A 2,000-Year-Old Appetizer Worth Bringing Back
The first course in our ancient Thanksgiving feast.
I love to cook. I love to bake. And lately, I've been spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to perfect sourdough bread. So when I discovered that ancient Romans were making a cheese-and-herb spread nearly 2,000 years ago, I had one thought: I bet that would be delicious on warm sourdough.
It's called moretum (moh-REH-tum).
It's a mixture of fresh cheese, herbs, olive oil, and vinegar, traditionally crushed together with a mortar and pestle.
A Roman writer named Columella deserves credit for writing the recipe around AD 60. Thanks to him—and generations of people who copied his writings—we can still make it today.
Of course, ancient people were baking bread long before Columella came along. They knew about naturally fermented dough, too. The Egyptians were making leavened bread for millennia. So while flatbread would be perfectly appropriate with moretum, I'm going with my homemade sourdough.
And here's where things get interesting.
Ancient recipes weren't written like ours. Forget precise measurements, oven temperatures, and instructions to beat something for exactly three minutes. Much of the interpretation is left to the cook. Which, frankly, sounds like my kind of cooking.
My mother and grandmother rarely measured anything. A pinch of this, a dab of that. Ask how much flour to add, and you'd hear, "You'll know by how it looks." Bread dough? "You can tell when it's not too sticky." Very helpful, Grandma.
So I've taken the ancient ingredients, added a little modern convenience (my electric mixer), and used my best judgment to create a version we can actually make in our kitchens.
Give it a try, preferably with a warm slice of sourdough, and please come back and tell me what you think in the comments. I'd love to know whether this ancient appetizer deserves a place on a modern Thanksgiving table.
Next week: We're going back nearly 4,000 years to ancient Babylon, where the world's oldest surviving collection of written recipes was discovered on clay tablets. I'll be making a stew from one of those tablets. No measuring cups. No cooking times. Just ancient ingredients and a little culinary courage.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yours truly,
Harper Woods
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