Apicius

For other uses of Apicius see Apicius (disambiguation)

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.

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; he is sometimes erroneously asserted to be the author of the book that is pseudepigraphically attributed to him.

Apicius is a text to be used in the kitchen. In the earliest printed editions, it was most usually 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".

Contents

Organization

The text is organised in ten books which appear to be arranged in a manner similar to a modern cookbook:[1]

  1. Epimeles — The Careful Housekeeper
  2. Sarcoptes — The Meat Mincer
  3. Cepuros — The Gardener
  4. Pandecter — Many Ingredients
  5. Ospreon — Pulse
  6. Aeropetes — Birds
  7. Polyteles — The Gourmet
  8. Tetrapus — The Quadruped
  9. Thalassa — The Sea
  10. Halieus — The Fisherman

Foods

The foods described in the book are useful 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. But, the recipes are geared for the wealthiest classes and a few contain what were exotic ingredients at that time, e.g. flamingo.

Here is a sample recipe from Apicius (VIII, vi, 2-3):[2]

ALITER HAEDINAM SIVE AGNINAM EXCALDATAM: mittes in caccabum copadia. cepam, coriandrum minutatim succides, teres piper, ligusticum, cuminum, liquamen, oleum, vinum. coques, exinanies in patina, amulo obligas. [Aliter haedinam sive agninam excaldatam] <agnina> a crudo trituram mortario accipere debet, caprina autem cum coquitur accipit trituram.
HOT KID OR LAMB STEW. Put the pieces of meat into a pan. Finely chop an onion and coriander, pound pepper, lovage, cumin, liquamen, oil, and wine. Cook, turn out into a shallow pan, thicken with cornflour. If you take lamb you should add the contents of the mortar while the meat is still raw, if kid, add it while it is cooking.

Alternative editions

In a completely different manuscript, there is also a very abbreviated epitome entitled Apici Excerpta a Vinidario, a "pocket Apicius" by Vinidarius, "an illustrious man",[3] made as late as the Carolingian era, it survives in a single 8th century uncial manuscript.[4] However, despite the title, this booklet is not an excerpt from the earlier Apicius manuscript we have today. It contains text that is not in the longer Apicius manuscripts. Either some 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 the contents changed over time as adapted by readers of the text.

Once manuscripts surfaced, there were two early printed editions of Apicius, in Milan (1498)[5] and Venice (1500). 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.

Between 1498 (the date of the first printed edition) and 1936 (the date of Joseph Dommers Vehling's translation and bibliography of Apicius), there were 14 editions of the Latin text (plus one possibly apocryphal edition). The work was not widely translated, however; the first translation was into Italian, in 1852, followed in the 20th century by two translations into German and French.

Vehling made the first translation of the book into English under the title Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome. It was published in 1936. The translation is still in print, having been reprinted in 1977 by Dover Publications. It is now of historical interest only, since Vehling's knowledge of Latin was not always adequate for the difficult task of translation, and several later and more reliable translations now exist (see the bibliography section).

Notes

  1. ^ Apicius, The Roman cookery book tr. Barbara Flower, Elisabeth Rosenbaum. London: Harrap, 1958, p. 7
  2. ^ Ibid., pp. 188-189
  3. ^ About Vinidarius himself nothing is known; he may have been a Goth, in which case his Gothic name may have been Vinithaharjis.
  4. ^ Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger, Apicius. A critical edition with an introduction and an English translation (Prospect Books) 2006 ISBN 1903018137, pp. 309-325
  5. ^ Under the title In re quoquinaria.

References

Bibliography

Texts and translations

Secondary material

External links

Latin text

Secondary material