SC - Re: A Zambone (Ice cleaning machine)

[Jeff Gedney]

Robin Carroll-Mann wrote:
> 
> And it came to pass on 30 Mar 00,, that Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
> 
> > This may be a translator's issue, but I'm not aware of a single usage of
> > garlic in Apicius De Re Coquinaria. At least not that I can think of
> > offhand before my tea is ready...
> >
> > Adamantius
> 
> Flower and Rosenbaum list two recipes with garlic in the index of their
> translation, which I believe is a well-accepted one.

My mistake, sorry!  It's been too long since I really dove into Apicius.
<sigh> Somehow I must have made an association to the effect that "No,
Roman aristocratic cookery doesn't have _nearly_ as much garlic as many
people assume, based on the evidence" somehow became "Roman aristocratic
cookery uses no garlic."

Which, for practical purposes, it almost does. One recipe calls for an
unnamed amount of garlic pounded up in a sauce, another calls for one
peeled clove, in a collection of several hundred recipes. Neither is an
example of garlic used as a main ingredient, or garlic eaten as a
vegetable, which I think was the question.  
 
Now, there are other Roman recipes which do call for garlic, but Apicius
isn't an example of the wildly profligate use of garlic by the Romans...

It may simply be one of those things that are generally undocumented,
but still occurred. For example, people used to eat (I'm talking about
within the past 50 years, especially) and sometimes still do, eat
scallions raw, out of hand, the way you might eat a carrot or a stick of
celery. Cookbooks, however, aren't really good documentation for this.
Maybe a reference in the occasional crudite entry. I've read that
gladiators used to eat raw garlic in quantity, and it may be that whole
cloves could have been eaten raw, in the field, for example, by various
laborers, and they may have wound up in pickles and such. Unfortunately
the body of known documentation doesn't seem to be huge.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com