A conversation with Sally Grainger

The Books for Cooks presentation was a wonderful day. We live in a village—we live quite rurally, and I don’t go to London that often, so it was nice to go to Notting Hill, a trendy part of London. I shall go back because it’s a lovely shop. And the chap who runs it, Eric, was delightful. He was diffident, but he was delightful.

It was the most amazing experience to realise how beautiful it is. It is a stunningly beautiful book. All the way through, it makes you smile and laugh. It makes me smile. My mini-mes are just amazing.

I don’t think I’ve ever been caricatured. It’s delightful, but it’s also so definitely me. She’s watched videos, and she’s caught the essence of me, which is a slightly eccentric—an intense kind of obsessiveness, but also so much fun. I do enjoy it immensely. One of my great pleasures in life is to cook and to cook authentically in that kitchen. I could see that she’d really engaged with me.

I can choose. I don’t have to be out there when it’s bitterly cold, and it is joyful. If things go wrong—I mean, some of those videos have burnt offerings in them—I just laugh it off because it’s the only way. Atmospheric pressure interferes with the way charcoal burns, and the heat is less intense. The wind blows, and the heat flies up, and it doesn’t stay under your pot. The smoke can be unpleasant, so it’s sometimes a struggle.
It’s also exhausting because it means an awful lot of fetching and carrying of wood and charcoal, and you have to be really careful not to allow the fires to get out of control. My ancient kitchen is downstairs next to my conservatory, and the rest of my house is on three floors. I have two flights of stairs to get from my modern kitchen to my Roman kitchen. I’ve got lots and lots of baskets and containers of all sorts to carry equipment and food. I still forget things. I’m still running up and down the stairs.

Thirty years?

Its only disadvantage is it’s sloping and north facing, so in the winter the sun is behind the house. In the summer, it takes a long time for the sun to come over the top of the roof and hit the garden. So, there’s a lot of shade-loving plants, but we also grow every conceivable kind of vegetable—onions and garlic and fennel and beetroot and carrots and parsnips and three or four different kinds of climbing beans, tomatoes, cucumbers. I fill my freezer. I just absolutely adore cooking with my own vegetables.

It was first a woodland slope. It had about six enormous trees, and the whole thing was just dead grass and shade underneath. We had the trees removed and did all the terracing ourselves. We built areas for fruit and areas for vegetables that look like the ruins of a Roman villa. If you ever go to a Roman site, you see there’s a little short wall that’s the outline of a room. We built those raised beds using stones that we found—this is an appalling area for farming, really—you get about three inches of soil and then enormous pieces of sandstone.

Yes, and in every direction from our house, there is National Trust woodland, and all the wood we need to cook with comes from there.

I started by sourcing the seeds and growing my own rue and lovage but also things like winter savory, which are very common in Roman recipes and not that easy to find. I also have thyme, rosemary, fennel, parsley. Coriander I tend not to grow. I want a lot of it, but I tend not to grow it because it always bolts and runs to seed, and I can’t get enough foliage, so we buy it. There’s a lot of herbs close to the back door to save my legs. I tried to grow herbs inside in the summer, but they don’t like sitting on windowsills.

Yeah, they are very well established. The lovage—if I were to dig it up, the root would be the size of a man’s thigh. It’s huge.

I get maybe six different stalks out of it at any one time. The issue, of course, is you need the seed, not the leaf, so every year I have three or four flower stalks that I protect as they dry. I don’t want them to get too wet because once they get wet, they go green and mouldy. I keep probably about two or three ounces of it at any one time, which is a lot of seed. Many of my colleagues can’t get it, so I parcel it up and send it off.

There are still recipes I’d like to try, and there are still techniques of cooking I want to try. Part of this is getting access to the equipment that’s required. We can identify the vessel, and then I need to go to a potter and ask them to make that vessel. We actually have a new relationship with a potter down in Cornwall. He’s got examples of what I want, but they are badly made. They’re called ‘clibanus’, and we found the original in a shop of the National Museum of Archaeology in Naples. They must have come out of the ground in the 18th century, and they are very old, but there’s no provenance. We don’t know which house, which status was using them, but we know they were burnt and very well used. No matter how cold it is, when I get my new replicas, I shall want to go outside and light a fire and play with them.

Before we moved south, I’d done a little bit of experimentation in the northeast because my husband was working in a museum of the Anglo-Saxon world. It was called Bede’s World in Jarrow.

Yes, the ruler is from the Bede Museum, and it had an Anglo-Saxon farm with a working bread oven and other means of cooking. I started experimenting with Roman recipes in that Anglo Saxon environment and didn’t tell anybody that it wasn’t Anglo-Saxon.
When we got back here, we thought, how shall we move forward in this? We were so excited by the whole concept of experimental archaeology, and that was a new concept. Really, very few people were doing it.
People were re-enacting, dressing up as Romans and pretending to cook, but the funny thing is they would dress as Romans—and they would fight and so on and demonstrate and have examples of pottery and things like this—but then they would go around the back of their tent and eat a sandwich because they couldn’t cook Roman food.

