[Sca-cooks] Advice on a Book

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Aug 12, 2009, at 1:47 PM, Mariann Eaves wrote:

> I was perusing Potboiler Press (which btw is finally up and going, Yay
> http://tranq3.tranquility.net/~potboilerpress/ ) and found Andrew  
> Dalby,
> Flavors of Byzantium listed.  Is this a good book to start out with in
> learning to cook foods from the Bysantium period?

My recollection (and I hope I'm not doing Dalby an injustice here) is  
that it's not really much of a cookbook, but more of an examination of  
food references in the fairly standard body of available texts:  
poetry, shipping records, histories, etc.

There may be recipes from sources such as Anthimus and Apicius to back  
up the references, but if there at all, they're probably sort of  
incidental.

If you simply want to learn what these people ate, it's a good source,  
but if you want one-stop shopping with worked-out recipes in the back,  
such as you might get from somebody like Terence Scully, this isn;t  
really that kind of thing.

Again, this is my recollection, backed up only slightly by a very  
brief skim through the pages before writing this. I may have missed  
the Secret Section On 101 Things To Do With Garum... ;-)

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter