Roman cucumber salad with vinegar and herbs

Emperor Tiberius's daily obsession, reconstructed from Apicius: raw cucumber dressed with garum, wine vinegar, asafoetida, black pepper, and fresh mint.

Origin: Ancient Rome, Italy

From the journey of Cucumber.

This recipe is adapted directly from Apicius's De Re Coquinaria, compiled around the 4th century CE and the oldest surviving cookbook in the world. The Roman dressing, garum (fermented fish sauce), wine vinegar, silphium, and aromatic herbs, is the direct ancestor of modern oil-and-vinegar salad dressing, its logic travelling through medieval European tables into the modern kitchen. Emperor Tiberius famously demanded cucumbers every single day of the year; his gardeners built primitive wheeled cloches, structures that could be moved in and out of the sun to regulate temperature, to supply this demand regardless of season, creating arguably the first greenhouse technology in recorded history. Pliny the Elder described at least three distinct types of Roman cucumber in his Naturalis Historia, indicating sophisticated cultivation practices by the first century CE. Cucumbers were considered a luxury food in Rome, associated with aristocratic tables and with medicinal properties: Pliny recommended them for improving vision and easing scorpion stings. Silphium, the extinct aromatic plant of Cyrene that was central to Roman cooking, is approximated here by asafoetida: its nearest surviving relative in flavour.

Ingredients

main

  • 2 medium cucumbers, thinly sliced into rounds (skin on, as Romans ate them)

dressing

  • 1.5 tbsp fish sauce (garum substitute, use colatura di alici for the premium option)
  • 2 tbsp good red wine vinegar
  • 1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 pinch asafoetida powder (silphium substitute, use sparingly, it is powerful)
  • 0.5 tsp ground black pepper, freshly ground
  • 0.5 tsp ground cumin
  • 0.5 tsp honey

garnish

  • 3 tbsp fresh mint leaves, roughly torn
  • 2 tbsp fresh rue leaves (optional, traditional but intensely bitter; use very sparingly)

Method

  1. Slice the cucumbers thinly; Romans ate cucumbers with the skin on, and thin slicing was specified in the Apician texts. Arrange the slices in a single overlapping layer on a wide flat plate or shallow bowl.
  2. In a small bowl, combine the fish sauce, red wine vinegar, olive oil, asafoetida, black pepper, cumin, and honey. Whisk together. Taste the dressing carefully; it should be sharp, savoury, and complex. Adjust the honey or vinegar to balance.
  3. Pour the dressing over the cucumber slices. Scatter the torn mint leaves over the top. If using rue, add just two or three leaves; rue is intensely bitter and used as a flavour accent, not a herb in the modern sense.
  4. Allow the salad to sit for 5 minutes before serving, letting the dressing penetrate the cucumber slices slightly. Serve at room temperature as a first course or side dish.

Notes

The quality of the fish sauce matters enormously here; colatura di alici (Italian anchovy extract from Cetara) is the closest modern product to Roman garum and produces a dramatically better result than standard supermarket fish sauce. Vietnamese fish sauce (nuoc mam) is the next best substitute. Rue is included for historical accuracy but is entirely optional; it was one of Apicius's favourite herbs but has fallen out of culinary use for good reason. The Roman salad was not dressed in advance; like the modern salad, it was dressed at the table. This reconstruction is as close to the source text as modern ingredients allow.

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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