So, we started to reenact. We got costumes, and we wrote to English Heritage and National Trust and so on and said, ‘We can cook Roman food’.
And we couldn’t, but we thought we’d try. It was just trial and error. I was a chef, and I had the hygiene knowledge, so they let me cook.
We had a flat-pack Roman kitchen, and we travelled the country. It was good for demonstration and entertainment and educational purposes, but I said to Chris, ‘We have this space at the back of the house. Why can’t we have a real one?’

He was on board from the beginning. We were in Herculaneum and allowed to go into places where we would not normally be allowed because of our contact with the archaeologists there. I found a small kitchen with an L-shaped platform, and the oven sat where the two points meet, so you could pull the embers out onto the platforms in either direction. That’s why we put the two together as we have, so when the fire has burnt through inside the oven, and the oven is hot enough to cook with, you pull those embers out to the far end of your hob. So, you’re doing two lots of cooking from one lot of wood.

No, but the problem is that if I’m going to be cooking a lot of food again and again to try and get the technique right, I need somebody to eat it. I kept knocking on my neighbour’s door, saying ‘I’ve got some food. Come and try it’. I’ve also become a research associate at Reading University.

I give them a lecture and a food tasting once a year in exchange for access to journals. That access is hugely important for the two projects I’m working on. One is ongoing research on fish sauce—really, really obscure byways of fish sauce, and the other is this spice called silphium. Asafoetida.

Yes, and it used to grow in northern Libya. It apparently became extinct, and they started to source it from parts of Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s used a lot in Indian food, and it gives a kind of a funky-rotten-garlic-onion kind of flavour. You have to use it with great delicacy, substantial delicacy. Two pinches in a quarter kilo of food.

I’m trying to source the green herb from the plant and also the root itself, because the resin is the eye of the tiger, but the root was also used in Roman times. I finally managed to connect with a spice trader, and he sent me asafoetida roots. It’s dry slices of root, and I’m going to be experimenting to work out the intensity of the flavour compared with the resin. I’ve also found a contact in India who’s going to be sending me some of the green material. Many of the people who trade the resin in India don’t understand how it’s grown or the process it goes through before they get it.

I think there’s a suspicion that if you reveal too much information, you lose power. And it’s not cultivated. It’s just grown wild.

I’m going to an academic conference in Poland to talk about it and will also be talking about it at a conference in Oxford. This is where my passions lie at the moment—very obscure. An academic study with a narrow focus on an aspect of food in the Roman world.

I do like to use meat if I know it has come from happy animals. There are farms that produce meat and sell to local suppliers, so I always use those. Have you seen the video of the cheesecake libum?

In the valley that you can see from my garden, if you follow it to the left, there is a large swathe of land owned by a couple, and they have goats. We filmed the goats being milked, and we made fresh cheese in order to make the cheesecake. Where possible, I like to source my ingredients locally. She also used to keep pigs, and so at one stage I had all the offal from her pigs.

It’s gorgeous, it’s wonderful. It adds a fabulous flavour, and it adds moisture to dry, lean meat. And there is a traditional dish called a ‘faggot’. Have you ever heard of the word ‘faggot?’

It’s like haggis in the sense that it’s very finely minced offal, and it may even be bound with oats and then wrapped in caul fat, which gives it the moisture. They’re roasted, and you serve them with a really thick, rich gravy. It’s a way of serving offal where you don’t have to worry too much about what you’re eating.
I strongly believe in eating offal. For the Romans, you sacrifice an animal, and you offer it to the gods, and you then spit roast it. Apparently, first dibs for the host and his guests was the offal, and the offal would be spit roasted separately.
I’ve been to two family parties in Greece, and they’re spit roasting lamb, what’s called kokoretsi, which is the heart and the lungs and the liver and the intestines, all cut into pieces and skewered on a spit. And then the whole thing is bound with the intestinal material.
It’s glorious, wonderful stuff. I’ve eaten it a couple of times while being abroad, and it’s honouring the beast. You take a life, you don’t waste any of it. Yet people are fearful of it.

Exactly, and in the elite section of the cookery books, elite recipes, high status recipes, that’s where all the offal is.

Yes, things like sweetbreads and brains went into stuffing. I used to be able to get brains and sweetbreads from my local butcher, but you also had a question about obscure and bizarre Roman foods?

I do have a story about dormice. I always wanted to try one, and I didn’t instinctively know it wasn’t the little mouse in the teapot from Alice in Wonderland. It’s a completely separate species. It’s a rodent, but it has a furry tail rather than a thin tail.
We went to a conference in Split in Croatia, and opposite Split is an island called Brač. It’s just a few trees and rocky hillsides and a few farms, and it’s a holiday resort now, but the locals, most of them grew up with their only meat being dormice. They had a festival in September or October when they were at their fattest before they hibernated. They’d catch as many as they could, and everybody got meat.

