Food is a living matter. Our way of eating and cooking is constantly evolving: it feeds on encounters, contaminations, trends of the time. This is why the neapolitan ragù we eat today, for instance, is different from the one of fifty years ago: just think of using olive oil instead of lard.
Ph. Machi di Pace
So it is difficult to go back to recipes that have their roots in very distant times, when the aristocratic villas of the ancient Romans decorated the edges of Campania Felix.
We have already talked about the Villa of Poppea in Oplontis. We told you about the fresco of the so-called cassata of Oplontis: a dessert whose shape recalls that of the famous Sicilian preparation, frescoed on one of the walls of the beautiful villa buried by the ash and lapilli of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Since we do not have a codified recipe for the cassata of Oplontis, we tried to make it starting from the ingredients and culinary suggestions of the time. Our chef Alessandra Calvo tried to prepare the recipe starting from a mix of ricotta and honey, ingredients widely used by the ancient Romans.
Ph. Machi di Pace
The base of the cassata is made from the same dough as the bread (instead of the “modern” sponge cake) which we then decorated with dried fruit, dates, apricots and figs cooked and soaked in honey. All around, a “band” of chopped almonds rolled out with a rolling pin, colored with turmeric.
Ph. Machi di Pace
It is a version based on the ingredients used at the time and on more modern suggestions. The researcher Salza Prina Ricotti told of “Sicilian cassata” without referring to a specific recipe from Oplontis. She focused on the purple-red color of the almonds: «What gave it this triumphal color? It is a mystery. It is an ingredient that we do not know and therefore cannot define».
This is why the history of food is made up of evolutions, changes and why not: experimentation, also in the name of tradition.