‘De re coquinaria’ - the Oldest Cookbook of the Western World

“De re Coquinaria,” also referred to as “Apicius,” is a cookbook featuring recipes that may have been collected as early as the first century. Who wrote it is a mystery, but it offers unique insight into the food culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

Check out the Pinterest Page that was used to create this episode: https://www.pinterest.com/missedinhistory/on-the-subject-of-cooking-de-re-coquinaria/

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson h And
right out of the gate, we will tell you that
this episode is sponsored by pinterest UH and in fitting

(00:22):
with that, it seemed natural to think about the types
of things you might look at on pinterest UH. And
it's no secret that we absolutely love to talk about
food and food history. It's been one of my favorites
whenever we do a show about it. Um And because
I have kind of been on a tear of doing
cookbook cookthroughs in the last couple of years, or basically

(00:42):
I try to cook every recipe in a cookbook, it
got me starting to wonder about the earliest cookbooks, and
that is how I landed at reading about during Coquinadia,
which is also referred to as Epiceus or sometimes the Epiceus.
And we're going to talk about that name of Piceus
because there's a little bit of a history mystery connected
to it. But really to talk about this cookbook, we

(01:05):
have to talk first about the food culture of ancient Rome.
So there are only a few surviving written accounts of
Roman food culture from the first several centuries. Gius Patronius
Arbiter in his satire satiricn includes a section that's titled
Sena Trimalchionis, and he describes the banquet table of this

(01:29):
uh the titular character in detail. This is trom Alkio,
and that's the person of the story, who is a
formally enslaved person who has acquired just ridiculous levels of
wealth through all kinds of nefarious and unscrupulous means, and
his life in the time the book is set is
all about just indulgence and excess. And as a consequence,

(01:50):
the descriptions of this banquet are probably an exaggerated version
of what a person would typically find in a wealthy
home of Rome. I mean, it is a attire has
the name suggests, but it still gives some insight into
what this world was like. Yeah, and it it also
gives some insight into the types of foods that they

(02:12):
were using. So one course is described as follows quote.
On the tray stood a donkey made of Corinthian bronze,
bearing pannier containing olives white in one and black in
the other. Two platters flanked the figure on the margins
of which were engraved trom Alchio's name and the weight
of the silver in each dor. Mice sprinkled with poppy

(02:34):
seed and honey were served on little bridges soldered fast
to the platter, and hot sausages on a silver gridiron
underneath which were dams and plums and pomegranate seeds, and
the courses just kept coming. It becomes apparent that the
visual presentation was hugely important as an aspect of the meal. Quote.

(02:54):
There was a circular tray around which were displayed the
signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer
had placed the food best in keeping with it. Rams
vetches on aries, a piece of beef on Taurus, kidneys
and lamb's fry on Gemini, a crown on Cancer, the
womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo, an African fig

(03:17):
on Leo, on Libra, a balance, one pan of which
held a tart and the other a cake, a small
seafish on Scorpio, a bulls eye on Sagittarius, a sea
lobster on Capricornus, a goose on Aquarius, and two mullets
on Pisces. In the middle lay a piece of cut sod,
upon which rested a honeycomb with the grass arranged around it.

(03:42):
So much work. So I got about halfway through that
and I was like, man, this is a lot right.
And the guests, incidentally, uh in this book, we're sort
of chagrined by this course, which is described in the
text as quote vile fair, and which treml ki A
assures them is quote only the sauce. And the group

(04:03):
is next served stuffed capons and sal's bellies and a
hair equipped with wings to resemble Pegasus. And they were
also served a wild boar with baskets hung from its tusks.
Those baskets contained dates from Syria and Thebes. When Tremalchio
cut open the boar, live birds flew out, which sounds

(04:24):
incredibly extravagant and also very gross. Yes, I may have
had a long discussion with my husband about how one
would achieve such a thing and why would you bother,
which really submitted to I don't want to eat roasted
anything that might have bird poop in it um. Another
source for gaining insight into the tables of ancient Rome

