In Sicily, the goddess of good cheer, Adephagia, had her especial altars, and thence, perhaps, the estimation in which the Sicilian cooks were held, who prayed to her for inspiration. Her ministers were paid salaries as rich as the sauces they invented. Something like £800 per annum formed the honorarium of the learned and juicy gentleman. But he was not always to be had, even at that price; and the disgusted Languedocien who would not remain in the cuisine of the Duke of Richmond, when Governor of Ireland, for the sufficient reason that there was no Opera in Dublin, had his prototype among his Sicilian predecessors. The jealousy of the culinary bondsman in Greek households against the free cook from Sicily, must have been sometimes deadly in its results.
The best-feed cook on record is the happy mortal to whom his master Antony gave a city, because he had cooked a repast which had called forth encomium from that dreadful jade, Cleopatra.
But money was the last thing thought of by the wearied epicures of Rome, especially when what they gave belonged to somebody else. When Lucullus spent £1,000 sterling on a snug dinner for three,—himself, Cæsar, and Pompey,—he doubtless spent his creditors’ money; at least, extravagant people generally do. Claudius dined often with six hundred guests, and the Roman people paid the cooks. The dinners of Vitellius cost that sacrilegious feeder upwards of £3,000 each, but the bills were discharged by a levy on the public pocket. When Tiberius ordered several thousands sterling to be bestowed on the author of a piece wherein every thing eatable was made to speak wittily, the author was really paid out of the popular pocket; and when Geta insisted on having as many courses at each repast as there were letters in the alphabet, and all the viands at each course so named that their initials should be the same as that of the course itself, he was the last person who troubled himself about the payment for such extravagance.
The cooks of such epicures must necessarily, however, have been as despotic in the kitchen as their lord was in the saloon. The slaves there, who hurried to and fro, bearing their tributes of good things from the market-place, or distributing them according to his bidding, obeyed the cook’s very nod, nay, anticipated his very wishes. They were, in fact, the ministers of an awful Sovereign. The cook was their Lord paramount. The stewards possessed no little power; but when the fires were lighted, and the dinner had to be thought of, the head cook was the kitchen Jupiter; and when he spoke, obedience, silence, and trembling followed upon his word.
From his raised platform, the Archimagirus, as he was called, could overlook all the preparations, and with his tremendous spoon of office he could break the heads of his least skilful disciples, and taste the sauces seething in the remotest saucepans. The effect must have been quite pantomimic; and to complete it, there was only wanted a crash of discordant music to accompany the rapid descent of the gigantic spoon upon the skull or ribs of an offender. The work was done in presence of the gods, and scullions blew the fires under the gaze of the Lares,—sooty divinities to whom, the legend says, inferior cooks were sometimes sacrificed in the month of December. “But,” as Othello says, “that’s a fable!”
Great Roman kitchens were as well worth seeing, and perhaps were as often inspected by the curious and privileged, as that of the Reform Club. “Order reigned” there quite as much as it did, according to Marshal Sebastiani, at Warsaw, amid the most abject slavery. Art and costliness were lavished upon the vessels, but the human beings there were exactly the things that were made the least account of.
No doubt that the triumph of the art of the cook consisted in serving up an entire pig at once roasted and boiled. The elder Disraeli has shown from Archestratus how this was done. “The animal had been bled to death by a wound under the shoulder, whence, after copious effusion, the master-cook extracted the entrails, washed them with wine, and hanged the animal by the feet. He crammed down the throat the stuffings already prepared. Then, covering the half of the pig with a paste of barley thickened with wine and oil, he put it in a small oven, or on a heated table of brass, where it was gently roasted with all due care. When the skin was browned, he boiled the other side, and then, taking away the barley paste, the pig was served up, at once boiled and roasted.” And such was the way by which the best of cooks spoiled the best of pigs.
According to Plautus, cooks alone were privileged in the old days to carry knives in their girdles. In the “Aulularia,” old Euclio says to Congrio, the cook, “Ad tres viros jam ego deferam tuum nomen,”—“I’ll go and inform against you to the Magistrates.” “Why so?” asks Congrio. “Because you carry a knife,”—“Quia cultrum habes.” “Well,” says the artist, standing on his rights, “cocum decet,” “it is the sign of my profession.” From another of the many cooks of Plautus we learn, in the “Menæchmei,” that, when a parasite was at table, his appetite was reckoned as equivalent to that of eight guests; and when Cylindrus is ordered to prepare a dinner for Menæchmus, his “lady,” and the official parasite, “Then,” says the cook, “that’s as good as ten; for your parasite does the work of eight:”—
“Jam isti sunt decem,
Nam parasitus octo hominum munus facile fungitur.”