Circe's potion kind of worked

"She led them in and sat them on couches and chairs and stirred cheese, barley and pale honey with Pramnian wine for them, and she mixed evil drugs into the food, so that they would forget their fatherland entirely. Immediately after she struck them with her wand, she confined them to pigsties. They had the heads, voices, bristles and bodies of swine, but their human minds remained as they were before" (Odyssey 10.233-240).

Bolstered by my success with Hecamede's kykeon, I finally decided to try my hand at Circe's potion. Odysseus' comrades drink it down willingly, so it must have been familiar to their palates, and Homer treats it as beautifully as the other food described in the Odyssey. But somehow the mixture does not sound delicious to me. Barley, cheese, honey and wine? Seriously? The constituent parts all sound good but ... all mixed together?

A couple of years ago, several students from my Great Books class took it upon themselves to cook up versions of the potion and bring them to class. Being the teacher, I felt morally obligated to taste the concoctions made from oatmeal, various types of cheese (whatever they had lying around -- usually cheddar), grape juice (so they wouldn't get in trouble for bringing alcohol to school). They were nasty, even though the some went through the trouble of decorating their containers with glitter to make the potion somewhat more appealing. One bottle of their Circe's potion is still displayed on my bookshelf (in my collection of classically themed liquids, alongside Ajax dish detergent and Ethos water). I like to think of it as inspirational.

Thus inspired, Amy and I made two batches of potion, one using ricotta and the other feta. I had used semolina for Hecamede's kykeon, but Circe's called for barley. I had found a bag of peeled barley at m2m on Third Ave., cooked it as I would rice and mixed it, still hot, with cheese. Meanwhile, Amy heated up the kosher wine I had lying around from a tasting I did a few weeks ago (I figured the heat would negated any need for the wine to have Pramnian origins) and stirred in some honey (I didn't have any ancient Greek honey nor do I keep bees, so we had to use the kind that comes out of the plastic bear). Mixing honeyed wine with cheesy barley was impossible; they could not be incorporated, even when put through the food processor (which Homer does not mention).

Both potions were by now a sickly pink color. The one made with feta was closer to the baby food consistency of Hecamede's kykeon, but far lumpier. The ricotta potion was much like bubble tea -- the barley sank to the bottom like tapioca pearls in liquid. We left out the evil drugs because I couldn't decide what modern equivalent I could substitute in. Tylenol? Not nearly evil enough. Not evil at all, actually.

Amy and I tasted both potions and decided that neither was revolting and if we were hungry enough from sailing around Greece and being shipwrecked, we would probably go ahead and eat them. But they really weren't good; they tasted sickly pink.

We didn't forget our fatherlands and we didn't turn into pigs, but being female, we decided that we weren't the best guinea pigs for this experiment, so we forced a bit down my boyfriend's throat. He declared the potion gross but not that gross and ultimately, nothing happened.

...Until about five hours later when I found him on the bathroom floor vomiting up every last trace of the potion and shouting, "Circe got me!"

It was horrendous; he was sick for two whole days. He didn't turn into a pig but he only seemed a little shy of total metamorphosis. I guess I should have discovered what moly was before I inflicted the power of Circe upon him.

Erebinthoi syn Xeroi Tyroi, Oi!

Chickpeas are good and cheese is good, thus I decided to test Mark Grant's recipe for Erebinthoi syn Xeroi Tyroi (Chickpeas with cheese). The recipe is wonderfully simple: chickpeas (soaked overnight) are boiled in salted water and then covered with grated cheese, either Parmesan or Pecorino Romano (Grant 148). Grant also promises a "glistening effect" that the cheese has on the chickpeas. 

In the ancient world, grated hard cheese was recognized for its versatility and nutrition. "Hard cheese was a practical, easily portable, and nourishing foodstuff on campaign to carry with him. It could have been broken into hunks and eaten with bread, though this combination, so familiar to us, is rarely mentioned by ancient sources. With a grater to hand, it could be grated into dough, or over fish or meat as available" (West 191).

I, too, carry hard cheese around with me, although I have never been a soldier on campaign. I get bonus points for this particular dish because the Parmesan I used was grated from the 1kg hunk that I brought back this summer from Rome (via Israel. The airport security officers were not amused). 

On chickpeas, Joan Alcock informs us, "the Greeks served them as part of tragemata eaten fresh, roasted, or dried, and served them at symposia. When boiled they were used in soup; in Rome this was a cheap food, bought from street sellers" (Alcock 36). Alcock also provides two very helpful citations: Aristophanes in The Peace (1136) "mocked the name, giving it a double meaning as 'glans penis,' and noted its tendency to cause flatulence." Alcock also cites Anthimus (De Observatione Ciborum Theodoricum Regem Francorum Epistula 66) who "warned that, when eaten raw, they caused violent flatulence, bad indigestion, and diarrhea, but they were diuretic and hence food for the kidneys."

Wonderful. I regret that I did not save any chickpeas to eat raw as a test. Oh well, next time. I find flatulence fascinating. Scatological humor in comedy is often recognized as representative of fertility and fecundity. The bomoloxeuma of Strepsiades in The Clouds -- his delight in hearing and making references to farting and defecating -- degrades both himself and Socrates, thereby destroying sanctimonious atmospheres in a similar way to how Jeffery Henderson views the function of cathartic sexual obscenity on the stage. Henderson sees "presentation of uninhibited sexuality, frequent reference to excretion" etc. as both the comic hero and the audience's "self-assertion against authority."