(04:46):
is Atheneas of Nocratus and Atheneas contributed to the historical
record of Rome's Tables because he referenced and quoted famed
ancient foodies in his work, and one of those that's
brought to light in the writings of A. Senias was Orchestratus,
who lived between four hundred and three hundred b c.
On Sicily. So quite a ways back, Archestratus was not

(05:08):
himself a cook. He was a connoisseur of all kinds
of foods and wrote a poem titled Hetipatia, and that
gives all kinds of details about food. But the evidence
of that poem is found in the writing of Atheneus,
specifically a piece of writing from c. E which is
titled Philosophers at Dinner. In that book, the guests gathered

(05:30):
for the dinner quote Orchestratus to one another. The sixty
two fragments that appear in the writing of Atheneas are
all we have of this longer poem. The name Hetepathea
translates to luxurious life or pleasant life. But even though
we only have fragments, those quoted fragments once again give
us an idea of what food was like along the Mediterranean,

(05:53):
and it's mostly advice on where and when to get
fresh seafood or how to prepare things for optimal flavor.
An Orchestratis is rather judgmental about how some people prepare
their food. In one fragment, uh, he writes, quote, do
not allow anyone come near you when you bake sea wolf,
neither Syracusan nor Italiote, for they do not know how

(06:14):
to prepare them decently, but they ruin them and make
a mess out of them with cheeses and sprinklings of
the liquid vinegar and the Sylphian brine. So there was
clearly plenty of food culture and ancient Greece and Rome.
Uh well before this cookbook specifically is known to have existed.
There was enough of a food culture that there were

(06:35):
people who were famous gastronomes. And we'll talk about one
of them in a moment. While there is some advice
about food prep in their writings, most of these astronomers
were not cooks themselves. They were just really enthusiastic and
knowledgeable consumers who were also educated enough to write about
their fondness for fine food. Yeah, there's a whole secondary

(06:59):
discussion and that could be have which we're not diving
into here about the fact that probably any of the
food prepared for a lot of these people was prepared
by people who were very skilled but were in fact
enslaved labor, which, of course ancient Greece and Rome had
its own whole culture of like that being a very
inexpensive way to run one's home um, which is a

(07:20):
very messed up thing in and of itself, but it
also is something to keep in mind as we talked about,
like all of the ways things get prepared. These people
are writing about it, but they're really leaning on people
other people to do that heavy lifting in terms of
the work. And so with all of this in mind,
we come to you what is believed to be the
oldest known cookbook in the West, and that is direct Coquinatia,

(07:41):
which translates to on the subject of cooking, and this
book comes with a number of caveats and question marks.
It's believed to have been compiled initially in the first century,
although the oldest surviving copy is estimated to have been
made sometime in the ninth century, so hundreds of years later. Additional,
it's not known how closely that surviving version might resemble

(08:04):
its predecessors. It was probably edited, augmented, and otherwise changed
over the centuries, and of course it was copied by hands,
so there are probably just errors or stylistic changes made
to better appeal to the sensibilities of any given copies
time of creation. Yeah, you'll also see that probably in
terms of actually writing it down, these may have been

(08:25):
sort of gathered together from fort century recipes, but not
actually written down in a collected group until later. It's
there are a lot of question marks about the beginning
point of this collection of recipes, and the other big
question mark around the book is who wrote it to
begin with. So the name of Picquius is associated with

(08:46):
several different people in relation to this book, and it
might be even a more generalized word to describe food lovers.
This reminds me a little bit of the Tratilla and
the Trata of Salerno, who we talked about, uh not
that long ago on the show, and just sort of
the question marks around was this a person? Was it
a title? Like what exactly are we talking about here? Uh?

(09:10):
While we might never know with certainty who Epiceus was,
the person who was most often cited as the most
likely candidate is Marcus Gavus Epicius, who was an influential
Roman merchant from the first century. And we're going to
talk all about Marcus Gavus Epicius, at least what we
know of him, after we pause for a sponsor break.

