Roman Apician celery sauce

A Roman herb and celery sauce for boiled meats, adapted from Apicius: ancient flavour in modern form

Origin: Rome, Italy

From the journey of Celery.

The Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria, attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius and compiled around the 1st–4th centuries CE, is the oldest surviving culinary text in the Western tradition, and it mentions celery (apium) in dozens of recipes. The Romans used wild celery as a flavouring herb rather than a vegetable, prizing its bitter, aromatic intensity for sauces, broths, and seasonings. The celebrated 'green sauce' tradition, herb sauces to accompany boiled and roasted meats, is one of the oldest unbroken culinary traditions in European cooking, running from Roman apium sauces through medieval verde sauces to the Italian salsa verde and French sauce verte that persist today. The sauce recorded here, known in Latin as ius in apium (literally 'sauce of celery'), combines celery with pepper, cumin, coriander, wine, and the fermented fish sauce garum that underpinned virtually all Roman seasoning. The result is complex, pungent, herbal, and deeply savoury, a window into a way of cooking that shaped the entire European culinary tradition.

Ingredients

Celery

  • 4 stalks celery (including leaves), very finely chopped

Herb

  • 1 handful fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped

Spice

  • 0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 0.5 tsp ground cumin
  • 0.25 tsp ground coriander seed

Umami

  • 1 tbsp fish sauce (a substitute for Roman garum: use Thai fish sauce)

Liquid

  • 100 ml dry white wine

Acid

  • 1 tbsp white wine vinegar

Sweet

  • 1 tbsp honey

Fat

  • 2 tbsp olive oil

Thickening

  • 0.5 tsp cornflour, mixed with 1 tbsp water (optional, for thickening)

Method

  1. Combine the wine, vinegar, fish sauce, and honey in a small saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat and cook for 3 minutes to reduce slightly and cook off the raw wine.
  2. Add the chopped celery and parsley, the black pepper, cumin, and coriander. Simmer for 5 minutes until the celery is soft and the herbs have flavoured the sauce.
  3. Stir in the olive oil. If you want a thicker sauce, add the cornflour slurry and stir over heat for 1 minute until slightly thickened.
  4. Taste and adjust the balance: the sauce should be herbal and green, warmly spiced, and have a clear presence of both acid and sweetness with a background of savoury depth.
  5. Serve warm alongside boiled or roasted chicken, pork, or fish: or as a dipping sauce for bread. It is also excellent tossed through plain boiled pasta (an anachronism, but a delicious one).

Notes

This recipe is adapted from Apicius Book III (Cepuros), and represents an interpretation rather than a strict reconstruction. Roman spice profiles were significantly more complex than modern Western cooking: the combination of fish sauce, sweet wine, vinegar, and multiple warm spices will seem unfamiliar at first but reveals its own coherent logic on tasting. For a more faithful recreation, replace the white wine with passum (raisin wine, approximated by a mix of white wine and a teaspoon of raisins boiled together) and add a pinch of lovage, which is the characteristic herb of Roman cooking.

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