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I am trying to reproduce a recipe found in the Roman "cookbook" Apicius, Conditum paradoxum: it is a spiced wine that calls for honey as an ingredient, but it uses a lot (30 % of the volume of the wine).

This means – adapting the recipe, that originally is for 14 11 liters of wine – that for a bottle of wine I should add 230 ml of honey (340 g if considering a density of 1,45 kg/l).

I was wondering if the honey produced in ancient times could be perhaps "lighter" than the honey we know; this could, at least a little, allow me to reduce the sweetness.

Andrea Shaitan
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    A Sextarius is .55 liters, the recipe calls for 20 Sextarii of wine, so that's about 11 liters of wine, not 14. – GdD Nov 02 '18 at 11:22
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    Note that an American pint is different to an Imperial pint, although 1 Sextarius = 1.5 pints is wrong for both. – Richard Nov 02 '18 at 11:47
  • GdD answer is very good. The closest wine you can find is Beaujolais nouveau. The charcoal filter was used to remove dust used to clarify the wine. – SZCZERZO KŁY Nov 02 '18 at 12:38
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    Even in modern times "honey" isn't a standard homogenous product, unless you only buy it in supermarkets. What you get is very sensitive to what flowers the bees have been visiting! – alephzero Nov 02 '18 at 14:12
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    The recipe seems to be calling for making a spiced honey-wine syrup, then thinning it back down to liquid with additional wine. It sounds like it is intended as what we would think of as a honey liqueur, cordial, or aperitif. Though also, @alephzero is right about honey as with all other ingredients - outside the very recent industrial-commercial food industry, most natural products are highly inconsistent by nature and cooks of the day would have just had to accept that things would come out differently with each batch (or would need adjustment to the recipe in ways usually not written down). – BrianH Nov 02 '18 at 15:53
  • Thanks @GdD, I took for granted what was written in the site where I found the text; it does not change that much but I will edit the question. – Andrea Shaitan Nov 02 '18 at 16:01
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    @alephzero, yes, but it is standardised for example in the residual water content (18% in Italy but generally around this value) – Andrea Shaitan Nov 02 '18 at 16:21
  • Most commercially available honey is highly filtered to remove pollen, etc, and can't be considered honey! See [this page](https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/) at Food Safety News. In cooking and eating (I prefer honey in my morning coffee) I use raw honey which has not been filtered. – IconDaemon Nov 02 '18 at 17:35
  • I heard that in some areas in old times they washed out the honey instead of getting it in the pure form like today, so it would be more liquid than today. No idea how widespread and true this is though – PlasmaHH Nov 03 '18 at 09:11
  • I don't know what processing is done to "commercial grade" honey. I prefer the stuff that comes from my local bee-keeper - the only processing that gets is a simple mesh filter to keep bits of beeswax out of the honey jars. – alephzero Nov 03 '18 at 10:22
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    @PlasmaHH the modern "low tech" way is to cut the beeswax capping from the honeycomb cells with a warm knife (i.e. an ordinary kitchen knife warmed in hot water), spin the frames to get the honey out (in a hand cranked machine a bit like a scaled-down spin drier) and then filter out any bits of beeswax that got mixed with the honey with a wire mesh kitchen strainer. In a warm climate you could simply put the honeycomb in the sun and let the honey drip out of it. – alephzero Nov 03 '18 at 10:26
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    @alephzero commercial grade is often ultrafiltration and pollen are removed. Up here in the more cold climate putting it in the sun would rarely work. The biggest difference to today might be that spinning stuff wasn't widespread much back then – PlasmaHH Nov 03 '18 at 15:30

2 Answers2

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It's not honey that's changed since ancient times, it's wine! Wine makers in ancient Rome lacked the knowledge and equipment to prevent oxidation and unwanted bacterial colonies, so their product was pretty awful by modern standards, being both sour and bitter with all sorts of off flavors. Honey and spices were added to try and make it palatable.

So you can't re-create the roman recipe without roman style wine, which you won't find in any store because nobody would want to buy it! If you add the same amount of honey to wine of today it will be overwhelmingly sweet, my suggestion would be to add a little bit of honey to it and work your way up. I would also suggest you not follow the recipe to the letter:

