ANCIENT EPICURES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 17, 12 September 1912, Page 6

ANCIENT EPICURES.

ROMAN COOK-BOOK. (From the “Inter-Ocean.”) Marcus Gabius Apicius ate up a fortune; he spent it all on food for himself and his guests, food and the accessories of service and entertainment, When he found ho had only a million sestorii left—about £/000 —be "af afraid ho would die of starvation. So lie drank poison and died. That was 1900 years ago, when Tiberius was Emperor of Rome. Apicius was one of the greatest gourmets that ever lived. His was an age of discovery, not only geographically, but gastronomicaliy. Every new country conquered revealed now foods. As the Roman Empire spread over Europe, Asia, and Africa new markets were opened up. Ships freighted with the produce of Gaul, Britain, Egypt, Syria, Porthia, Mauretania, and Scyt.na flocked to Civita Vecchia, the port of Rome, and foreigners of all complexions brought their tastes and their customs to the capital. They also brougr the foods 1 and drink to which they had been accustomed at homo. And Roman travellers learned in distant lands how delicious were meats and vegetables and fruits of which they had never before suspected the existence. Just as we to-day are eager to try the savour of foreign dainties, so the pleasure-loving Romans of the days of the early Caesars were eager to try the national dishes of other pooWealth came suddenly to thousands, and with wealth came ostentation and extravagance in eating and drinking. Rome was full of mushroom millionaires and the class of men who in Paris arc called “rastaguoueres. Among the enormously wealthy epicures Apicius stood pre-eminent. He was a type of the gourmet, a man to whom eating was a fine art, dining a religion. But he was unselfish m his taste, and was glad to enrich the world with the deep knowledge of cookery that he had attained through long

study and much experimentation. So ho wrote a cookery book. This hook is the oldest of its kind that is known, except a fragmentary one in Sanskrit, the Vasavarajeyam. The original has been lost, but it formed the basis of a book published 150 years after his death, and this, which contains his recipes, has lived for 17 centuries, and has been the inspiration of thousands of cooks. Many of the recipes of Apicius are in common use, with but slight modification, to this] day, especially bj the cooks of Spain, Italy, and Southern France. Of course we have advanced in gastronomic-!

knowledge since those days. Those sybaritic Romans knew nothing of many foods that are almost a commonplace to vis—-sugar, for instance, and potatoes and turkeys, to say nothing of chocolate, tea and coffee, and tobacco. So, where our recipes direct sugar, theirs ordered honey. If they had not turkeys, they had partridges, pheasants and quail. Where we use potatoes, they used cliestnuts, peas, beans and lentils.

The taste of tho Romans of tlio early days of the Empire ran to tlio recondite. To servo food with its own flavour seemed too easy. Art in cooking did not consist in adding eilch condiments as would bring <hlt the natural flavour of the meat—as we cat mustard with ham, or cranberry sauce with turkey—hut rather in so disguising the flavour as to make it impossible to recognise what was the basis of the dish. The artistic chef of that day made veal taste like fish, fish .taste like rabbit, and so on to a bewildering extent, almost f>S some modern French cooks boast that they can make a delicious ragout out of a pair of worn-out gloves. And there are many similar recipes given by Ap'cius which are similar to the methods in use to-day as to- be almost identical. He tells, how to make barley water such as is given to invalids; bow to prepare comestibles with honey or salt by freezing and keeping out of the air. He tells how to keep bunches of grapes by burying them in fresh bran; how to keep

vegetables green by washing them in soda and water, and dried figs and prunes by dipping them into boiling sea water. Again, there are meat pies, so dear , to the heart of the Englishman, and the no less delicious deep pies, made bowls, were well-knpwn to Apicius, and he even gives implicit instructions about leaving a hole in the upper crust through which the steam may escape. Tho majority of our modern sauces were known to the kitchen. You could make a sauce piquante, remoulade, or vinaigrette without difficulty by following his instructions. It is interesting to note that the far-famed Worcestershire sauce had its origin in his kitchen, and has changed but little since. To-day, as then, it is made of cayenne pepper, black pepper, cloves, ginger, tumeric,, paprika, mustard, sugar, tamarinds, vinegar, 'sherry garlic, and asafoetida. This is probably the only form in which asafoetida is used in cookery to-day, but it was used' by every housewife in the middle ages. The fruit salad, supposed to be a modern invention ,is really a case of atavism, for Apicius records how he regaled the Roman gourmets on bananas, peaches, and pears covered with piquante mayonnaise.