Apicius
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Apicius is the title of 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.
Apicius is a text to be used in the kitchen. In the earliest printed editions it was given the overall title De re coquinaria ("On the Subject of Cooking"), and was 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". The name Apicius had long been associated with excessive love of food, apparently from the habits of an early bearer of the name. The most famous individual given this name because of his reputation as a gourmet was Marcus Gavius Apicius, who is sometimes mistakenly asserted to be the author of the book.
The text is organised in ten short books which appear to be arranged rather like a modern cookbook:
- Epimeles — The Chef
- Sarcoptes — Meats
- Cepuros — From the garden
- Pandecter — Various dishes
- Ospreos — Peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc.
- Aeropetes — Fowl
- Polyteles — Fowl
- Tetrapus — Quadrupeds
- Thalassa — Seafood
- Halieus — Fish
The contents are out of order, with some recipes in the wrong chapters. Some recipes are there in two versions, some are clearly truncated, sometimes one line must be missing.
The foods described in the book are important for reconstructing the dietary habits of the ancient world around the Mediterranean basin, since many of the foods identified with that region today—tomatoes, pasta—were not available in Antiquity. On the other hand, the recipes are geared for the wealthiest classes and contain what were exotic ingredients at that time, e.g. flamingo.
In a completely different manuscript there is also a very abbreviated epitome Apici Excerpta a Vinidario a "pocket Apicius" by a certain Vinidarius, made in the 5th century. However, although it says so in the title, this booklet is not an excerpt from the manuscript we have today. It contains text that is not in the longer Apicius-manuscripts. Either text was lost between the time the excerpt was made and the time the manuscripts were written, or there never was a "standard Apicius" text, because every cook would add his own notes.
Once manuscripts surfaced, there were two early printed editions of Apicius, in Milan (1498) and Venice (1500). But in the flood of heavy tomes of pagan and Christian antiquity, it was delightful to read a Roman cookbook. Four more editions in the next four decades reflect the appeal of Apicius. In the long-standard edition of C. T. Schuch (Heidelberg, 1867), the editor added some recipes from the Vindarius-manuscript.
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[edit] External links
[edit] Latin text
- Bibliotheca Augustana: De Re Coquinaria Libri Decem Mary Ella Milham's edition, nicely presented (Latin)
- Text of the cookbook in Latin at The Latin Library
- De re coquinaria, available at Project Gutenberg. (the edition of 1922 by Cesare Giarratano and Friedrich Vollmer, now superseded but still useful)
- Another version of the Latin text (source not stated)
[edit] Secondary material
- James Grout's Apicius, part of the Encyclopædia Romana
- Partial re-translation from a German translation, adapted for modern cooking styles
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Texts and translations
- Apicius, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome tr. Joseph Dommers Vehling. 1936. [English]
- Apicius, The Roman cookery book tr. Barbara Flower, Elisabeth Rosenbaum. London: Harrap, 1958. [Latin and English]
- Apicii decem libri qui dicuntur De re coquinaria ed. Mary Ella Milham. Leipzig: Teubner, 1969. [Latin]
- Apicius, L'art culinaire ed. Jacques André. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974. [Latin and French]
- John Edwards, The Roman cookery of Apicius. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 1984. [English]
- Grocock, Christopher & Sally Grainger (2006), Apicius. A critical edition with an introduction and an English translation, Totnes: Prospect Books, ISBN 1903018137 [Latin and English]
[edit] Secondary material
- Elisabeth Alföldi-Rosenbaum, "Apicius de re coquinaria and the Vita Heliogabali" in Bonner Historia-Augusta-Colloquium 1970 ed. J. Straub (Bonn, 1972) pp. 5-18.
- Matthias Bode: Apicius – Anmerkungen zum römischen Kochbuch. St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag 1999.
- Carol Déry, 'The art of Apicius' in Cooks and other people: proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995 ed. Harlan Walker (Totnes: Prospect Books, 1996) pp. 111-7.
- Sally Grainger, Cooking Apicius: Roman recipes for today. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2006.
- Mary Ella Milham, A glossarial index to De re coquinaria of Apicius. Madison, 1952.