(09:38):
The legend of Marcus Gavius Epicius's foodie proclivities is fairly epic.
The wealth he acquired in business is said to have
been spent almost entirely in pursuit of thrilling, unique and
exceptional eating experiences. One story goes that he traveled from
Rome to Libya's simply because he had been told that

(09:59):
the prawns it could be found in Libya were just exquisite.
This trip was apparently a bust, though he got home unimpressed.
Apparently he as he neared the shore, a boat of
fishermen approached the ship that he was traveling on and
showed him the prawns they had available, and he asked
if there were any finer in the land, and when

(10:19):
they said no, he had his own ship turnaround to
go back home. This is not worth making land. I
would rather just stay on the ship. Depending on on
what Sourcire reading, you'll also see those prawns listed as
crawfish or like another crustacean. There's clearly some translation going

(10:39):
on there, but just you know, the lesson is the same.
He found them insufficient. But in addition to food adventures,
it appears that Marcus Gavius Apicius was also pretty invested
as a scholar of food, even though this may have
been considered kind of exceptionally indulgent at the time. Uh
He has also been credited with creating a cooking school

(11:00):
to instruct cooks based on the research and the information
that he had gathered over the years. All of the
globe trotting and research into food that Marcus Gavius Epicius
did was also expensive. It was so expensive that he
ended up spending his whole fortune chasing down the various
flavors that excited and unfortunately sometimes eluded him. Like those prawns.

(11:23):
He was also known to throw huge, huge banquets if
they were anything like the ones that we mentioned from
literature at the time. It is no surprise that his
finances were really completely drained by the end of his life,
and the end of his life is kind of its
own story. It's one that was recounted by numerous writers
of the time, including Seneca the Younger, and while some

(11:45):
of the details vary depending on which specific account you're
looking at, the basic version is that when Marcus Gavius
Epicius realized his money was running out, he made the
decision that death was his best option. Now, this reason
is sometimes given as a fear that he would starve
to death. That doesn't really hold water, because he actually
still had quite a bit of money. Um. You'll see

(12:06):
different numbers bandied about, but it's like in the you know,
thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Uh. The
other reason often cited for his decision to take his
own life was that he knew he no longer had
enough money to live that life of pursuing knowledge and
deliciousness at this sort of grand scale. And so, according
to pretty much every version, he staged one last lavish

(12:29):
banquet and he poisoned himself at its conclusion. This is,
of course, a deeply melodramatic story, and we don't even
have any certain evidence that this is anything more than
an exaggerated tale told so often that it just came
to be believed as a truth. But we also don't
know otherwise about this food lover's end. So this has

(12:49):
kind of been the accepted with an Asterist story of
his life. But here's the important thing, though. If this
is the Epicqueus who's named in the manuscript, Marcus Gavious
Epicius was probably the inspiration for the book's name, not
the person who wrote the book. As a well known gastronome,

(13:10):
he would probably have been exactly the type of person
you would dedicate a cookbook too. And even so, the
earliest estimation for the book's completion is still centuries after
he lived, that was in the fourth century. So Athenius,
whose writings we mentioned earlier, actually references epici Use the man,
but not this cookbook or this gathering of writings in

(13:33):
any of the writing that Athenius was doing in the
third century. So that suggests that this book itself may
not have been particularly well known yet if it already
existed at that time. Athenius also mentions recipes and dishes
that were named for Marcus Gavus Epicius, so he was
certainly well known for his love of food, and possibly

(13:54):
because of that fame, at some point the name Epicius
became a common use term. In to writings of the
first century Roman satirical Povet Juvenile, the word Epicius was
used to refer to a foodie. Juvenal was born a
couple of decades after Marcus Gavius Epicius died, just for
like a timeline reference. Yes, so it would have been

(14:15):
after he was gone, and it could have been by
that point twenty years later people were just being like, Oh,
you're kind of an apiqueous, aren't you. You're really you're
really fancy in your food choices. I'm going to start
introducing that in casual conversation, f y. I uh So,
to continue the case that Derek Coquinadia as it has
survived today doesn't really appear to be the work of

(14:36):
a food loving aristocrat like Marcus Gavus Epicius. It just
isn't written in a way that someone of that station
would write. It's possible that Epicius was the collector of
the various recipes, or even that he may have paid
for an initial effort at bringing them together, like this
was his little financial project. But the reality is we
don't know who Epickius is in relation to this book,

