AUTHOR: MARCUS GAVIUS APICIUS (ATTRIBUTED TO)
DATE: FIRST CENTURY AD
In the commercial world of books, it is a well-known fact that you’re more likely to please your bank manager by publishing the recipes of a celebrity chef than the latest scribblings of a Nobel Prize Winner. Eating is one of the few truly universal activities and people cannot get enough of tomes instructing you how to cook the most delicious meals. But the hunger for cookery books is not a modern phenomenon. They have been with us for millennia in evolving forms. In ancient times, recipes were presumably communicated orally but the oldest-known cookery volume is the Roman-era On the Subject of Cooking (or De re coquinaria in Latin).
FOOD FOR THE MASSES
In 1845, an English woman called Eliza Acton published another landmark cookbook that was in certain respects the antithesis of its Roman counterpart. Modern Cookery for Private Families included recipes that were designed to cater for the middle classes rather than the wealthy elite. Acton introduced the British public to new, exotic ingredients including spaghetti and Brussels sprouts. A runaway success, it was also the inspiration for another book on food and other domestic affairs that quickly came to usurp it in popularity after publication in 1861: the legendary Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. For all Mrs Beeton’s wisdom, however, she did recommend boiling pasta for an hour and three-quarters!
The precise origins of the book are shrouded in mystery. The oldest extant editions date to the ninth century AD, and it is thought that the collection of four hundred or so recipes was brought together in perhaps the fourth or fifth century AD. However, it is probable that this volume was based on a number of recipes gathered from several different chefs in the first century AD. Among the most famous gourmets of that period was one Marcus Gavius Apicius, to whom authorship of the book has traditionally been attributed. Indeed, the book itself is sometimes referred to as Apicius. Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that he set out to write a cookbook in the modern sense.
Instead, he was probably one of the principal sources of the recipes, although many of these may in fact have been the work of chefs whom he employed. Apicius was a merchant whose wealth allowed him to enjoy the high life during the rule of Emperor Tiberius in the first half of the first century AD. He was noted for the lavish feasts he hosted, and may even have been paid by the Roman authorities to entertain visiting foreign officials. But where contemporaries regarded him as showing off the best of the Roman world, others have come to see the excesses he promoted as a sign of the Empire’s imminent decline.
As well as knowing how to put on a good spread, Apicius was also famed for his deep knowledge of food. This extended to the production of ingredients as well as their preparation. These were not recipes for ordinary folk, but for the trained cooks employed by the wealthy elite of Roman society. Apicius’s reputation was well established by the time Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History that he was ‘the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts’. Pliny detailed, for instance, how Apicius was reputed to have learned to prepare a sow so that its liver might be a delicacy. The process involved feeding the beast with large volumes of figs and then, just prior to slaughter, giving it honeyed wine. By the end of the second century AD, Tertullian called Apicius nothing less than ‘the patron saint of cooks’.
On the Subject of Cooking is divided into ten sections, each dealing with a particular aspect of cuisine, including housekeeping, meat, vegetables, pulses, poultry and seafood. The vast majority of recipes include a sauce, typically made either with fermented fish or a type of grape syrup. What is not made very clear are the quantities of ingredients to be used and, frequently, the precise cooking techniques. Often, the advice comes in terms similar to ‘cook until ready’. Moreover, the required ingredients were frequently highly exotic. Among the meats considered are dormouse, crane, peacock and ostrich. One recipe requires the cook to parboil a flamingo before finishing it off with leeks and a spicy sauce. (It is worth noting, too, that the volume includes a number of suggested remedies for stomach ache.)
The lengths to which Apicius would go in order to find the best and rarest ingredients was legendary. Athenaeus of Naucratis, a Greek writer of the late second/early third century, wrote in Deipnosophistae – his epic account of a series of banquets held in Rome and itself considered a valuable source of information on classical cuisine – that Apicius embarked on a long voyage to Libya in search of giant prawns. Unsatisfied by the specimens he was shown, he was said to have returned to Campania empty-handed and disgruntled, without even having gone ashore. Seneca, a close contemporary, related another story of how Apicius became embroiled in a bidding war for an unusually large mullet. His teachings around food and its consumption, Seneca suggested, had ‘defiled the age’.
It is true that Apicius’s name became shorthand for gluttony. Elagabalus (also known as Antoninus), Rome’s emperor between 218 and 222, was noted for his own pleasure-seeking excesses. He was said to gorge himself on delicacies like camel heels, peacock tongues, nightingales, flamingos’ brains and the heads of parrots in imitation of Apicius. But time eventually caught up with Apicius, whose wealth was depleted by his opulent lifestyle. Apparently fearful of having to live on limited means, he reputedly opted to take his own life instead.
How much of On the Subject of Cooking is the work of his own hand is moot, but what is certain is that the book that bears his name opens a window onto life among Rome’s high society. Perhaps more importantly, it established that the book form was a vessel not only for high art and philosophy but for exploring more corporeal pleasures too.