Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome by Apicius

What about a mid-morning snack? When they passed a takeaway did they pop in for something fried or did these place sell sweet snacks, pastries and confectionaries? What did the wealthy people of 'Imperial Rome' consider comfort food? But there are few details of what Romans ate for breakfast. There is much detail of what Romans ate for feasts, there were certainly takeaway restaurants in Pompeii and wooden structures meant that from time immemorial in almost every country there were communal ovens, usually the baker's. I had expected a certain amount of background, but not a very detailed, occasionally smarmy, often derogatory criticism of the previous translations of the book published through the ages If you are interested in Apicius as a historical figure and what all the various translators made of his book, then you might enjoy this a lot more than I did. All these technicalities got in the way of the recipes and were oppressive. There were more notes, more discussion, and notes about the notes. I gave it up because the notes, appendices, indices, introductions, prefaces, explanations of typsetting, Apiciana and vocabularies were oppressive. When I'm in the US, Whole Foods is my kitchen!īut the book didn't deliver.

All that chopping and fat spattering and cleaning up. I've cooked in restaurants, I just hate it. That's a bit disingenuous as I don't actually have an oven or a hob, if a microwave or rice cooker can't manage it then I can't either. In the earliest printed editions, it was most usually given the overall title De re coquinaria ('On the Subject of Cooking') and attributed to an otherwise unknown Caelius Apicius, an invention based on the fact that one of the two manuscripts is headed with the words 'API CAE'.I wanted to know what the Romans ate and how I could cook versions of the food. Apicius is a text to be used in the kitchen. He is sometimes erroneously asserted to be the author of the book that is pseudepigraphically attributed to him. The name 'Apicius' had long been associated with excessively refined love of food, from the habits of an early bearer of the name, Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmet and lover of refined luxury who lived sometime in the 1st century AD, during the reign of Tiberius. 'A Bibliography, Critical Review and Translation of the Ancient Book known as Apicius de re Coquinaria.' Particularly useful if you want to cook wild boar or dormouse :-) According to Wikipedia: 'Apicius is a collection of Roman cookery recipes, usually thought to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th century AD and written in a language that is in many ways closer to Vulgar than to Classical Latin.

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Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome by Apicius