(14:58):
and even the mark is Gavious theory is really an
educated guess without any hard evidence. According to Ann Garner,
curator Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health
and a post that she wrote for the Center, in quote,
these recipes appear to be written by and for Cooks.
The Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

(15:20):
acquired their ninth century manuscript, which is one of the
oldest known surviving copies, in the nineteen twenties, and it
was rebound and restored in two thousand six. Yeah, I
think I didn't verify this, but I read one account
that it had already been kind of rebound prior to that,
and so it wasn't like they were they were completely
redoing it. They were just trying to maintain it for posterity. Uh.

(15:44):
And that version of the book was written by hand,
and it was written by several different people. It was
created in a monastery in Folda, Germany. And it's possible
that the Folda book was used as a teaching or
a practice document for scribes. And that's uh theory that
comes up because there are a number of strikethroughs in
the text, you know, kind of rewritten and fixed errors.

(16:06):
And it's also not heavily decorated. There's another ninth century
copy of the manuscript that appears to have been copied
from the same source as the one from Fulda, although
that source document has been lost. That other ninth century
copies in the Vatican Library, and the Vatican copy contains
the same text, but it's illuminated with guilt accents, so

(16:29):
it's a lot fancier than that other copy. Yeah, you'll
sometimes see the two side by side, and you can
see like this looks like a notebook of writing, and
this looks like a fancy pants unicorn book. It's very
beautiful and the illustrations are super detailed. Um. Beginning in
four r Coquinaria started to have print runs for wider distribution.

(16:50):
The first of these was in Milan. The second run
came from Venice two years later, and since those first
two runs it has been reprinted numerous times in a
variety of languages. Uh. There was also another book titled
apix A Natio, and that was produced by a nebulous
figure named Nidarius in the eighth century. And while these

(17:12):
excerpts of Epicius that Nidarius produced aren't really duplicates of
what most editions of the Epicius manuscript include. They are
often included with printings of Dereka as supplemental material because
the style is very similar. It does kind of match
up and seem like it could be of the same
group that maybe some of those had been cold and

(17:33):
then got used in this later, smaller publication. This cookbook
has been copied and reprinted for centuries, but it didn't
make it into the English language until nine when Joseph
Dahmer's Veiling published his translation and also made a case
to encourage academia to just embrace food scholarship. He describes

(17:55):
in the preface to the book how studying food offers
insight into the lives of the people who ate it,
writing quote, it has been often said that the way
to a man's heart is through his stomach. So here
is hoping that we may find a better way of
knowing old Rome and antique private life through the study
of this cookery book. He reiterates this belief in the

(18:17):
opening line of the book section of analysis, with quote,
anyone who would know something worthwhile about the private and
public lives of the ancients should be well acquainted with
their table. I feel like this is like the flag
that we could carry through every episode of Unearthed, right,
we talked about it all the time, like, oh, now
we know that they ate grains, which means that they

(18:40):
were either trading or doing their own. It really is
like a way to to engineer your model of what
it was like to live in these previous times. Veiling
also cautions in his book about not leaning on presumptions
and partial facts that have been repeated over the years
so many times that people have taken them as fact
rather than examining historical evidence more carefully writing quote, they

(19:03):
have become fixed ideas, making reconstruction difficult for anyone who
would gain a picture along rational lines. Failing lists the
three Latin editions of the epiceous book that he used
for his translation. The first was a fifteen forty one
edition by Albanus Toranis, and the second was the work
of Martinis Lister, who produced multiple editions of the book

(19:27):
between seventeen o five and seventeen o nine. The third
was a n edition by C. G Iratano and Friedrich Volmer.
And you'll notice, of course that these are all additions
that came out well after the recipes are believed to
have been collected initially, like many hundreds of years. Hundreds

(19:48):
of years. Yeah, yeah, it's it is one of those
things that I wanted to make sure we pointed that out,
because we're talking about this ancient book, but we're talking
about of version that may not bear all that much
resemblance to the initial one. We don't know, And that
Jarrattano Vulmer edition in particular got some rather harsh comments

