teaspoon plus a generous sprinkle of powdered seed did nothing to change the taste; it remained very garlicky and too sharp.  Adding fresh green herbs like parsley might have taken the edge off of the sharpness, but I didn't have any handy this time.

My final thoughts:

• A certain amount of "pounding" with the mortar, not grinding, is necessary to make moretum, because harder cheeses were used, and using harder cheese seems to give better taste results.
• Grating the garlic helps to make the resulting paste smoother.  Perhaps grating the celery would have a beneficial effect on the texture also, but I did not think of trying that when I made this last batch.  
• Grating the garlic also releases more garlic juice, making the resulting cheese more garlicky than might otherwise be the case for a similar quantity of garlic.  
• Modern cheeses must contain more salt than Roman cheeses did, because I found no need for the additional salt Symilius is said to have added in the poem.
• It's difficult to tell what purpose adding vinegar was supposed to serve without knowing the characteristics of the vinegar used. I couldn't detect any noticeable difference in my moretum after adding balsamic vinegar.  Possibly wine vinegar would give a more noticeable result.
• It would be fun to make moretum using the historical Roman "viniagre" Alan Coxon makes. However, I'm not up for paying nearly 10 British pounds (plus shipping) just for the privilege of adding a few drops of his vinegar to a batch of moretum every now and then.
• I should keep an eye out to see whether the remains of any garlic grater plates such as the one I used have been found at Roman archaeological sites (though I wouldn't expect a farmer like Symilius to have or use one).  It seems to me that such a device would be very useful for making moretum, and would have been easy to make with technology available to the Romans.
• It may be worthwhile to use celery root, rather than celery ribs, in moretum.  The tough fibers of celery ribs make it hard to completely mix them into the pounded cheese; that problem might not exist if the root were used instead.
• Moretum recipes work better with very hard cheese; this moretum was much more garlicky than the batch I made with cheese that had gone very hard, confirming my suspicion that one of the purposes of moretum was to make palatable a cheese that had passed its prime.

If anyone has additional thoughts about moretum or about the process I used, please don't hesitate to comment!

EDIT:  (2/15/2016) Corrected some syntax errors and clarified my final thoughts about my moretum experiments a bit.

My Second (?) Moretum Experiment

Second moretum experiment--results

This afternoon, while taking a break from scanning the Internet for plausible job openings, I made another batch of moretum, based on my friend Stella Anderson's redaction of Virgil's recipe.

I started out with a chunk of a cheese called Oro Antico, which claimed to be a Pecorino Toscano (which, like Pecorino Romano, is a sheep's milk cheese) that had been aged for 6 months.  I ended up using a piece of the chunk that was about the size of the palm of my hand and roughly an inch thick.  

The cheese was quite tough and dry after sitting in my refrigerator for nearly 2 weeks, so I chopped it up into 1/2 cm-sized bits before I made a serious effort to pound it.  And I do mean "pound".  Virgil is right about Symilus "pounding" his cheese.  The normal twisting, grinding motion I normally employ in using a mortar and pestle did nothing to the cheese bits--the mortar simply skidded off without discernible effect.  However, holding the mortar vertical and bringing it straight down onto the cheese bits with controlled force worked very well. By this method I eventually managed to turn my chunk of cheese into a quantity of coarse, slightly fluffy damp powder, into which I ground an equal volume of diced celery.  With the celery, conventional grinding was necessary to work it into the mass of powdered cheese.  

After I got the cheese and celery somewhat combined, I began adding olive oil to the mixture.  A small "dribble" did nothing, but about an ounce or so of oil turned the powder into a  spreadable, if coarse, paste.  Then I ground in an 1/8th of a teaspoon of ground coriander seeds, about a tablespoon of chopped parsley, and 3  small cloves of garlic.   I would have tried adding rue if I had had any on hand.

The result of my labors was indeed tasty.  It still tasted like Pecorino Toscano, but was moister and had a pleasant tang from the herbs.  It didn't have much garlic taste, which leads me to conclude that the older and harder your cheese is, the more garlic can be added to the recipe without the garlic flavor becoming overwhelming.  I shudder to think how tough Symilus's cheese must have been if he needed four heads of garlic to make it palatable!

From this second moretum experiment, I conclude that the recipe in Virgil's poem assumes that a hard cheese like a Pecorino was used; such a cheese requires "pounding" instead of grinding in the mortar and can tolerate the addition of much more garlic than a soft cheese.  Celery is also a critical addition, because in addition to having a pleasant flavor it makes the resulting cheese-and-olive-oil paste moister and easier to spread.  I suspect that the use of any herbs or vegetables other than celery would depend upon maker's taste and the herbs available to him or her.  For example, Symilus didn't use basil in his moretum, but basil would probably be quite tasty in this recipe instead of (or perhaps even in addition to) the parsley. 

Many thanks to Stella and the author of opus anglicanum for motivating me to rethink my original assumptions and arrive at a more plausibly historical moretum recipe.

EDIT:  (7/3/2015)  My moretum got pretty hard sitting in the refrigerator (not a problem Virgil's farmer would have had), so I ended up adding almost another ounce of olive oil, mixing it in with a (non-period style) fork.  This worked pretty well to retain spreadability while not changing the taste.  I also added some salt (totally unnecessary; I'd forgotten that the Pecorino is already salted) and black pepper (which worked well). 

EDIT:  (1/31/2016) Added a question mark to the title, because I realized that this was really my third moretum experiment.

Another Moretum Experiment

I was pretty satisfied with the moretum [i.e.,  the name for an ancient Roman type of cheese spread] I had made until I read my friend Stella Anderson's moretum recipe on her blog, Historical Living with Hvitr.  Stella's blog post makes three points about the redaction of the recipe found in Virgil's poem by the author of Pass the Garum ("PTG") that has made me reconsider my original views about moretum in general and Virgil's recipe in particular.

