Who doesn't know the roman frickin
empire, am I right? When it comes to branding they're at the
top. They're up there with Coke, and Disney, and McDonald's so I think it's
pretty big of them to have given credit when making today's recipe
to a little bit lesser of an empire. Someone
that was not so much a household name and a nemesis at that. Pullum parthicum or
Parthian chicken is a classic Roman dish from the De Re
Coquinaria. So today that's what we're making and
it'll give us an opportunity to look at the Parthian empire and see just why
that empire got the credit for this dish, this time on Tasting History. Parthian chicken open the chicken at the
rear end and in the square shape. Pound pepper,
lovage, a little caraway, moisten with liquamen,
blend with wine. Put the chicken in an earthenware pot,
and pour the sauce over it. Dissolve strong asafoetida in lukewarm water,
pour it over the chicken and let it cook. Sprinkle with pepper
and serve. So is this chicken Roman or Parthian? Well it has a distinctly
Roman ingredient, caraway seeds which were grown in
central Europe at the time, but then it also has a distinctly
Parthian ingredient asafoetida which came to Rome along the Silk road from Parthia. Asafoetida or asafetida as
it's sometimes called is the extract of a plant of the same
name that's grown in the mountainous regions of Iran and
Afghanistan. It was a very popular ingredient in
ancient Rome especially after its North African cousin silphium
went extinct, and I would actually love to do an entire episode just on
silphium so if that's something you might like to see
let me know in the comments. So i've never actually tried
asafoetida. I bought it just yesterday to make this recipe,
and I undid the top and I have to say it lives up to its name and so i'm a
little trepidatious to actually eat it. It's name asafoetida comes from
asa meaning gum and fetada meaning fetid or stinking,
and it stinks. It smells like an apartment that I had back in college
where over the summer a cat died in the wall,
and nobody knew and the apartment was in Arizona so
yeah. Of course it's going to be a popular ingredient in ancient
Rome and I can't wait to try it... Anyway for this recipe what you'll need
is one chicken (three to four pounds), one and a half
teaspoons of pepper, plus a little extra for garnish, one
tablespoon of chopped lovage. So lovage might be a
little hard to find, I actually got some because I had a
viewer send it to me freeze-dried from England, very, very
excited. Kind of smells like um, smells a bit like
celery but but a little more potent so thank you to
James Eddie and Bodhi for picking this wonderful lovage,
and sending it my way here to the states. I do have to warn you
after some research about lovage i found out you're not supposed to eat it if
you're pregnant, or have kidney problems so you know
maybe stick with celery if you want,
or if you can't find lovage. One and a half teaspoons of caraway seeds,
three tablespoons of liquamen, now that is
garum which I'm sure many people found my channel from when i discussed
garum. It's that ancient roman fermented fish sauce.
So I'm actually using Colatura Di Alici, which is a fermented
fish sauce, rather than my quick garum that I made in that episode.
This is going to have a little bit more of the umami flavor that you're
going to get. You can also use just a regular Eastern Asian
fish sauce as well. One cup or 250 milliliters of wine.
You can use red, you can use white, it doesn't matter it's up to you.
Three quarters of a teaspoon of asafoetida powder. Now if you can find the
actual root, good for you but most people are going
to find this in a powder. If it's yellow there's more turmeric in
it so you might want to use a little bit more
maybe like a full teaspoon. If it's brown then there's less turmeric
in it so just stick with that Three-quarter
teaspoon, and 1 4 cup lukewarm water. So first we have to prepare the chicken
and the translation, I found many translations and none of them
really agree on on what it's saying there in that first
sentence. I kind of read it as you know cut open and then and then set
like a square which makes me think of like a butterfly or a spatched cock
chicken and I kind of love that word spatchcocked,
so that's what i'm going to be doing but you can go ahead and truss it, or cut
it up you can do whatever you want but just know that the cooking times that
i'm giving today are for a spatchcocked chicken so if you
are going to spatchcock your chicken make sure to clean it out and then with
kitchen shears cut out the spine then flip it back over and
crack the breastbone so it lays flat. If it keeps popping up you can actually
snip that breastbone as well so that it lays flat. Then set it into a
baking dish, and tuck in the wing tips so they don't
burn. You can also cook this in like a cast
iron skillet or a stainless steel pan, just anything that can go into the oven
and once your bird is set you can either
move on to the rest of the recipe or you can actually put it into the
refrigerator overnight. Let the skin dry, makes
for a crispier skin. When you are ready to move on go ahead
and set your oven to 450 degrees fahrenheit,
or 230 degrees celsius then grind up your pepper,
and your caraway seeds as best you can and mix them and the lovage in a bowl
then add your garum and finally the wine, and mix together.
Then in a separate bowl dissolve the asafoetida in the lukewarm water.
Now for some reason the recipe has you pouring these two sauces
separately over the chicken. I don't really understand
how that's going to to change things but you know what i'm going to do
as the De Re Coquinaria suggests, and first i'm going to pour the wine concoction
over the chicken and then the dissolved asafoetida mixture.
