Roman-style Puls

Based on What Did Roman Soldiers Eat?

This recipe is for a single portion, which gives a filling breakfast which would have kept the legionaries going all day (or at least until their lunch of hard tack)

Ingredients

• 1 cup (200ml) grain
• 2 cups (400ml) water
• a splash of olive oil
• 1 stock cube (optional)
• 2 cloves garlic
• 30g of some sort of protein
• 2 tsp mushroom stir-fry sauce or similar

Directions

1. If the grain is not already broken or roughly ground, pulse it in a blender until it's well broken up. I've found that buckwheat well works well as it is, but barley and wheat want breaking down a bit.
2. Put the grain on to boil in the water, and add the stock cube if used (I do a vegetarian version, which benefits from it. The original uses salt pork for the protein, which probably doesn't need it)
3. Chop the protein coarsely and the garlic finely, and fry them in the olive oil, adding the garlic once the protein is starting to brown.
4. Once they are cooked, add to the grains.
5. Once the grains are cooked and forming a porridge, add the sauce (a substitute for garum, which is a fermented fish sauce)

This was consumed with a handful or so of dried figs, and a cup of posca. I've found you can make a good posca by adding 25-30ml of red wine vinegar to half a pint (300ml or so) of water. If this is too sharp for you, adding a little honey would probably not be inauthentic. The sharpness of the posca cuts through the fattiness of the puls, balancing it well.

I've tried fresh and tinned mushrooms, chopped vegetarian sausages, and a couple of types of vegetarian "bacon" for the protein. The best I've found so far is the crispy bacon style strips done by the squeaky bean.