Recipe for Psoai
(Pork in a piquant sauce)
from the Heidelburg Papyrus
This recipe comes from a papyrus fragment of a cookery book that was found in Egypt and first published in 1921.
Original recipe:
Translation: Loin and pieces of meat: mix together in sufficient qantity with salt, coriander, and fig sap. Cook until it has thickened. Make a hot sauce in a pan: wine vinegar, one part of olive oil to two parts of sweet wine, a pinch of salt. When it has boiled, add a handful of oregano, skim off the froth and sprinkle on some green stuff.
Ingredients
- 2 lb. pork
- 4 oz. olive oil
- 1 cup sweet white wine
- 5 figs (dried or fresh)
- 2 tsp. coriander seeds ground in a pestle, or 1 tsp. ground coriander
- 2 tsp. dried oregano
- 3 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
- A handful of fresh parsely
- Sea salt
Preparation
- Chop the figs into smal pieces and boil in 2 cups of water for about 20 minutes or until the water is reduced in half.
- Cut pork into 1-inch cubes, place them into a casserole and fry in a little olive oil until brown.
- Toss the pork with some salt, the ground coriander, and a bit of the boiled fig stock (poured through a strainer to keep the seeds a fig pieces out).
- Add the wine, oregano, vinegar, and the rest of the fig stock to the pork.
- Bake in covered casserole in a 350º oven for an hour and a half.
- Sprinkle parsely on the pork shortly before serving.