Then pop it in the oven for about 40 to 45 minutes, or until an
instant read thermometer stuck into the breast of the bird reads
165 degrees fahrenheit, or 74 degrees celsius.
Make sure to pour yourself a glass of wine so it doesn't go to waste. Now if
you're worried about the bird drying out while it's baking you can go ahead and
baste it a few times throughout the cooking process.
I didn't, it wasn't in the original recipe so I didn't do it but it's
probably a good practice. Now while the chicken bakes let us look
at the empire that gets all the credit for this dish. Now i'm not going to go into the long
and rather complex history of the Parthian empire and how they came to be,
but it is pretty impressive. Essentially
Alexander the Great had this huge empire that stretched from Europe to
India and then when he died it broke up into
smaller warring factions. You had the the Greco-Bactrians.
You had the Seleucids, and then over here you had ancient Rome which was
starting to grow and kind of come in as well,
and here this this little people called the Parni kind of
squeezed into the table and they're like "okay, all right,
okay", and finally all right we've quickly taken over all of Iran,
Iraq and parts of the caucasus and Syria.
It was really, really pretty impressive, and what they were famous for at this
point was something called the Parthian shot,
and that's when the archers during a feigned retreat or maybe a real
retreat on horseback would turn around, and shoot at their
enemies who were coming at them and it's actually where we get the
phrase parting shot. So that's kind of cool right but as cool
as etymology is what we're going to be discussing today
is what they were famous for later on when they kind of settled down
stopped trying to impress everyone, and realized that what they were
good at was business and being the middleman of the
Silk road. Starting around 90 AD the Silk road ran
from Northern China uninterrupted all the way
to Rome and it was controlled by just four
states. Now most of the goods being traded were
coming from either China on one side or Rome on the other side. They were the
two big players but in the middle you had these two smaller empires. You had the Kushan kingdom, they
had lots of spices to trade and they actually had a lot of the links
to the even further southeast like Indonesia and whatnot, and
then you had the Parthian empire and if the ancient Chinese sources are to be
believed then the only things that the Parthians
were trading were lions, gazelle, and large birds. So
yeah, but the Romans obviously were getting their asafoetida from them
hence the name of our dish so they were trading a few other things,
but they didn't need to because their trade
was business. See while the Kushans allowed Chinese traders to
come across their lands for a small fee, once they got to the Parthian city of
Merv, "Marv!" no, Merv they were stopped and basically
the Parthians were like give it here, give me, I got, I got it. I'll take it the
rest of the way, don't worry. I got it, I gotta you know what, it's long. You're gonna thank me, you're welcome I'm doing this for you,
and then they would take the goods the rest of the way to Rome, and sell them at
a tidy profit. It was a wonderful business model and
they kept tight control over their little section, their rather
large section, of the Silk road. In fact all through the
Han dynasty of 400 years there is only record of one Chinese
person getting across their lands. According to
the Hou Hanshu, a 5th century chronicle of the latter
part of the Han dynasty, in the year 97 the great general Ban
Chao sent Gan Ying as an ambassador to visit Daqin, which
is what they called Rome. Anyway Gan Ying made it all the way
across Parthia to the Western sea which was probably
the Persian gulf where he planned to take a ship the rest of the way,
but when he got there and tried to hire a ship the sailors told him
"the ocean is huge... if you encounter winds that delay you, it can take
two years... the vast ocean urges men to think of their country
and get homesick and some of them die." Now the sailors neglected to tell him
that there was a much faster, and safer route over land but you know what,
maybe he didn't ask so you know benefit of the doubt.
Anyway Gan Ying being practical said well why don't you just tell me about the
Roman empire, and so they did. He wrote it down and he
hoofed it back to China. Now we know that Rome was getting silks
from China and lots and lots of spices, and other exotic things from the Kushan
empire, and beyond. But what I find interesting
were the things that Rome was sending back "Gold, silver, and rare
precious stones, especially the jewel that shines at
night, the moonshine pearl and the chicken frightening rhinoceros,"
I assume that the Hou Hanshu is referring to like the rhinoceros horn there but
I just love that they made sure to let you know that
rhinoceros frightens chicken. The document also talks about glass and
perfumes coming over as well as cloth made of asbestos, and
when I read that I was like well they have to mean something else,
but no it's that asbestos like the kind that was in the walls of
the house where I grew up. There's actually a story of a sixth
century Sasanian king Khosrow II impressing guests by cleaning
his asbestos napkins with fire. Magic! *_*
Another textile that they mention is silk cloth
made from Roman silkworms, but you're probably asking well if Rome had
silkworms why are they importing silk from China and the answer
is they don't, and they're not. What actually
was happening was when the the Chinese would send silk it
was in this kind of thick brocade, and then once it got to Rome they would
unravel it and re-sow it in a way that made like a very
thin gauze kind of material probably similar
to what we think of as silk cloth today, but as it went back
over to China the Parthians made sure to tell the
Chinese well yeah they're making it with their own silk worms so that
China didn't think that they had a monopoly, and hence would have to keep
the price of silk down. Bit unethical, but again
good business sense on the Parthian side and silk wasn't the only time that maybe
the Parthians were leaving out some details when talking to the trading
partners because they they often sold Parthian
furs which were actually Russian furs and
there are stories in China of precious jewelry made with gemstones
coming to Xhina and then once a discerning eye looked at them they
would realize they were just colored glass.
