Recipe: Saturnalia Must Cake
450g/1 lb wholemeal self-raising flour
15ml sweet wine (and more to taste)
½ tsp cumin seeds
2-3 anis stars
1 egg beaten
50g/2 oz lard, at room temperature
50g/2 oz Cheddar Cheese
dribble of olive oil for baking tray
bay leaves
Method:
Preheat oven to 200°C. Crunch up cumin and anis in pestle and mortar. Combine flour and spices in a bowl, with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda if desired. Add grated cheese. Add lard, then cut in to pieces and rub in. Make a well and add 15ml wine, then bring in the flour mixture with a fork. Mix in the beaten egg. Pour in more wine as necessary (quite a lot more!) and knead by hand to a ball of soft dough. If you have overdone the wine, sprinkle on more flour. Pull the ball in half, in half again, and break into threes; roll into 12 round balls. Flatten each cake on a bayleaf on an oiled tray. Either bake at 200°C for 18 minutes on a mid-high shelf, or under a Roman baking cover with hot cinders until they look done, or adjust temperature for your fan oven.
Variations:
Different cookery writers recommend different cheeses, including cottage cheese and feta. Other flours work (you can now buy the ancient variety, spelt). Wholemeal, which was in my store-cupboard, is absorbent; that may explain why I needed about 3 times the recommended amount of wine. Must, or fermented wine lees, requires access to a vineyard or a homemade wine enthusiast; alternatives are grape juice with yeast, or my taster suggested cider or beer though I haven’t tried that. Adding more cumin (say, 2-3 tbsp) and anis makes a spicier cake which clears the sinuses, but you can’t taste the cheese. Possibly fresh bayleaves would be more exciting than dried.
Feedback: The result is more of more of a flavoured bread roll than a modern cake. I tried different versions, which are all based on Cato’s original, and this one owes most to English Heritage’s recipe. At least it didn’t have to be fed to the birds. My rather forthright taster was unimpressed all round (so were my birds). I say, Ma is right: this is cheap scoff for slaves.
