1.1 The role of digestion

Digestion (in Greek, pepsis) was seen as a key process in the body, harnessing its natural heat to ‘cook’ food into blood. Galen commented that stale bread made from emmer would make a person feel ‘like a lump of clay is lying in his bowels’.

Because health depended on effective digestion, ways of aiding digestion were used. Apicius’ De re coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking) is a fourth or fifth century CE compilation of earlier Latin cookery books, containing around 500 recipes. Watch Video 2 where Laurence Totelin prepares Apicius’ recipe for oxygarum, an aid to digestion.

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Transcript: Video 2 The role of digestion

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LAURENCE TOTELIN

Today, I’m going to make an oxygarum. And an oxygarum is named after its main ingredient, and that’s the garum. And garum is a liquid that is made with rotten fish. And the oxygarum is meant to help digestion.

So the ingredients, first we have peppercorns. And then we have two common herbs, parsley, and lovage. Lovage is not in season at the moment. So I’ve replaced it with mint, which is an ingredient that was commonly used for digestion in the ancient world. And the ancients themselves often did use another ingredient when it wasn’t in season.

Then we have caraway seeds and honey and fish sauce. I’ve used Thai fish sauce because that’s what is closest to the Roman garum. And finally, vinegar.

So now I’m going to measure and crush the ingredients. This recipe is measured in ounces. The Roman ounce is between 25 and 30 grammes, so that’s quite a large amount. And what I’m going to do instead is use a spoonful of each ingredient. And that’s OK in Roman medicine. Roman medicine is all about proportions.

So I’m going to take a spoonful of peppercorns, a bit of parsley, the lovage that I have, plus a bit of mint, and the caraway seeds. And then I am going to crush the ingredients together with my pestle.

So this is a household remedy. It’s made with relatively common ingredients. And depending on the wealth of the household, it would have been a slave preparing it in a wealthy household or the lady of the house.

So I’m done with my crushing now. And I’m going to add some honey. And this is going to make a paste. So this paste doesn’t look particularly appetising. It’s greenish-blackish. But it smells lovely. So it smells of honey and herbs and spices. So it’s really nice.

So the next step in the recipe is to add the liquids. So normally this would be put in a jar and stored. But I don’t have a jar here, so I’m just going to show you how it works. So I’m going to add the fish sauce and the vinegar. And it was probably quite a lot of it. So this was meant to make a large amount.

So now that I’ve added the liquids, the smell has really changed. And it’s very pungent. And it’s not nice at all.

And now that the preparation is ready, I can take it. So if I have indigestion, I can take a little spoonful of my remedy. It’s not too bad. It’s very strong tasting. But it’s much sweeter than I thought it would be. So it’s OK. I’m not sure it would do anything to indigestion, though.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s so strong.

End transcript: Video 2 The role of digestion

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Video 2 The role of digestion