[Sca-cooks] Re: (a few excerpts from Apicius)

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach El Hermoso Dormiendo:
>To me, the translations I've seen of Apicius describe a style of food that
>don't seem similar to the documented medieval European styles of food that
>I've seen (with few specific exceptions e.g. fish sauce), so I don't know
>that a practice described in translations of Apicius could be assumed to
>relate to medieval European practices, necessarily.  If it's genuine (i.e.
>actually written by Apicius in "Ancient Rome" days) then I wouldn't assume
>that any practice described in it was necessarily carried over 600+ years to
>be continued in medieval Europe.  (Some may have, some may have not, some may
>have been "re-discovered" independent of any ancient Roman practices.)
>
>Combining these two thoughts, it does seem plausible that some medieval
>European author could have written a book on what the author thought sounded
>like ancient Roman cuisine (rather than being a "real" book from ancient
>Rome) and simply ascribed it to Apicius...and this amuses me to no end,
>because it brings up the possibility that people of any age always think that
>"primitive" peoples from hundreds of years ago must have been forced to eat
>"rotten" food because they didn't have "modern" (relative to the thinker)
>culinary techniques and materials, rather than assuming that the medieval
>author was dictating common medieval practices into the faked "ancient Roman"
>recipes.
>
>(The latter is pure speculation on my part out of amusement - I've not
>actually seen any documentation to suggest this...except maybe Apicius itself
>if it were to turn out to be a medieval work...didn't I hear somewhere that
>in Renaissance Italy there was a contemporary equivalent to the SCA dedicated
>to recreating "Ancient Rome"?...if so, perhaps had this same loud argument
>over whether or not those poor people so long ago must have had to eat rotten
>food all the time?  I guess the saying is wrong, it's not "history" that
>repeats itself, it's "historians"...)

It's possible, I guess, that what we know as De Re Coquinaria is an 
Italian Renaissance forgery, but it seems unlikely for various 
reasons, unless it was a really elaborate hoax indeed. For instance, 
it calls for ingredients that were effectively extinct (think of the 
sylphium/laser substitution, for example), and the fact that the 
Latin is different from Platina's, which, if they're roughly 
contemporary, is kind of odd. I'd think it would take a rather 
long-sighted person, even among students of language and history of 
the later Middle Ages, to try to imitate an 
old-but-not-really-Classical brand of Latin, and pull it off 
successfully.

Just a thought...

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04