It was very, very gamey, but we were also there during Easter, so the dormice weren’t fattened. The concierge organised a trip for us, and we were in a community in the centre of Brač. We found a small local tavern that had caught some for us that morning, and I watched them being bled and spit roasted. It wasn’t pleasant, but I had archaeologists back in the UK who wanted samples of the bones.
The Romans would have fattened up dormice in the same way as geese. They were probably force fed with sweet things and nuts and fruit to make their meat sweet. Have you ever seen or heard about the dormice vessels?

They were enormous pots with a kind of spiral inside, and the mouse just runs around this spiral, and then you drop the honey and nuts and the honey-soaked bread pieces. When it gets fat enough, you break the pot. I mean, it’s grim. But they had a different attitude towards animals, and we’re pretty bad, let’s be honest. They were obsessed with obscure, bizarre food items. The more exotic and difficult to attain, the more desirable they were. Animals were shipped across and served up as roasted meat, things like tigers and giraffes.

Yeah, absolutely.

I was very bored being a chef.
I was a pastry chef, and I used to work evenings. I used to have two or three hours off in the afternoon and then go back to the kitchen, so my social life was pretty grim. I eventually got a job where I had my evenings free. I was living in London, and my local further education college was just up the road, five minutes away. I’d left school with very little in the way of academics at all.

Yes, I left school at 16, and I didn’t do any A Levels, and I didn’t do O Levels. I was probably dyslexic, a little. So I went to the Working Men’s College in London, which is a famous college for educating working men, and it was only ever open in the evenings for people that wanted to further their education. And it was a wonderful place. I did four O Levels and ultimately two A Levels. I took an ancient history A Level because by that time I’d been reading I, Claudius by Robert Graves.

Yes, and I’d become fascinated by Roman history. I applied to university in London to do ancient history, and I was at the Egham campus at Royal Holloway. My fellow students used to have toga parties. They would wrap themselves in their sheets and drink a lot of beer, and that would be their idea of a toga party. I said, well, let’s have a real Roman banquet because I’d discovered a bad translation of Apicius. I’d just been glancing at it and thought, OK, let’s do this.
I had no idea how to do it at all, but I organised a Roman party where everybody would come in costume, but none of the students would go because all the staff wanted to go. At that stage, people doing classics at university—the staff did not socialise with the students, and the students were frightened of them.
But I was 30 years old. I was not 18. So I said, fine, I’d sooner have the staff than the students. So, we had 25 people, and they all came in costume, and lecturers in poetry would recite (as they should). The meal was a bit hit and miss, but it worked. One of my friends had invited a guy from London to come, and he was called Andrew Dalby.

After the meal, he said, ‘Sally, would you like to do a book?’ This was my second year at university, and I was 31. So, by the time I left university, we were halfway through the preparation for The Classical Cookbook.

I had to go back to cooking after I graduated because I needed money, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore, and then I met Chris.

We met at his tutor’s house, and his Latin skills were superb. I know that sounds like I’m showing off because he’s my husband, but most Latin teachers need to prepare every lesson in advance because they can’t read Latin off the page. Chris could read Latin off the page. He’s an old-school Latin scholar who has the skills. If I’m in the middle of something, and I can’t understand what Pliny the Elder is saying, I just say, ‘Chris, what does this mean?’ I know he’ll just read it.

It’s wonderful. We have two big leather-top desks that face each other.

It’s lovely. I’m sitting where he normally sits, so you’ve got the books behind me, and I’ve got a bank of orchids to look at in the window.
Chris has the enthusiasm, and he loves food. We got together because I brought food to this meal where we met.

It is. I love cooking good food. We always have a big party in the summer. We spit roast a lamb in the garden, and we invite 50 people. I do Roman food, and we do tomato salad. It’s not authentic, it’s just whatever I fancy doing. But I also plan for the next three days after the party: I do nothing because I can’t move.

The house is chock full of the equipment that we used to use a lot when we worked for English Heritage, and we travelled around the country, so there’s lots of samian ware.

Yes, but it’s just sitting there gathering dust because I don’t use them. We have an awful lot of it, and it’s nice just to look at it—it’s familiar, and it reminds me of what we used to do. But my favourite has to be the mortar.

I must have about 20 different kinds—you know, the little grooves that go in the base that help to grind the spices? They can be big, medium, small. The mortars can be shallow, taller, or they can have a lip or a wide handle, and then I also have lots of modern ones all over the house.

Yes! And I have a secondary reason for wanting to come to Barcelona. There’s somebody at the university who’s doing research into fish sauce who I would really want to see.