The first recipe for Libum comes from De Agri Cultura, written about the 2nd century BCE by Marcus Porcio Cato. Cato’s agronomy book is particularly interesting because reports recipes of dishes mentioned by other authors whose method would be otherwise lost, most of all, sweets, bread and cheesecakes. Libum is one of them.
Liba may not have contained any sweeteners in the dough, but that didn’t stop people serving them drowned in honey or pomegranate syrup.
The Greek writer Athenaeus, writing some 350 years after Cato wrote the recipe for Libum also tells of basynias – boiled dough filled with a honey and date stuffing – and elaphos – dough shaped like deers cooked with honey and sesame – for the festival of elaphebolia.
Back in Cato’s De Agri Cultura we find a large number of different cakes listed, included the alarming entitled ‘placenta’ cake. Cato’s preoccupation with cake in a work that is otherwise serious and instructive shows how culturally significant it was to the ancients.
Libum fits in perfectly with this assessment of the seriousness of cake. Rather than be baked to be eaten (although of course they were also used for this), Libum‘s primary function was as a sacrificial offering to the household gods of ancient Rome.
Horace, and other Latin authors, believed Libum was a ritual food prepared as an annual offering to the gods. There were many ways to prepare it. Virgil writes of a libum offered with milk to Priapus; Ovid of one prepared with millet for Vesta, of another eaten with honey for Liber.
Each household would have had an altar upon which one or two of these cakes would be offered to give thanks to the gods.
"Make libum by this method. Break up two pounds of cheese well in a mortar. When they will have been well broken up, put in a pound of wheat flour or, if you wish it to be more delicate, half a pound of fine flour and mix it well together with the cheese. Add one egg and mix together well. Then make into bread, places leaves beneath, and cook slowly on a hot hearth under an earthen pot." — Cato, De Agri Cultura