(20:10):
in the Classical Review when it came out in h
Here is an excerpt of the review, penned by classical
scholar Wallace Martin Lindsay, and it gives you evidence into
how hard it can be to work on a project
like this that reaches so far back into human history.
He writes, quote, Jarrattano did what nine out of ten
editors in these days would do. He contented himself with

(20:32):
the manuscripts within reach, the ninth century manuscript in the
Vatican Library, the other Italian Renaissance manuscripts. He did not
cross the sea to Cheltenham, where, in a library whose
door opens but to golden keys, is imprisoned another ninth
century manuscript of a picqueous destined, doubtless for the shelves
of some dollar king whose freakish son will use its

(20:54):
pages to light a super cigar. Indeed, he seemed unaware
of its existence. Uckly, Vulmer intervened. The two ninth century
manuscripts are the only foundation for an addition. So this
is pretty harsh. I like that he manages to not
only criticize the editor, but also like society at large,

(21:18):
like none of you value history like a hypothetical book buyer. However,
Lindsay does go on to praise this edition in the review,
even referring to it as a gem in spite of
those initial criticisms about relying on too late version. He

(21:39):
definitely praises Vulmer for his involvement in the work and
and seems to think that it would have been a
disaster without him and the work of Vulmer even predating
the publication of that edition. Also tackles the subject of
the nature of the Latin that's used in the available manuscript.
So this is something that has caused a lot of
debate over the years because a lot of it is

(22:00):
written in what is called vulgar Latin. That really just
means it's like colloquial or casual Latin. As opposed to
more formal classical Latin, and Vulner arrived at the conclusion
that this was part of the book being copied as
it passed through time, and that probably somewhere in the
fourth or fifth century, one of the copies that was
made that survived was in the more casual language form.

(22:21):
So this is something probably most of us are familiar with.
It's sort of like if you were to copy a
recipe out of an old cookbook and abbreviate or shift
the verbiage to more modern sensibilities. But there have also
been historians over the years, including Lindsay, who have made
the case that, because it's a book of cookery really
a how to manual, not philosophy or literature, that the

(22:44):
Epicqueous Manuscript might have always been in vulgar Latin right
from the start. That would make sense in a lot
of ways, but that also doesn't entirely hold because there
are some sections of the book that use more classical Latin,
and suggests that the sections and vulgar Latin may have
been integrated into the text over the years. So in

(23:06):
the English translation, Bailing establishes his theory that I think
has continued to persist that this is not the work
of any one person, but it is the work of many,
he writes, quote in our opinion unfounded, of course, by
positive proof. The epicqueous book is somewhat of a gastronomic bible,
consisting of ten different books by several authors, originating in

(23:28):
Greece and taken over by the Romans along with the
rest of Greek culture as spoils of war. These books
or chapters or fragments thereof must have been in vogue
long before they were collected and assembled in the present form.
So now that we've talked about the murky origins and
attribution of this book. Coming up, we will talk about
its contents. But first we will take a quick break

(23:51):
to hear from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed
in history class going. The contents of don't entirely resemble
modern cookbooks. Although if you listen to any of our
previous episodes with food journalists and historian and Burn, you

(24:14):
probably won't be surprised that the recipes in A Pigeous
are not terribly specific. When it comes to actual directions,
you have to know a little bit of what's going on.
There have been theories that this was due to the
assumption that people who would be reading it would know
their way around food prep and they simply didn't need
all of that extra language. There's also a likelihood that

(24:35):
this group of recipes was always intended for private use
and never as a published manual, but more like something
to be shared among foodies. The brevity of instructions could
also maybe have been as a means to conserve writing materials.
In terms of arrangement, though the book might feel really
familiar to anybody who has worked with a modern cookbook,
the chapters are arranged by ingredient, and this is an

(24:58):
area where things can once again diverge from what might
feel familiar because some of those ingredients, like flamingo, are
not things that are commonly consumed today, at least not
here in the US. The ingredients are ruled to a
degree by season, location and a lack of preservation options. Yeah,
whereas today, I think, particularly in the in the US

