[Sca-cooks] Free redactions of Roman recipes
Terry Decker
t.d.decker at att.net
Fri Apr 4 17:45:34 PDT 2014
Actually, that is a Wiki simplification Edward Brandt, who is the unquoted
authority for this information, did the analysis of the text in the late
1920's and came to the conclusion that the the work was a compilation of a
number of earlier sources including Apuleius and Palladius rewritten in
common Latin for a broader audience and general use. Brandt believed that
the more luxurious recipes in the collection may represent an earlier
version of Apicius. There is no way to definitively state whether or not
the recipes of M. Gavius Apicius are in the compilation.
M. Gavius Apicius is known to have existed in the 1st Century from the works
of such authors as Pliny, Seneca, Tacitus and Athenaeus. He was known to
have written texts on cooking and is tied to a number of kitchen inventions
by Apion in a lost text entitled, On the Luxury of Apicius. According to
Odo of Cluny, Apicius wrote a text on cooking and a text on sauces. St.
Jerome, who was contemporary of or predated the compiler of Apicius used the
phrase "sauces of Apicius" in reference to Jovinian. And Isidore of Seville
refers to Apicius as the author of the first cookbook and as a person whose
gluttony killed him.
Flower and Rosenbaum point out that in the available texts, recipes for food
and sauces are combined, suggesting that there are earlier texts that
combined Apicius's works on cooking and sauces and that one of these was
incorporated in the compilation. They also note that Vinidarius's excerpts
from the 5th or 6th Centuries are from a different source than the
compilation.
So the whole question is not as cut and dried as Wikipedia makes it seem.
Bear
-----Original Message-----
Just to be clear, the gourmet Apicius was first century, but he is not
believed to have had anything to do with the work, which is generally dated
to
the fourth or fifth century and may have been compiled by several hands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
"Apicius" seems to have become a kind of general term for a gourmet just as
Pseudo-Apicius; it is a little too easy to blur the lines between the
historical figure and the (unknown) author or authors of the work.
Jim Chevallier
_www.chezjim.com_ (http://www.chezjim.com/)
Early Medieval French wine
http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2014/03/early-medieval-french-wine.html
In a message dated 4/4/2014 3:12:45 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
t.d.decker at att.net writes:
While Apicius is 1st Century CE, there are excerpts transcribed in the 5th
or 6th Century
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