Roman garlic and herb paste: from the ancient poem that is also a recipe
Origin: Ancient Rome
From the journey of Garlic.
Moretum is one of the most remarkable documents in culinary history: a Latin poem of 124 lines, attributed in antiquity to Virgil but now generally thought to be by an unknown author of the 1st century BCE or early CE, that describes in extraordinary narrative detail the morning routine of a Roman peasant farmer named Simylus. Before going out to work his fields, Simylus grinds a paste of garlic, fresh herbs, hard cheese, salt, oil, and vinegar in a stone mortar to eat with bread. The poem is simultaneously a recipe and a social portrait (the only surviving literary account of what an ordinary working Roman ate for breakfast) and it is written with a poet's precision and a cook's eye for the physical reality of making food by hand. The paste Simylus makes is the direct ancestor of pesto: raw garlic pounded first to a paste, then herbs worked in, then cheese crumbled through, then oil and vinegar beaten in to emulsify the whole. The mortar technique (grinding raw garlic to an absolute paste before incorporating the other ingredients) is also the founding technique behind skordalia, aioli, and toum. All descend from the same ancient Mediterranean tradition of pounding garlic to release its alliins and then emulsifying it with fat. The poem's famous phrase, fessaque dextera, 'his right hand grows weary'; speaks with honest humour to the sheer physical labour of making this properly in a stone mortar. There are no shortcuts in ancient cooking. The herbs Simylus uses are specified in the poem: rue (ruta graveolens; bitter, citrusy, medicinal, beloved of Roman cooks and now largely absent from modern kitchens), parsley, coriander, and celery; specifically the pale inner leaves of wild celery, which have an intensity that cultivated celery leaf lacks. Walnuts or pine nuts are sometimes mentioned in scholarly interpretations of the poem as optional additions for body and richness. The cheese is a fresh, salty sheep's milk curd: the Roman equivalent of fresh pecorino or ricotta salata. Nothing in the ingredient list is complicated or expensive; everything is the produce of a small farm and a kitchen garden. Moretum was almost certainly eaten across the Roman world wherever legions and settlers carried their food traditions; in Britain, Gaul, the Iberian provinces, the Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. As a preparation it sits at the precise origin point of a dozen modern garlic sauces and herb pastes, connecting the kitchens of contemporary cooks directly to a Roman farmstead of two thousand years ago. To make it is to make something that a man named Simylus made before going to work on a cold morning, and the poem is there to tell you exactly how.
The poem Moretum can be read in full in any edition of the Appendix Vergiliana: the collection of minor Latin poems attributed, often incorrectly, to Virgil. The recipe-within-a-poem structure is unique in classical Latin literature; no other ancient text gives us this quality of detail about the daily food of an ordinary person. Making moretum is an act of historical re-enactment, but it is also genuinely delicious. Rue is worth sourcing from a kitchen herb garden if possible; its flavour is irreplaceable and gives the paste its specifically ancient, medicinal-herbal character. Omit it and the dish is still excellent; include it and you are tasting something that has not changed in two thousand years.
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