Chicken with Oxymel

This was served as part of the second course at the Ymir 2025 feast.

What, Where, When

• Chicken drumsticks roasted in an oxymeli glaze — honey, vinegar, olive oil, and Byzantine-adjacent spices.
• Based on a 6th-century recipe from Anthimus’s De observatione ciborum, originally for suckling pig, transposed to chicken.

Discussion

The technique here comes from Anthimus, a 6th-century Byzantine physician who wrote De observatione ciborum as a dietary treatise for the Frankish king Theuderic. In his chapter on pork, Anthimus describes a simple oxymeli — two parts honey to one part vinegar — applied to suckling pig that has been roasted “not too much, but in such a way that it seems steamed.”

Two substantive substitutions from the source. First, I used chicken rather than pork, because the feast already had a pork dish (Byzantine-inspired stuffed pork from the same course) and serving an additional one would be not only rude to my guests who did not eat pork, but redundant. Chicken is appropriate in the Byzantine context: Andrew Dalby notes that chicken was the commonest bird eaten in Byzantium, and that one of the dietary writers called it “the best and lightest of all meats.” The Anthimus oxymeli technique is about the sweet-and-sour glaze, not specifically about the meat underneath; transposing it to chicken changes what the glaze coats, not what the glaze is. Second, I used chicken drumsticks rather than a whole bird, a logistical choice driven by feast-service portioning rather than period practice.

I added several spices to the glaze — long pepper, coriander, and cumin — with long pepper as the lead note. Long pepper (Piper longum) is the pepper of choice in Byzantine and early medieval cooking; the familiar black pepper didn’t come to dominate the European spice trade until the 15th century. Coriander and cumin are both plausible seasonings in the Byzantine spice vocabulary, though neither is named in the Anthimus passage itself — the original gives only the honey, vinegar, and salt. The spice additions are meant to give the glaze some aromatic depth beyond a straight sweet-sour base, but a stricter reading of the source would leave them out entirely.

A note on what actually happened at the feast: the chicken was supposed to be roasted on a half-sheet pan in a single layer, browning and basting properly. Unfortunately, due to another timing error, oven space was constrained — the pork roast was occupying more oven than planned and could not come out — and the chicken ended up crowded into pans two or three layers deep, which produced more of a braise than a roast. I shuffled the drumsticks around during cooking to try to give each one at least some browning, and people reported liking it, but the recipe below is the intended method, not the improvisation. (That said, even the braised version would fit Anthimus’ description).

Sources

Anthimus, De observatione ciborum, on suckling pig (via Historical Italian Cooking)

Suckling pig is apt and suitable simmered, or stewed in its juice, or roasted in the oven with no much smoke and not cooked too much, but in such a way that it seems steamed. Dip the meat in simple oxymeli made with two parts of honey and one of vinegar, then cook it in a clay vessel. Brush the meat with this mixture when you eat it.

Bibliography