In Old Comedy, farts rival thunder. When in The Clouds, the cloud chorus appears, Socrates says, "August Clouds, you have clearly heard me calling, (to Strepsiades) did you perceive the voice together with the divine roaring thunder?" (292) and Strepsiades replies, "I revere you, much-honorable ones, and I want to fart back to the thunder, so much do I shiver and fear you, and now, whether or not it is permitted, I will shit!" (293-5).

Perhaps Strepsiades ate too many chickpeas.

Yet in The Clouds, there is no actual defecation -- only the urge to do so and resulting farts. The lack of dung and remaining flatulence eliminates any representation of fertility and focuses on character debasement and a sort of cathartic grossness.

Now that I have made chickpeas with cheese thoroughly appetizing, I highly recommend them as a side dish. They do indeed glisten, the chickpeas themselves are firm and nutty and would pair well with perhaps a bit of steak and green salad. If nothing else, its gaseous results can at least induce comedic catharsis.

References:

Alcock, J.P. Food in the Ancient World. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006

Henderson, J. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. Oxford, 1991

Grant, M. Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens, London 1999

West, M.L. "Grated Cheese Fit for Heroes," The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 18.190-191, 1998

Wrap Stars: Placenta (as in Cheese and Pastry Pie, not the other kind)

It would take much more than a blog or even a book to detail all there is to know or consider

when it comes to the primary ingredients of the recipe for Placenta: flour, cheese and honey, so for this entry, I will only address one aspect of this pie in terms of symbolic significance.

Grant notes that while "the Athenians of the fifth century BC loved their bars," Roman bars (popinae) were "sleazy" (Grant 84). I was therefore going to make a sleazy cheese pie. Awesome.

He calls the pie an ancient form of tyropitakia (Grant 104-5) and indeed there was quite a bit of wrapping and layering involved in the process, although my finished product would never be referred to as light or fluffy. I first slapped two types of dough together, one made from wheat flour and one from white. I creamed honey with feta (sliced from the two pound... well, loaf that I had picked up from the Mediterranean Foods store in Agora Plaza. I like to be prepared with lots of cheese at hand. Also I did not realize how much feta two pounds of feta was when I asked the cheese man to slice me off a hunk.).

I painstakingly rolled the balls of dough as thin as I could (not terribly thin). I had to dust flour on the white dough constantly as it stuck to everything -- the table, my hands, the rolling pin. My honey and cheese filling looked somewhat chunky, but I figured it would even out as it melted in the oven. The little bits of cold filling I tasted seemed really good. Cheese mixed with honey. Genius.

In a nice and swift overview of the history of cheese, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge (always helpful) provides the following: "the production of cheese seems to have first taken root in the Middle East, specifically Mesopotamia... When the art of cheese making finally made its way to Europe, the cooler climate meant less of a need for salting and more of a chance for microbes and molds to grow on the cheese; these are what give aged varieties their stronger and more distinctive flavors. By the time of the Romans, cheese making had become a refined art and various cheese types were developed using different storage and aging conditions. Indeed, cheese was so important to the Roman diet that houses had a separate cheese kitchen (called a caseale) as well as a special area where it could mature" (NYT 1263).

My loaf of feta was not one of those matured Roman cheeses. It was salted. Somehow my taste buds initially missed this fact. I wish I had read this blurb in the New York Times Guide before beginning to make the pies.

The combination of cheese and honey held particular significance to the Romans as marriage food (Apuleius recognizes this in the Golden Ass in his references to cheese and by extension, Circe's potion, cheese and witches [Oates 208, Etienne 303]). Caroline Oates also traces the implication that cheese refers to women (and therefore, sex) throughout European folklore from when "in Apuleius' Golden Ass it signifies women as sexual partners" (Oates 206). Thus we have yet another angle to this cheese pie being sleazy.

My sister and I decided to make spam musubi at the same time (I still didn't totally trust those ancient recipes to provide a satisfying dinner), since we are always homesick for Hawaiian food anyway. I wrapped layers of dough around the cheesy mixture, alternating white dough and cheese spread, while my sister wrapped nori around rice and spam, which I had marinated in soy sauce and sugar, then fried.

The apartment smelled amazing, all honeyed and warm (with undertones of salty, spammy goodness).

The pies turned out rustic looking with a few cheese bubbles spilling through holes I left in their centers and the crust (which I had labored to make as thin as possible) was fantastic, like a toasty, crunchy cracker. I started off by picking off bits of crust to eat first. Very satisfying. But the cheese filling, pretty good at first bite, became horrendously salty by the third. My sister and I choked down most of our pies (we were raised to never waste food) until we just couldn't anymore. Salt was a fairly precious commodity to the Romans, so something went horribly wrong. I did not take into account how inherently salted the feta was so I did not skip the requisite teaspoon of salt that Grant's recipe called for. I paid for this oversight; my tongue tingled for at least an hour after I gave up on the pie -- even after two bottles of Mythos (Mythoi?).

And I had flour everywhere -- in my hair, on my pants, between my toes.

So for dinner I ended up mournfully eating the flour-dusted, back-up spam musubi. We had managed to not screw that up. I will just have to keep the two remaining pies in my ancient fridge until I can throw them at someone I hate.

References:

Etienne, R. "Fromages et alimentation a Rome," In Histoire et geographie des fromages, ed. Pierre Brunet. 299-304. Caen: Universite de Caen, 1987

Grant, M. Roman Cookery: Ancient Recipes for Modern Kitchens, London 1999

The New York Times. The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind. New York: Macmillan, 2007

Oates, C. "Cheese Gives You Nightmares: Old Hags and Heartburn," Folklore, Vol. 114:2, Aug. 2003