First, Stella noted that, whether or not garlic heads were smaller in those days, the amount of garlic used by the farmer in Virgil's poem was "insane".  She points out that Virgil intended to convey the idea that the amount of garlic was excessive by stating that the garlic made the farmer's eyes water as he pounded it.  (In contrast, my eyes didn't water at all as I put my single clove into my moretum recipe.)

Second, it turns out that apius, the Latin word actually used in Virgil's poem, means "celery" not "parsley", making it unclear why the translation used by  PTG refers to parsley in the first place.

Third, and most importantly, the poem itself explicitly describes the cheese used in the farmer's moretum as a hard cheese.  I'm not sure how I missed that detail.  I can't read Latin, but the translation used by PTG describes the cheese in question as follows:  "...a cheese transfixed/ By rope of broom through mid-circumference/ Was hanging there, an ancient bundle, too,/ Of dill together tied."  Or, in Stella's words, "...Symilius' cheese is obviously some type of hard cheese.  He keeps it hanging from his roof by a string tied through a hole in the middle of the cheese."

These facts convince me that, however tasty a soft-cheese spread might be with the additions proposed by Virgil, Stella and my friend at Opus Anglicanum (who made up some moretum with her own redaction of the recipe given in Virgil) are right; a hard cheese was meant to be used in the recipe, and may well have been generally preferred for moretum in ancient Rome.  The cheese was pounded in a mortar with olive oil to make it spreadable, and the added vegetables and herbs likely provide a useful level of moisture to the mix as well as a more pleasing flavor. Although Virgil likely exaggerated the amount of garlic used to make the farmer look more like a country bumpkin, a significant amount of garlic might be necessary for achieving a pleasing flavor balance in a salted cheese that was even drier than normal because it had been hanging for a long time.  

So I went looking for some Pecorino Romano, a type of sheep's milk cheese which was already being made in Roman times.  On my first effort, I failed to locate Pecorino Romano in my local supermarket, but did find and purchased some Pecorino Toscano.  I selected an aged version of Pecorino Toscano, hoping to duplicate the effect of Symilius's ancient cheese.  Later, I found Pecorino Romano, and purchased it as well.

Now, I have two possible hard cheeses to experiment with.  I think I'll start with the Pecorino Toscano, because I have a smaller piece of that and because Stella has already vetted Pecorino Romano as a base for moretum.   Pecorino Toscano is somewhat softer in texture and less sharp in flavor than Pecorino Romano, so it is a good choice for my next batch, which I'm going to make using Stella's redaction of the moretum recipe from the poem as a starting point.   The result will be described in this blog.

EDIT:  (7/1/2015) Fact correction; Stella's recipe used Pecorino Romano, not Pecorino Toscano.  I have corrected the text accordingly.

My Moretum Experiment

My first batch of moretum!

The moretum, served on half of a pretzel roll

Ever since I read Pass the Garum's recipe for how to make moretum, an ancient Roman style cheese spread, I've been eager to try it out for myself.  This afternoon turned out to be a good time to do so.  Photographs of the fruits of my labors appear with this post. 

By and large I followed the Pass the Garum recipe, but differences in taste and the supplies I had available resulted in a few exceptions, as follows:

1.   Garlic.  I used a full clove of garlic, though a small one.

2.  Cheese.  Pass the Garum suggested using a "cheese spread", which seemed too much like cheating--isn't the point of the recipe to make a cheese spread?  On the other hand, the recipe seems to require a soft cheese, rather than a hard one.  I would have used what we now call "farmer's cheese"  except the ones I could find were a bit expensive.  So I compromised by using a soft goat cheese, which I could conveniently buy in small quantity (about 4 tablespoons worth, or two batches according to the recipe).

3.   Olive Oil.  Unfortunately, I did not realize until after I had started that I was almost out of olive oil.  I could only manage to get about 2/3 of a tablespoon of oil out of the bottle, so I made it do.

4.  Coriander seeds.  I had ground coriander seed to hand, so I used it.  Because I figured the raw seeds would grind up to a much smaller pile of spice than ready-ground powdered spice, I used only a teaspoon. 

5.   Mortar.   I originally had a mortar and pestle set, but my pestle (the bowl part) broke long ago.  So I used an ordinary ceramic bowl instead.  The bowl was flatter on the bottom than a true pestle, which made it more difficult to use, but I was eventually able to get the celery, garlic and other spices to form a rough paste, to which I added the cheese, oil, and vinegar.

The goat cheese blended very nicely with the oil and vinegar into a mixture with a nicely spreadable consistency.  My only regret was that I didn't mash the celery longer, since the odd lumps of celery marred the texture of the finished product slightly.  It helps to dice the celery finely before adding it to the mortar for mashing.  I diced my celery into half-inch thick chunks, but in retrospect, I should have diced it into even smaller pieces, each perhaps as thin as an eighth of an inch.   

I found that the moretum is garlicky, all right, but the primary taste note in the batch I made was sourness.  (My use of goat cheese may have had something to do with that.)  Since I happen to enjoy sour flavors, I was very  pleased with the result, and didn't feel impelled to add black pepper (though I may add some the next time I eat more of it).  What I likely will do when I make my next batch is add more parsley, which I think goes a long way toward balancing out the garlic bitterness (and possibly even the effect on one's breath). I suspect the moretum would have tasted even better on a coarse, crusty, whole-grain bread than on a pretzel roll, but since I was making this only for me to eat (my husband detests cheese)  I was looking for a small roll to eat it on, and the pretzel rolls were the most appealing rolls of the right size that my supermarket had this afternoon. 

I would be delighted to hear about any readers' experiments with similar recipes, or to answer questions about my little experiment, in the comments.