(25:19):
and other parts of the world, you could pick up
a cookbook that has even things that are maybe not
in season or or a little bit harder to get,
and you can probably find them at your local market
or whatever. But this is a time when obviously like
they didn't have produce year round of every variety, and
they did not have so there's some of that places
into it as well. Um. There are also some ingredients

(25:41):
in this book that are mentioned that have kind of
nebulous meanings. So one of them is the word liquidmen.
This has used almost any time that anything liquid would
be used, like a stock or a gravy or a
broth that might come into play, and without understanding a
recipe's context, it might be difficult to figure out which
version of liquomen is actually intended to be used. There

(26:04):
is also a fish sauce that's referenced several times called
garum that would have at one point referred to a
sauce created with a very specific fish, but in this
case it seems to be applied pretty liberally throughout without
that level of specificity, so it's kind of like any
fish sauce. And this means that you can't really take
all of these recipes literally. Again, they have to be

(26:24):
considered in context. But there are also a lot of
ingredients and seasonings that remains staples in kitchens today. Human
is featured throughout as our eggs and leaks and pine nuts,
savory pepper, and parsley. The first book of the cookbook
is called The Careful Experienced Cook and it offers up

(26:44):
recipes for alcoholic libations, as well as an array of
ways to rescue items that are past their prime maybe
have begun to spoil a little bit. I thought about
this and wondered if it would really gross you out, Tracy,
because it's food safety is important. Yeah, but most of
the time, of things that make things spoil aren't the

(27:08):
same things that make you sick, right, So like, if
there's a little mold on the bread, you can just
cut that piece of the bread off. Yeah. Reading some
of these, I was like, oh, don't eat that. But yes,
we're but again, it's not the same constant supply that
we would have now, so you would have had to
rescue things. One of the recipes in this first section

(27:31):
that I of course gravitated to is for a rose wine,
and it reads make rose wine in this manner rose
petals the lower white part removed, sewed into a linen bag,
and immersed in wine for seven days. Thereupon at a
sack of new petals, which allowed to draw for another
seven days. Again, remove the old petals and replace them

(27:52):
by fresh ones for another week. Then strain the wine
through the colander before serving at honey sweetening to taste.
Take care that only the best petals free from do
be used for soaking. There's also a recipe for rose
wine made without roses, using citrus leaves as a substitute.
Sneaky uh. The advice on keeping oysters instructs the reader

(28:15):
simply to quote, fu migate a vinegar barrel with pitch,
wash it out with vinegar, and stack the oysters in it.
See that's a little grosser to me. I don't know why.
An oyster stack kind of picked me out as well,
But and the things in oysters that might make one
ill will definitely just multiply, and they're not tell it

(28:38):
with anyway. Book two is titled Minces, and it gives
recipes for making several kinds of sausage, meat, puddings, and
meat loaves. For example, to make a cuddlefish croquette, quote,
the meat is separated from bones, skin, chopped fine and
pounded in the mortar shape. The force meat into neat

(29:00):
croquettes and cook them in liquidmen. They are displayed nicely
on a large dish so simple. Just cook it. It's fine,
just cook it, Just cook it. Book three is the Gardener,
and there are dozens of recipes to prepare fruits and
vegetables in this one, including pumpkin, melon, cabbage, cauliflower, beats, turnips, carrots, parsnips,

(29:21):
and many others. Vegetable dishes promoting good health are featured,
and in many cases there are numerous preparation descriptions for
any given ingredient. For example, there is a recipe for
general pumpkin or squash preparation involving cuman, stock and pepper,
and then something called pumpkin Alexandrine boiled pumpkin, fried pumpkin,

(29:42):
which I kind of want to try doing. Pumpkin boiled
and fried, mashed pumpkin and pumpkin stewed with a hen,
and then garnished with hard skinned peaches and truffles. The
beat preparation is quite interesting. Quote to make a dish
of beets that will appeal to your taste. Slice leaks
and crush coriander and cumin, add raisin, wine, boil all

