Apicius

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Apicius is a Roman cookbook whose surviving recipes include instructions for cooking flamingo, a dish suited only to the wealthiest tables of the ancient world. Yet no name is signed to the work with any certainty. Two different manuscripts point toward two different men who both carry the name Apicius. The Latin inside the text itself seems to shift hands across widely separated centuries. Was this book compiled by a gourmet living under an early Roman emperor, or stitched together far later, as the Roman Empire itself was ending? Does a separate, much shorter version of these same recipes survive somewhere, credited to a compiler almost nobody can identify? And how did any of this reach a European printing press, centuries after anyone could ask the authors what they actually meant?

• 2. Two Men Named Apicius

  ›

  One manuscript is headed with the words API CAE. From that fragment, scholars invented the name Caelius Apicius, though no other trace of that person exists anywhere. A couple of recipe headings inside the text back up the guess. Patinam Apicianam sic facies appears in Book Four as recipe fourteen. Ofellas Apicianas appears in Book Seven as recipe two. Both credit a cook simply called Apicius. A second name attached to the book is Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmet. He lived sometime in the first century AD, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. The book may also have no single author at all. It may instead have been assembled by a number of different Roman cooks working across that same century. The Latin itself hints at a long assembly process. Earlier recipes use Classical Latin words such as iecur and fervere, while later recipes layer in Vulgar Latin words such as ficatum and bullire. Many recipes also call for silphium, a plant thought to have gone extinct sometime in the first century AD, which points toward that earlier date. Yet the food scholar Bruno Laurioux, working from the text itself, argues the surviving version was not compiled until the fifth century. That fifth century marked the very end of the Roman Empire. As Laurioux writes, "The history of De Re Coquinaria indeed belongs then to the Middle Ages." Whichever theory holds up, the finished text passed through Roman kitchens for hundreds of years before anyone organized it into a single order.

• 3. The Ten Books

  ›

  Epimeles opens the collection, its Greek name translating simply as The Diligent, setting a practical tone for what follows. Sarcoptes comes next, meaning The Butcher, then Cepuros, The Gardener, and Pandectes, The Encyclopedia. Ospreon takes on pulses and legumes. Aeropetes turns to birds, Polyteles to sumptuous dishes, and Tetrapus to four-legged animals. The final pair, Thalassa and Halieus, both look to the sea: one, The Sea, covers seafood broadly, while the other, The Fisherman, narrows the focus. Ten books make up the whole, each carrying a Greek name even though the text underneath is written in Latin throughout. That eighth book, Tetrapus, covering four-legged animals, is exactly where a recipe for stewed kid or lamb would belong.

• 4. What Romans Actually Cooked

  ›

  One recipe that survives intact, numbered 8.6.2-3 in modern editions, walks through a stew of hot kid or lamb. The cook places the meat in a pan and finely chops onion and coriander. Pepper, lovage, cumin, garum, oil, and wine are pounded together in a mortar. Once cooked, the stew is turned out into a shallow pan and thickened with wheat starch. The instructions even split by animal. With lamb, the raw meat takes on that pounded mixture first, while with kid, the mixture is added once the meat is already cooking. Garum, a fermented fish sauce, does the work in this recipe that salt does in a modern kitchen, folded into almost everything. Historians now use recipes like this one to piece together what actually went into a pot around the Mediterranean Basin in the ancient world. The next surviving trace of these recipes does not come from this same manuscript tradition at all.

• 5. The Vinidarius Puzzle

  ›

  A wholly separate manuscript preserves an abbreviated version of these recipes, titled Apici excerpta a Vinidario, later described as a "pocket Apicius." Its compiler is named only as Vinidarius, called an "illustrious man," and the excerpt was put together as late as the Carolingian era. Vinidarius may have been a Goth, in which case his name in Gothic could have been rendered Vinithaharjis, though this remains conjecture. Despite the flattering title, nothing else about him can actually be confirmed. This excerpt survives in a single manuscript, written in uncial script and dated to the 8th century. Despite its name, the booklet is not simply a condensed copy of the longer Apicius known elsewhere. It includes material that does not appear in those larger manuscripts at all. Either some of that material was lost between the making of this excerpt and the copying of later manuscripts. Or there was never one single standard version of the cookbook at all. Its contents may simply have shifted as different readers reshaped it over time. This same instability did not stop the recipes from eventually finding their way into print, centuries after any manuscript was copied by hand.

• 6. Into Print

  ›

  Two early printed editions of Apicius appeared within two years of each other. One came out in Milan in 1498, under the title In re quoquinaria. The other appeared in Venice in 1500. Four more editions followed within the next four decades, evidence of how much appeal the old cookbook still held. The long-standard scholarly edition, prepared by C. T. Schuch and published in Heidelberg in 1867, folded in some recipes taken from the Vinidarius excerpt. Between that first 1498 printing and 1936, fourteen editions of the Latin text had appeared. That count includes one further edition whose authenticity remains uncertain. In 1936, Joseph Dommers Vehling produced an English translation along with a full bibliography. Translation lagged well behind printing. The first translation of Apicius came out in Italian, in 1852, and only in the 20th century did German and French translations follow. The French version, produced by Bertrand Guégan, won the 1934 Prix Langlois from the Académie française. More than four centuries after that first Milan edition, the number of full translations remains small. That is a reminder of how narrow the audience for this Roman-era cookbook once was outside Italy and France.