  1. Don't let it sit like the recipe suggests, add the spices in and let it steep, then strain and add more wine
  2. Don't filter it through charcoal: the reason they did that was because wine makers added all sorts of awful stuff to preserve the wine, modern wines don't have those issues. If it has particulates try using a coffee filter instead.
GdD
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    I'd also suggest picking an extremely dry wine, leaving the sweetening entirely up to the honey. – Erica Nov 02 '18 at 12:04
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    Good point @Erica. Dry, maybe a bit acidic, something you wouldn't ordinarily drink maybe. – GdD Nov 02 '18 at 12:16
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    Do you have any citations for this? I know little about wine production, historical or otherwise, but I would be surprised if the Romans, who **a)** consumed _lots_ of wine and **b)** were in many regards quite advanced, and certainly had a knack for culinary finesse (or at least, _for culinary luxus_), really had only such bad wine. I would think it more likely that the OP's recipe simply should be understood as more a dessert rather than an actual drink. – leftaroundabout Nov 02 '18 at 13:25
  • @leftaroundabout According to the notes on the recipe, it was actually an apéritif. – Richard Nov 02 '18 at 13:29
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    @leftaroundabout It probably wasn't *only* such bad wine, just *mostly* (and [here is a news article](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/dining/the-history-of-wine-drinking-from-a-chore-to-a-choice.html) on the topic). A Roman cook working with high-quality wine would presumably adjust the proportions in the Apicius recipe when working with the good stuff! – Erica Nov 02 '18 at 13:44
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    If you're trying to be historically accurate, you may want to look at products marketed as "natural wine". Over the last year or so I've seen a few articles written by apparent wine-snobs slamming people making them for turning their backs on all the modern processes used to make consistent high quality products vs the erratic and often sketchy quality of pre-modern wine. Based on those comments I suspect that product is probably as close to the Roman product as you can get these days. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Nov 02 '18 at 13:57
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    You're not going to be able to be entirely accurate even if you end up making your own wine (not recommended): the varietals they used don't even exist anymore. You can find some that are biologically close still in Macedonia (the country) and Greece, but you won't be 100% accurate. – Roddy of the Frozen Peas Nov 02 '18 at 15:30
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    It is easy to get bad wine, it is called wine vinegar – Ian Nov 02 '18 at 15:38
  • In ancient Rome the lowest grade of wine was essentially vinegar @Ian, made from the leas and grape leftovers. Then there was a grade above which was better but still pretty rough. The first press was reserved for the best wines. – GdD Nov 02 '18 at 15:46
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    Do note that their honey would also have been different because the flavour of honey is highly dependent on what plants the bees collect from. Most commercial honey these days is clover honey because clover is cheap to grow and makes a lot of flowers, but you can find other types in some stores, and an even wider variety from your local beekeepers, so don't hesitate to experiment a bit. – Perkins Nov 02 '18 at 20:11
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    Romans were also known to [sweeten their wine with toxic chemicals](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-deadly-sweetener-89984487/). I wouldn't try too hard to reproduce their recipes exactly. – StackOverthrow Nov 02 '18 at 20:29
  • They added lead sometimes @tkk, don't even joke about that! – GdD Nov 02 '18 at 20:35
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    @Perkins I guess that romans used a multiflower honey, monovarietal is a modern thing. I live in south of France so I'm pretty confident that the honey I can found from beekeepers here is not so different (in terms of floral flavor) from what Romans could have. – Andrea Shaitan Nov 02 '18 at 22:22
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    @GdD Not so sure about the bad quality of Roman wine; sure they lacked modern oenology technology, but considering what they've been able to achieve in other fields we cannot say with certainty that their wine was awful (especially when we cannot prove it). Honey and spices were added probably to preserve wines, maybe for taste and for medicinal reasons. Does it seems logical to add expensive products like pepper and saffron to something spoiled? would you add saffron to a ruined dish in order to make it more palatable? I'm pretty sure you wouldn't – Andrea Shaitan Nov 02 '18 at 22:30
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    Andrea: it doesn't matter. If you can't produce hemetically sealed containers, you're going to be limited to producing, at best, oxidized and vinegary wine. And for all the Romans' innovations, they didn't even have barrels until after 100AD. It's telling that ancient Greeks did not distinguish between "wine" and "vinegar". – FuzzyChef Nov 04 '18 at 06:21
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    @AndreaShaitan Alcohol. Even today, it is standard to take beverages that contain alcohol but taste horrible and mix them with other stuff to make them more palatable. The ability to get drunk is a strong incentive to get an acquired taste for beverages you wouldn't normally touch with a 10-feet pole, based on their taste only. – Federico Poloni Nov 04 '18 at 08:43
  • @FuzzyChef Ceramic Amphroa/Pithos, sealed with a clay plug? Heavier than a barrel, but still well sealed. As for *'ancient Greeks did not distinguish between "wine" and "vinegar"'* - the Modern German language does not distinguish between Ham or Gammon ("Schinken"), but that doesn't mean that they're not capable of producing both. The meaning is generally contextual. – Chronocidal Nov 05 '18 at 10:18
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    @AndreaShaitan plus the Romans had one massive sweet tooth :) – jwenting Nov 05 '18 at 12:20
  • Amphoras are not sealed; they are made from low-fire terracotta, which is porous, and passes both oxygen and bacteria. Romans lined them with resin or wax to improve the seal, but it was far from perfect. – FuzzyChef Nov 05 '18 at 16:27
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    @AndreaShaitan multiflower was probably more common, but it's going to depend on location. Even in the wild it's not uncommon for some areas to be dominated by only one or two flower species if they're well adapted to the local climate. That happening with certain varieties of rhododendron is where "mad honey" comes from. – Perkins Nov 12 '18 at 23:15
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Possibly the wine is supposed to be diluted with water once you've finished spicing and sweetening it? The text doesn't mention it, but adding a lot of water with your wine was the norm so the author may have assumed that you'd know to do that bit.

Vince Bowdren
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  • Yep, pretty sure Caesar in the Gallic Wars wrote that he was astounished that Gallics drank their wine without cutting it with water. – Vulpo Nov 29 '18 at 15:42