By Sean Coughlin

This post follows on yesterday’s post on whether the Romans had pumpkins.

Translation:

[Cooked] gourds with fowl: [add] hard-fleshed peaches, truffles, pepper, caraway, cumin, silphium, green herbs – mint, celery, coriander, pennyroyal, mentuccia –,  honey, wine, liquamen, oil and vinegar. (The Latin text is here).

My interpretation:

Ingredients

• 2 tbsps. olive oil
• 2 large turkey drumsticks (about 750 g)
• Salt and pepper
• Half a sugar pumpkin or butternut squash, cubed
• One apple, peeled, cored and diced
• 1/4 tsp. asafoetida
• 1/2 tsp. caraway
• 1/2 tsp. cumin
• Silphium (1/2 tsp. fennel seeds will do)

For the sauce

• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 cup chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 tbsp. honey
• dash of fish-sauce or MSG
• Fresh herbs to taste (mint, celery, coriander, pennyroyal, oregano)
• Truffles, shaved (to taste)

1. Season the turkey legs with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in deep pan over high heat. Add turkey legs and cook, skin-side down, until crispy and golden brown (8 minutes or so). Flip legs and cook until the other side is browned, another 5 minutes. Transfer to a plate.

2. Return pan to heat with a bit more oil, and when it’s hot, add the pumpkin or squash and asafoetida. Cook until the pumpkin just begins brown, about 5 minutes. Add the apple, caraway, cumin and fennel seeds and cook for another few minutes until browned.

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3. Add wine to the pan and reduce by half. Add stock, honey, fish-sauce and herbs. Return the drumsticks to the pan, cover and let simmer for an hour until drumsticks are fall-apart tender. Add water or more stock if it begins to look too dry. Alternatively, place in an oven preheated to 375 F / 190 C. Serve drumsticks with roasted sweet potatoes, drizzle on some of the sauce with some shaved truffle.

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I’ve recently become obsesessed with cucurbits thanks to a question from Peter Singer. This resulted in a discussion with Laurence Totelin that took place this summer during a workshop at the Humboldt-Universität as part of SFB 980, project A03, “The Transfer of Medical Episteme in the ‘Encyclopaedic’ Compilations of Late Antiquity”, with Philip van der Eijk. The subject was our forthcoming translations of Books I and II of Aetius of Amida’s Medical Collections. “We” are Sean Coughlin, Eric Gowling, Christine Salazar, and Piero Tassinari. Many thanks to our guests Alessia Guardasole, Matteo Martelli, and of course Laurence for attending. The translation of Book I was completed by Eric Gowling as a doctoral dissertation and was in the process of being revised by Piero Tassinari and myself when he passed away last year. I hope Piero would appreciate this little essay. He is dearly missed.

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