(30:04):
down to perfection. Bind it serves separate from the broth
with oil and vinegar. Why is it a beat recipe
that is made of leaks. Well, their beats already in there,
and the leaks are added the follow up recipe for beats,
which is simply listed as another way, and the English
translation says, quote, cook the beets with mustard seed and

(30:27):
serve them well, pickled in a little oil and vinegar.
It's more like a letter from your nana than a cookbook.
Just cook them. The fourth book is titled Miscellanya, and
it features boiled dinners, finely minced dishes, porridge gruel, and
a section headed as appetizing dishes that means appetizers, not

(30:49):
just things that are yummy. There are a number of
pies listed here, but these are generally savory pies. Even
the pumpkin pie that they list here is really more
like a roasted pumpkin with pepper on it. Book five
is legumes, so it's full of peas, lintels and beans.
And there's a particular recipe in this section that's unusual.
Spelling even notes in his translation that there's just nothing

(31:11):
quite comparable to it in any other source. And this
is a layered dish, which the translation calls peas supreme style,
sort of like a layered cast role that has layers
of crushed nuts, cooked peas, sausage, bacon, leaks, and diced
meats all on hand, with a layer of peas over

(31:32):
each other ingredient. It's then quote baked thoroughly and a
sauce is made with the yolks of hard boiled eggs,
white pepper, honey, white wine, and broth heated in a saucepan.
I try that, honestly, I would too. It's like p lasagna, yeah,
and it sounds kind of fascinating to me, and I

(31:55):
would probably eat it. Book six delves into ways to
cook foul in eating birds that you might expect like
chicken and goose and duck, but also crane, ostrich peacock, parrot,
and the previously mentioned flamingo. And this is where a
Pickius covers how to prepare quote birds of all kinds
that have a goatish smell, which is followed by a

(32:17):
section titled another treatment of odor. So there's definitely a
good bit of advice about masking items that have basically
gone off or started to started to smell a little gamy.
I don't know why birds with a ghatish smell just
sounds like the title of a poem to Me and

(32:40):
Books seven. The text covers sumptuous dishes. As you might expect,
these are all very rich. Most of the dishes are
made with fatty cuts of meat. This recipe for fresh
ham mentions gingerbread, but this wouldn't have been a sweet
It would have been more like a biscuity bread made
with savory spice. Is quote. A fresh ham is cooked

(33:03):
with two pounds of barley and twenty five figs. When done,
skin glaze the surface with a fire shovel full of
glowing coals. Spread honey over it, or what's better, put
it in the oven covered with honey. When it has
a nice color. Put in a saucepan raisin, wine, pepper,
a bunch of rue and pure wine to taste. When

(33:26):
this is done, pour half of it over the ham,
and in the other half soaked specially made gingerbread, and
the remnant of the sauce after most of it is
thoroughly soaked into the bread, add to the ham. That
sounds kind of interesting as well. I think a lot
is depending on exactly what the consistency of that gingerbread is. Right,

(33:47):
If it's biscuity and you soak it in a sauce
that actually sounds pretty numby. It's like biscuits and wine
gravy um. Book seven also offers up some sweeter fay
so that's mostly very simple things like bread that has
been soaked in milk and then fried and then covered
with honey, or dates stuffed with nuts and then drizzled

(34:09):
with honey. The eighth book is titled Quadrupeds and it
encompasses everything from wild boar to dormouse game. Animals like venison,
wild goat, and gazelle are mentioned in the text, along
with preparations and appropriate sauces can Book nine cover seafood.
Uh and I really loved this one. Of course, it's

(34:30):
on the Mediterranean, so seafood is prominent, and the broiled
lobster recipe in this case evidence is how they are
just some food preparations that have persisted through time. This
one reads make thus, if broiled, they should appear in
their shell, which is opened by splitting the live lobster
into season with pepper sauce and coriander sauce moistened with oil,

(34:53):
and broil them on the grill. When they are dry,
keep on basting them more and more with oil or
butter until they are properly broiled. Book ten has labeled
the fishermen, and it's largely a section on sauces. Believe
that this was probably in addition to the texts, since
there are already plenty of seafood content and the books
and the chapters that come before it. So having read

