Apicius

Apicius is the title we give to the only surviving Roman cookbook; it is, in fact the only such cookbook to survive from anywhere in the ancient world. The name comes from Marcus Gavius Apicius, a gourmet of the early 1st century who lived under Tiberius and was famous in his own time for luxurious living and an obsession with food. According to Seneca, he spent around 100 million sesterces on his kitchen, and when he found himself with only 10 million left—a large fortune still—he poisoned himself rather than endure a life of lesser meals.

It seems doubtful that Apicius wrote a recipe book, and this one least of all: it contains dishes named for emperors who reigned long after his death. Instead it seems that his name attached first to particular dishes he devised or that were devised in his household, then to a whole style of luxury cooking, and by the fourth century his name had become synonymous with “luxury cookbook”. Vinidarius claims to be an excerpt of Apicius but while the recipes are similar to those in Apicius in style they do not overlap; it thus seems likely that many different collections called “Apicius” were in circulation during the late Roman empire.

The surviving Apicius is a composite. The recipes are written in wildly different registers, from bare lists of ingredients to elaborate step-by-step preparations, in Latin that ranges from competent to badly broken. It was clearly never the work of a single author and was probably compiled piecemeal; while there is a broad logic to the arrangement, recipes are occasionally duplicated or placed in the wrong section.

Judging by its language, the final work probably dates to the 4th century, but many of the recipes preserved are much older. Seven dishes are attributed to Apicius himself, or at least, to the Apician style of cooking; the “Terentine” style of 4.2.13, 4.3.2, and 8.7.1 and “Julian” style of 5.1.1 also appear to pre-date 200, given they also appear as cakes in the work Chrysippus of Tyana. A few eponymous recipes have clear links to Roman emperors: three are attributed to the notorious gourmand Vitellius (d. 69 AD), while one each is associated with Trajan (d. 117) and Commodus (d. 192); we also have two references to Marcus Terentius Varro (d. 27 BC) and one to Gaius Matius, a friend of Augustus who wrote three volumes on gastronomy and from whom the Spanish word for apple, manzana, derives (the recipe, 4.3.4, fittingly contains apples). A number of other recipes are named, but their provenance is more obscure.

A few other recipes can be dated more directly. Recipe 7.1.1 calls for Cyrenaican laser—the Greek silphium—which was effectively extinct by the reign of Nero. Pliny, writing in the 70s AD, already refers to the soda trick for keeping vegetables green in Recipe 3.1 as “Apician cooking”, while a dish almost identical to the rose patina of 4.2.9 appears in Athenaeus, c. 200. The simpler vegetable dishes in Book 3 and 5 likewise concur with the simple preparations in Galen’s On the Properties of Foodstuffs, also c. 200. By contrast, few recipes clearly post-date the 2nd century; but ultimately the vast majority of recipes are undatable and may have originated anytime between the 1st and 4th centuries.

Apicius is divided into 10 books and contains about 450 individual recipes. The Grocock and Grainger edition of Apicius (A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation, Prospect Books, 2006) contains both the best Latin text and English translation, along with a detailed discussion of the text itself. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in ancient cooking.