The World That Was - Hellenistic Honey-Roasted Chicken

 Hello and welcome to the World That Was! 

Today, I'll be going back to the Hellenistic Period, to the Hasmonean dynasty of Judea. The recipe in question is a simple honeyed-hens, recorded by Seleucid accounts of a feast held by one of the ruling elite. Though the original recipe refers to it plainly as chicken with honey, I'm going to be recreating it today based on our knowledge of contemporary dining habits!

In any case, let's now take a look at the World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!

Ingredients

4 chicken thighs
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
ground cumin
ground coriander
2 tbsp wholegrain mustard
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp honey
2-4 cloves garlic

Method

1 - Prepare the Chicken

To begin with we need to season our chicken. Do this by sprinkling some salt, some freshly ground black pepper, some ground coriander, and some ground cumin on top of your chicken, before rubbing it in with your hands. I used some skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, but really any cut of chicken would work well here. In antiquity, chicken would have been eaten, along with wildfowl like duck, and even doves or pigeon. Any of these birds would work well here, but chicken would be the easiest meat to deal with today.

Leave your chicken aside while you go make the sauce.

2 - Prepare the Sauce

Next, we need to make a sauce to go with this. In antiquity, mustard seeds and vinegar would have been the base of several sauces or condiments. You can easily do this here, but a better solution would be to use pre-made wholegrain mustard, like I'm doing.

In any case, toss about a tablespoon or two of mustard into a bowl, along with a good glug of olive oil. On top of this, add an equal amount of honey, along with a few crushed cloves of garlic. Mix all this together into a fairly thick sauce. If you want, you can thicken this over a medium heat for a few minutes until it's just about bubbling. I didn't do this, but it turned out well!

3 - Assemble the Dish

Toss your seasoned chicken into a lightly oiled baking dish. Pour over your sauce, and try and spread it around evenly. If you want to, you could place the chicken into a Ziploc bag with the sauce and leave it to marinate overnight in the fridge.

Either way, place your prepared chicken into an oven preheated to 200° C / 400° F, and let it all bake away for 40 minutes, flipping them over halfway through so they cook evenly.

Take the chicken out when they're browned and cooked through, serve up warm on a bed of edible greens like rocket, and dig in!

The finished dish is super succulent and flavourful. The spices were very floral and nutty, improved by the time spent baking. The mustard and honey mix caramelised at the bottom of the baking dish, which was a delicious bit of sweet heat when serving up!

The meat itself was very tender, with the skin on top crisping up significantly during the cooking process. In antiquity, it's unknown if birds were divided up into legs, wings, thighs etc, before or after cooking. Though it's likely that they may have been prepared both as a whole roasted chicken that was then divided up at the table, as well as pre-cut into more easy to manage pieces like I did here. It's really a matter of personal preference today anyway.

The Hasmoneans were a ruling dynasty in the 1st and 2nd century BC, and a client kingdom of Seleucid Persia. Due to it's location, Judea took on a fusion of culinary styles from the Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, and Arab worlds which resulted in a unique culinary trend that's still present today!