It is hardly expected that many will follow Mr. Vehling in testing the Apician formulæ. Hazlitt in speaking of “The Young Cook’s Monitor” which was printed in 1683, says:
“Some of the ingredients proposed for sauces seem to our ears rather prodigious. In one place a contemporary peruser has inserted an ironical calculation in MS. to the effect that, whereas a cod’s head could be bought for fourpence, the condiments recommended for it were not to be had for less than nine shillings.”
We shall close with a plagiarism oft repeated. It was a plagiarism as long ago as 1736, when it was admitted such in the preface of Smith’s “The Compleat Housewife”:
“It being grown as fashionable for a book now to appear in public without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a hoop-petticoat, I shall conform to the custom for fashion-sake and not through any necessity. The subject being both common and universal, needs no argument to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the practice of it; since there are but a few nowadays who love not good eating and drinking....”
Old Apicius and Joseph Dommers Vehling really need no introduction.
Frederick Starr
Seattle, Washington, August 3, 1926.