Roman Cuisine Focus Of One

NHS Student’s Junior/Senior Project

By Eliza Hallabeck

Newtown High School student Eliana Kohrman-Glaser has been working on her junior/senior project since March, and is now starting to see her efforts move from the page to the plate.

Eliana has been working with NHS teacher Jennifer Huettner and local chef Nancy Bamburg to complete her project, in which she is translating ancient Roman recipes in the cooking collection called “Apicius,” before she will rewrite them to make them modern.

Eliana said she has been taking Latin since seventh grade when she was attending Chase Collegiate School in Waterbury, and when she was thinking of an idea for her junior/senior project, Peg Ragaini, who is one of the advisors of the course and works in the school’s Career Center, mentioned another project that gave her the final idea.

“Mrs Ragaini mentioned that someone had once done something about Italian food,” said Eliana, “and I thought, I take Latin, I like to cook.”

In Latin last year her class also translated an ancient Roman satire, which included a Roman dinner party scene. At the fictional dinner party, guests ate meals like a roast pig with birds inside.

“It was mostly supposed to be about how tasteless the main guy was,” Eliana said, “but it was interesting, all the food, even though I would never want to cook most of it.”

When rewriting Roman recipes into her modern versions, Eliana said she has been focusing on recipes people would want to eat.

“There is one recipe that is dates stuffed with nuts and cooked in honey,” she said, “there is one that is like watercress soup, and there is a fish stew I was translating.”

The finalized project will be in the format of a book, but Eliana has no plans on publishing it. The finalized Roman cookbook, as translated by Eliana, will be placed in the school’s library with other works completed by students in the junior/senior project course.

“I’ve been translating from the Latin and comparing it to English versions to see if there is a big difference,” Eliana said, “because some of it is hard to find, like the specific herbs, in Latin dictionaries.”

The first thing Eliana remembers cooking is a muerbeteig cake, a German recipe, with her grandmother, who she also credits with giving her a love of cooking.

“I like to cook,” said Eliana. “I’m not really a chef, but I have been cooking since I was little.”

While working through translating the recipes, Eliana said she was surprised at the number of Roman recipes that use brains as an ingredient.

“Like pig brains,” Eliana said. “I was looking at this recipe, and it was for ‘Rose Pudding,’ and I thought that looks nice. When I started translating it, it listed brains, like four pig brains. I’m not going to make that.”

Elaina’s guess is the brains, which she has found mostly listed in puddings and pie recipes, was used to gel the food, because gelatin would not have been available when the recipes were written.

Some recipes, she said, would translate into modern Italian cooking easier than they would for modern American cooking. She used bread salads as one example.

Eliana has been looking through the recipes and deciding which ones she will make, and her family has been mostly tasting them with her so far.

“Some of them are good,” she said. “I have not cooked that many yet. I have mostly been doing the translating portion so far.”

The Junior/Senior Projects are due at the start of May, and Eliana said she only has cooking left to do to complete the project.

(Other students who are working on junior/senior projects this semester who would like to discuss their projects with The Bee may contact Eliza Hallabeck at eliza@thebee.com.)