(35:15):
all this, it's easy to see why scholars and historians
have come to view the study of food and food
preparation as such an important part of human history. And
any literal hundreds of recipes collected in this cookbook, it
becomes pretty easy to consider both the differences and the
similarities of our own tables and those of previous civilizations.
Despite the unusual nature of some of the ingredients, a

(35:38):
lot of the advice and direction in the epicqueous text
is pretty similar to the way things are done today,
all the way down to the tools and the words
of vailing, which seemed like a good place to wrap
this one up quote our own age is but the
grandchild of antiquity. The words we utter in their roots
are those of our grandfathers, and so do many dishes

(35:59):
we eat today. We're zimbol, those once enjoyed by a
Picius and his friends. Done, Done, Done. I have so
many thoughts for our Friday episode. Yeah, we should probably
also mentioned that since this episode is sponsored by Pinterest,
we have pinned some things in our Pinterest that are

(36:20):
related to this book and the recipes in it. Yes,
it is fascinating and inspiring to look at all of
these old dressed peace and wonder what one might do
with them today. And we'll talk a little bit about
that in in our Friday episode, but for now, I
have cooking related email about a different episode. This is
our related to our recipe on Lydia Mariah Child, and

(36:42):
it's from our listener Betsy, who writes Deer, Holly and Tracy,
longtime listener, first time email er. I wanted to thank
you for your most recent episode on one of my
favorite people, Lydia Mariah Child. Mariah has played an outsized
role in my life and education, but there was a
huge amount I didn't know about her until I listened
to your episode. Throughout high school, I interned at Old

(37:02):
Sturbridge Village, a living history museum depicting life in the
late eighteen thirties New England, so I learned to cook
in large part over an open hearth and using the
recipes from her cookbook The Frugal Housewife. I no longer
work at that particular museum, but I use the skills
I learned their daily for anyone curious. Her recipes, called receipts,
can easily be adapted to a modern oven or stove.

(37:25):
It's pretty easy to approximate average cooking times and temperatures
for different kinds of food. The harder part is interpreting
vocabulary that has changed. Indian meal is corn meal, and
a gill is half a cup. I particularly like her
curried foul ideal for old tough birds, but any grocery
store chicken will do. Indian putting, caraway cakes and gingerbread

(37:46):
a recipe most people enjoyed learning about, though in my
experience it always comes out soggy. Is her recipe for cupcake.
So nowadays cupcake is baked in a cup, but in
Mrs Child's day, cupcake was measured in cups. One cup butter,
two cups sugar, three cups flour, and four eggs. I
have read The Frugal Housewife covered to cover numerous times,

(38:06):
and I knew she had also written fiction and been
an abolitionist, but I didn't know the extent of her activism,
scholarly education, or editorial career. So thank you so much
for giving me the opportunity to learn about her many accomplishments.
And then she asked us for some sources, which I
will send her, and then writes, also one of you
mentioned something about how you were skeptical about there being

(38:27):
deep snow in November in New England. That was me
that I'm not able to verify this, but the explanation
I have been given in the past is that we
were still in the Little Ice Age, and also the
date of Thanksgiving hadn't been standardized yet. It was just
when the governor wanted it to be, so sometimes it
was in December. Once again, thanks to the episode and
for your podcast in general, I listen to nearly every

(38:49):
episode with interest, and I've got several friends and also
my mother, whom I listened to this episode with into
the show. Your friend and listener, Betsy, Thank you so much, Betsy.
That's um uh perfectly makes a little bookend for this
episode about cooking to talk about a much more recent thing,
but still something we have to interpret if we want
to make those recipes today. Yeah, and that that explanation

(39:10):
of snow on Thanksgiving makes total sense to me and
was just not stuff that was at the top of
my mind when I speculated on it. No me either. Yeah.
So I hope everyone is inspired to eat something delicious
by all of this. Yeah, if you would like to,
you can write us an email and tell us what
you ate us a consequence, that's a history podcast at

(39:32):
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on
social media as Missed in History And if you would
like to subscribe to the show, we would like you
to do that, you can do that on the I
heart Radio app or wherever it is you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,

(39:54):
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.