Though whether it was a Parthian deception or a Roman deception
we shall never know. What we do know is that Parthia was
exporting asafoetida so you know they they did something right. Anyway I
think it's time to say a toast to the middlemen, and get
back to our chicken. So at about 40 minutes into baking go
ahead and check the breast with an instant read thermometer
to see if it's hit that 165 degrees fahrenheit.
If it hasn't, leave it in for a few minutes more. Then make sure to let the
chicken rest for about 10 minutes before carving it up, and here we are
Parthian chicken. You want to make sure to pour some sauce on there, and sprinkle with pepper. Now i'm going to slice right into the whole chicken
because my chicken carving skills are lackluster at best, and i don't want to
embarrass myself all over the internet so
i'm going to just cut into the whole thing.
Smells wonderful, doesn't smell at all like the asafoetida did at all. Okay so it's amazing, but I don't know what I'm tasting. I
don't know what I'm tasting. It's so
foreign to me, I don't know if it's the asafoetida or
if it's the garum, but it's wonderful. I can see why this
ingredient or whatever is making this flavor
came from so far and was so wonderfully prized.
It is an interesting flavor, it's not, it's not a really strong flavor. You
actually, when I first bit into the chicken I didn't get it. I was like oh, it's
chicken and then and then it just kind of washed over me.
It's an umami flavor but one that i've never really had before.
It kind of reminds me a little bit of of like a really nice
chantral mushroom, which I actually don't like,
but it's because the texture so you get the wonderful flavor without the texture
of mushrooms. But then you get the celery, or the lovage as well. It's this cool celery
flavor coming through and kind of cutting through the umami, and
oh what a wonderfully complex dish this is. I heartily endorse this dish, it has
two ingredients the asafoetida and the the garum, or
liqueman, that that do not smell good. That really,
it's like why are you putting this in food but
they work. I don't know how they work but they work. It's like
magic alchemy because this is really fantastic and complex,
and something I don't think you will have ever tried before
so go ahead and make it. i'm going to link to a lot of the ingredients down
in the description, some of the harder ones to find but
if you have trouble finding lovage go ahead and use celery.
Yeah, endorsed, A+, thumbs up, and I will see you next time
on Tasting History.
Love to see a dish that turns out to be genuinely delicious.
Also your shirt is amazing. Fashion on point in this video.
Well, mine’s in the oven. I saw another video where they jointed they chicken rather than spatchcock, and crisped the skin a bit in a frying pan before adding the sauces.m, so Ive done that.
I’ve probably overdone the liquid as I’m only cooking the legs and wings but made the whole recipe worth of sauces.
My asafoetida has turmeric and rice flour in it, I’ve used celery leaves and pounded them to a paste with the pepper and Caraway. I cut back the wine a bit to not completely drown the chicken and I used colatura.
It smells good so far, somehow ’fresher’ smelling than I expected.
I’m planning on having it with rice and steamed spring greens.
Edit: It smells really good, familiar in a way I can’t place.
Tasting Edit: That’s peppery... very peppery. But also as Max said, lots of umami. I thickened the cooking liquor with a bit of sourdough bread and drizzled that over.
It’s very good, it’s very peppery.
I think when I do this again, which I will. I’ll pulverise the peppercorns a little less than I did, or use a bit less of them to give the caraway a fighting chance. Also, reducing the pan drippings probably intensified the pepper a bit too much.
Bloody tasty though. This would be an excellent way to cook up a bunch of spicy wings.
This episode is literally one of my favorites, I was in total awe when you took the first bite and it turned out great. With such ingredients you would've thought some of the smell would've stuck to the chicken lol
I made this with chicken breasts, Three Crabs fish sauce, red wine, and substituted celery seeds for lovage. Only basted once. They came out really juicy and delicious. Will definitely make this again.
I can't wait to make this, I'm pretty excited!
Just got the ingredients today to make this!! going to try tomorrow. So excited :)
Well I'm going to try this tonight, only I realized I didn't have Caraway seed. So, I'm going to use cumin instead. It should work I hope.
I tried this earlier in the day and to be honest, it was good but I never had a "wow" factor or tasted something unusual.
The chicken was very moist however and the sauce was to die for. Maybe I built it up in my mind a little to much but live and learn. I'll try something else from history soon enough. :)
This was the very first episode of Tasting History that I ever saw, so it’s going to be the first-made recipe from the show as well!
My husband and I are both medical professionals, so we work non-standard hours. Today is his “Friday,” and I’m surprising him tonight with a cooking show-esque mise en place set up to make this together. He was on service yesterday and missed the inauguration, so we’re going to watch it while we celebrate, drink some wine, and make this sure-to-be-sublime ancient recipe.
Thank you so much to Max Miller for making such a joyful, playful, and engaging show. It’s really given us a bright spot in the week - and something to really look forward to - since we found it about five months ago.
Huzzah to Max, and SERVE. IT. FORTH.