Learning Classics is a bit like putting on a magic pair of 3-D glasses. Once you start delving into the language and the culture, you'll start to see it all around you. This blog is a record of the club's journey through the worlds and language of ancient Rome and Greece... and through modern times, too, searching for the influence of classics all around us. You'll also be able to find vocab, home tasks, links and generally enlightening info here, too.

28 November 2015

Lesson 9 - The Great Roman Bake Off

One of our favourite activities today: The Great Roman Bake Off. Using recipes from Apicius (which you can find here), we tried our hand at preparing an array of Roman dishes. First things first, we took a tour (with the odd tasting) of the ingredients available to us. Dark rye bread, apricots, figs, melon, fish sauce, honey, spices, herbs, date syrup, eggs, pepper, grape juice, raisins, pine nuts, almonds, semolina and milk - yum!

Yaren - kitchen goddess
Proud chefs!


Yaren and Jagoda impressed everyone with their focus and, quite frankly, professionalism to create a delicious semolina pudding studded with crunchy almonds and chewy raisins. The presentation wouldn't have been out of place in a five star restaurant. Therefore, quite rightly, they carried off the victor's crown.


Taiwo and Rebecca pound away
Hannah puts her back into it
The hypotrimma (a dip that seems to taste completely different depending on who's making it) required a great deal of elbow grease to get it to the right consistency. Kind of a work-out and cooking combined. Hannah and Ketsia's version was peppery and minty and absolutely delicious, and so these two won their group's title of Star Roman Baker.



"No, he's the evil chef genius!"
Adrian finds a creative way to grind pepper
Other notable dishes included mushroom patina by Kehinde and Abiye, and a fantastic ham and fig pie. The melon in mint was as wonderful as ever (if a little sweet the second time around!). We introduced a new dish this year to replace the (quite frankly, disgusting) lettuce patina: the stewed apricots were actually really delicious. 

 Of course, we couldn't cook all this food and then not try it! A testament to the skill of all the chefs, after the judging the food was devoured by the members of Classics Club (and me!).