SC - Epicious (sp?) and decedent roman feasts....

[Philip & Susan Troy]

rebecca tants wrote:
> 
> A friend and I are putting in a bid to run this upcoming winter's
> Feast of the Seven Deadly Sins.  Another friend thought it
> would be a nice idea for us todo a decedent Roman feast.
> 
> Epicious is the obvious reference, but I don't have a copy.
> My first question therefore is where to get one.

Marcus Gavius Apicius is _believed_ to be the person for whom the book
is named. It is called, properly, something like "Apicius De Re
Quoquinaria", and whether anybody named Apicius is tha actual author is
in some question. Probably the best English translation is by Barbara
Flower and Elizabeth Rosenbaum, done in the late 1950's. It gives on one
page the text in Latin, and the English translation on the facing page.
While there are no redactions per se, there are footnotes with a lot of
useful information. There is a text translation by a fellow named
Vehling; you should probably stay away from this one as it has a number
of textual errors: Vehling was a professional cook who was unfortunately
not well educated outside his area of specialization. 

One of the most recent books on Apicius is John Edwards' "The Roman
Cookery of Apicius", Hartley and Marks, New York, 1984. It doesn't
really offer a translation of Apicius, but rather a text on Roman
cookery with copious translated recipes, some of which are adapted for
the modern kitchen. It doesn't really adhere to any work style of any
other secondary source I've seen. I'd say it's pretty good, with one
warning: it seems as though a number of the recipes as adapted call for
ingredients that no first-century Roman would bother with. My belief
isn't that Edwards decided that people living to the north of Rome might
have, say, substituted butter for oil when browning meat, but rather
that nobody would care. The distinct possibility is that such
substitutions might have been made by, say, the Romanised British, but
Edwards doesn't mention this possibility, and it's hard to tell
sometimes when he is tinkering with a recipe or presenting it as
originally written. 
 
> My second question is if there are other references that would
> go with this theme.  I've been concentrating on northern
> european sources due to the language barrier, but am open to
> suggestions given the 6 months I have to try and figure them out.

The Flower and Rosenbaum Apicius translation includes sections on the
making of such things as amulum (amydoun to you medieval folks), cheese,
bread (I think), wine, and the ubiquitous aged fish sauce called
liquamen or garum. These sections are based on works by people like Cato
the Elder, Columella, and Pliny the Elder.

Another common source for researching this is Petronius' "Satyricon",
which is, as the title suggests, a satire, from around the same time as
Apicius. There is a fairly detailed description of a "decadent Roman
feast", but being satire, it's hard to tell how accurate it is. Bear in
mind that for most of Rome's history as a world power, there were just
as many people trying to preserve the ancient Roman virtues of
motherhood, frugality, and unseasoned porridge ;  ), as there were
eating fricaseed hummingbird tongues.

Interestingly enough, I just happened to run acros an Asian market that
sells little plastic trays of duck and goose tongues, not to mention
various other unmentionables. We're a pretty adventurous bunch where I
live, so who knows? 

Adamantius