[Sca-cooks] roman feast

Lilinah lilinah at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 19 16:14:39 PDT 2008


Euriol wrote:
>The first feast I ever worked on I did a course of recipes based out of
>Apicius. The most frequent comment I had was that the food seemed so
>ordinary. If I recall the menu I did for the course it was:
>
>Herbed Peas
>Fried Carrots
>Chicken in Cream Sauce over Pasta
>Cucumber Salad
>Red Snapper with Red Wine Sauce
>Pinenut Custard

Peas? Barely period for the 16th C.
Cream Sauce? Hardly likely.
Pinenut custard? That patina recipe is probably closer to an omelet, 
at least as i interpret it.

Sounds like the recipes were based on Vehling's work, not the Apician 
cookbook itself (i don't call it "Apicius" since he clearly had 
nothing to do with it, and the use of his name was just a selling 
point).

Of course when i served a period recipe for asparagus - actually 
based on several period recipes from the Apician cookbook (2nd C CE) 
to Platina (15th C) - some people complained that it was too 
ordinary. And i thought, c'mon, asparagus? To me it's always welcome 
and nummy, even if only tossed in olive oil and vinegar or lemon 
juice, as the recipes said. I added the recipe close to feast time 
when i found some at a fabulous price.

>I would have to go back to my original redactions (Vehling and Rosenbaum &
>Flowers were the only resources available to me at the time, Rosenbaum &
>Flowers was on loan to me) and see if I would change any of them.

That's Flower, not Flowers. I always have to stop myself from typing 
a final "s".
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilinah



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