As Strong As Soup

Ever since I picked out a modern interpretation of an Apicius pork dish in Dom’s first ever Random Recipe challenge (and that was quite a while ago now) I’ve been playing around with some of the other recipes (I use the term loosely) in this text from ancient Rome. Since my Latin is a little rusty, I’ve lazily resorted to translations I’m afraid. A brief QI style digression: There are actually ten “books” in the Apicius writings that (sort of) add up to a complete treatise on cooking. The books are named in honour of Apicius, who was known for his love of fine food, but were actually compiled long after his death. And I think that’s more than enough facts for now. You need a fair amount of imagination with some of the “recipes” in Apicius: there are few exact quantities given or methods described and some of the ingredients, such as the plant silphium or laser , no longer exist.  So I feel justified in bringing you a fairly free adaptation of an Apicius sauce...

Although the Gâteau Breton is very often plain, some people prefer it with a filling such as apples or prunes soaked in armagnac. Less traditionally, I put together a date and chocolate filling this time, which may look unpromising (or even faintly disgusting) but I assure you it tastes good. You don't even have to buy expensive whole dates for this – simple chopped dates will do fine, as long as they're nice ones.  There are a lot of rules about how the authentic Gâteau Breton should be made and I don't seem to stick to all of them; but then neither do all the apparently authoritative recipes I've seen. Two rules I do stick to, though, are that there should always be the same weight of sugar as butter and that the butter has to be salted. I'm reliably informed that using unsalted butter in a Gâteau Breton would be one of the worst thing you could do in Brittany – roughly the equivalent of walking into a bar in Quimper and announcing that you don't like bagpip...