Test Kitchen: Ancient Roman Melon Salad

While green-and-black watermelons and elongated yellow cantaloupes are mostly imported from Italy when they reach the shelves of the organic food stores I shop from in Berlin, I still figure they are environmentally sustainable enough for this blog!

When I bought the ingredients, however, I'd failed to account for the fact that the weather in Berlin has become rather too chilly for fruit salad.

(My family is holding off on heating so far. I'm relying on warm sweaters, woollen socks, a sleeping bag, fuzzy slippers and exercise to keep from shivering while I'm sitting down to work and then to waste time on the internet after work.)

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ARCHAEOLOGIST Dr. Ursula Janssen adapts and discusses cookery from ancient Babylon to the Renaissance on her YouTube channel. (I can also recommend her cookbook Garum.)

Her version of Apicius's pepones et melones — a melon salad — uses soy sauce instead of garum, the notorious Roman fermented fish sauce.

Quick recipe: "Pepones et melones" - Ancient Roman melon salad

[Ursula Janssen - YouTube] July 23, 2022

Despite Berlin's chilly weather, I made her recipe this evening with these measurements.

Spoiler Alert (click and drag after the colon to see the text): The dressing tasted like Chinese rice crackers, which was not the dramatically peculiar flavour I was expecting.

Peasant harvesting melons (ca. 1390 AD)
Taken from the Tacuinum Sanitatis manuscript, fol. 21 recto
Found in Wikimedia Commons

Salad

• ~1 to 2 cups of watermelon, diced
• ~1 to 2 cups of cantaloupe, diced

Dressing

• 1 tsp honey
• 1/2 tsp aceto balsamico
• 1 little splash of soy sauce

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If you are interested in Apicius's original recipes, a Latin edition is here ; and here is an unreliable (but at least copyright-free) English translation from the 1930s.

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VII. PEPONES ET MELONES:

Piper, puleium, mel vel passum, liquamen, acetum. interdum et silfi accedit. 

("Pepper, pennyroyal, honey or condensed must, broth and vinegar; once in a while one adds silphium.") SAFETY WARNING: pennyroyal is not considered safe to eat nowadays. You can substitute mint.