Apicius: Rome's Surviving Cookbook, From Flamingo to the Printing Press

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Apicius, or De Re Coquinaria, is the best-known cookbook to survive from ancient Rome. The author name Caelius Apicius appears to be a later misreading of the abbreviation API CAE in one manuscript, and no such writer is recorded. The name echoes Marcus Gavius Apicius, a first-century gourmet in the time of Tiberius who reportedly sailed to Africa to check whether its shrimp were larger and turned back without landing. Historians see the book as a compilation by many anonymous cooks, finalized around the fifth century according to scholar Bruno Laurioux. Its Latin shifts from classical words like iecur and fervere to kitchen terms like ficatum and bullire, and it still calls for silphium, extinct since the first century.

The text runs to ten books with Greek titles, including Epimeles for kitchen management, Sarcoptes the butcher, Cepuros the gardener, Aeropetes for birds, Thalassa for seafood, and Polyteles, the sumptuous, with flamingo and parrot. Its terse instructions assume a skilled professional cook, likely enslaved or freed, rather than the wealthy owner. An eighth-century uncial manuscript, the Apicii Excerpta a Vinidario, compiled by an illustrious man named Vinidarius, contains recipes missing from the main text. The book was printed in Milan in 1498 and Venice in 1500, with 14 Latin editions by 1936. It was translated into Italian in 1852, into French by Bertrand Guégan in a 1934 award-winning version, and into English in 1936 by Joseph Dommers Vehling.

• Only a couple of recipes carry the Apicius name, including an Apician dish in book four and Apician pork scraps in book seven.
• A book eight lamb or kid stew pounds pepper, lovage, cumin, oil, wine and liquamen fish sauce, then thickens it with wheat starch.
• For lamb the spices go on the raw meat, while for kid they are added during cooking.
• Vinidarius may have been a Goth, and his short edition shows there was never one standard version of the text.
• Four more printed editions followed within four decades of the first 1498 Milan printing.