GOURMET COOKING


An open book with beige pages lined with neat black text. There are two lines of red text on the bottom of the right-hand page.
A page with two columns of text and red Roman numerals.
A rectangular mosaic featuring a bluish-green parrot with an orange beak and wings folded behind its back. The bird stands on a light brown brick against a black background, framed by a black and white border.
A yellowish-brown mosaic featuring a blue and green peacock with a long orange tail. There is damage on the top right corner.
A black square mosaic crowded with fish and other marine creatures of various sizes, including a shark, eel, squid, and octopus.
A square mosaic with an orange-brown flamingo in profile, its legs bound to its body. The neck makes an S-shape and the large beak is red. The square has multiple patterned borders.
A white rectangular mosaic depicting an assortment of table scraps, brightly colored.
A painting of a man and woman reclining on a blue couch with fabric draped around their waists. The man raises a drinking horn; before the couch is a three-legged table holding silver mixing vessels. A female figure in a tunic stands in the background.
A horizontal painting showing a plate of food, a drinking glass, and a red radish hanging from a nail.

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The type of conspicuous consumption critiqued by writers such as Pliny the Elder and Juvenal is illustrated by the recipes contained in “The Apicius,” or On the Subject of Cooking. This ancient Roman cookbook takes its name from the luxury-loving gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius. Even though it is unlikely that this first-century member of the elite was the book’s actual author, the work has come to be associated with his name: Apicius was famous for hosting extravagant banquets with show-off meals, and historians theorize that the recipes likely came from his household cooks (yet the question remains a topic of scholarly inquiry). It is the oldest surviving cookbook from the Roman world and includes recipes for camel heels, parrot, venison, pheasant, brain-stuffed sausage, peacock, snails, and expensive seafoods including mullet, bass, and caviar-stuffed crayfish. In addition to these delicacies, the volume also includes recipes for foods that were likely within the means of the average Roman builder, craftsperson, tradesperson, or farmer such as ham, legumes, and vegetables. However, the nearly 500 recipes are not presented in a format that we might recognize today. In most of them, quantities are not provided, nor are detailed instructions. Here, for example, is a recipe for preparing a flamingo:

“Scald the flamingo, wash and dress it, put it in a pot, add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar to be parboiled. Finish cooking with a bunch of leeks and coriander, and add some reduced must [grape juice] to give it color. In the mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root [silphium], mint, rue, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and the fond [drippings] of the braised bird, thicken, strain, cover the bird with the sauce and serve.” 

Medical texts and pharmacopoeia did not hold the monopoly on medicine either: On the Subject of Cooking also includes remedies for stomachaches.

On the Subject of Cooking begs the question: did Romans actually gorge themselves to the point of vomiting at lavish banquets? The practice of inducing vomiting in order to avoid digesting a decadent meal, or to make room for more, is certainly attested: Plutarch laments the judgment of those “who fill up their bodies for the sake of emptying them, and then empty them for the sake of filling them up again.” But the polemical and moralizing contexts of such remarks raises questions about how mainstream this practice actually was. The image of emetic Roman meals in the modern popular imagination is perhaps due in part to a misunderstanding of the word vomitorium: it was not a room for throwing up, but rather an architectural feature of stadiums, theaters, or other performance venues to allow extra space for people to move as they exited following a performance, something akin to an overflow area for crowd control (the word derives from the Latin root meaning “to spew forth”). Yet different types of purging were indeed part of a preventive regime for some people. Certain writers believed monthly vomiting was a healthy form of evacuation—the emetic properties of various foods, notably radishes, receive frequent comment—and others advocated enemas or bloodletting for purgative health maintenance. Galen did not explicitly advocate vomiting, and in Keeping Well he recommends other approaches to ridding the body of buildup—exercise, for example, helps with the removal of excrement—but he did regard venesection as an effective way to purge the body of harmful accumulations, should a condition require it.