“Carnem salsam dulcem facies, si prius in lacte coquas, et postea in aqua.”
But again his compounds are nauseating even in print. He was famous for many dishes, and Pliny, in his Natural History, says he discovered the way of increasing the size of the liver of the pig—just as the liver of the Strasbourg geese is enlarged for pâté de foie gras, and as our own Southern people used to induce pathological conditions in their turkeys.
The method of Apicius was to cram the pig with dried figs, and, when it was fat enough, drench it with wine mixed with honey. “There is,” continues Pliny, “no other animal that affords so great a variety to the palate; all others have their taste, but the pig fifty different flavors. From this tastiness of the meat it came about that the censors made whole pages of regulations about serving at banquets the belly and the jowls and other dainty parts. But in spite of their rules the poet Publius, author of the Mimes, when he ceased to be a slave, is said never to have given an entertainment without a dish of pig’s belly which he called ‘sumen.’”
“Cook Apicius showed a remarkable ingenuity in developing luxury,” the old Roman says at another time, “and thought it a most excellent plan to let a mullet die in the pickle known as ‘garum.’” It was ingenuity of cruelty as well as of luxury. “They killed the fish in sauces and pickled them alive at the banquet,” says Seneca, “feeding the eye before the gullet, for they took pleasure in seeing their mullets change several colors while dying.” The unthinkable garum was made, according to Pliny, from the intestines of fish macerated with salt, and other ingredients were added before the mixture was set in the sun to putrefy and came to the right point for serving. It also had popularity as a household remedy for dog-bites, etc.; and in burns, when care was necessary in its application not to mention it by name—so delicately timid was its healing spirit. Its use as a dish was widespread, and perhaps we see in the well-known hankerings of the royal George of England a reversion to the palate of Italian ancestors.
But garum was only one of strange dishes. The Romans seasoned much with rue and asafetida!—a taste kept to this day in India, where “Kim” eats “good curry cakes all warm and well-scented with hing (asafetida).” Cabbages they highly estimated; “of all garden vegetables they thought them best,” says Pliny. The same author notes that Apicius rejected Brussels sprouts, and in this was followed by Drusus Cæsar, who was censured for over-nicety by his father, the Emperor Tiberius of Capreæ villas fame.
Upon cooks and the Roman estimate of their value in his day Pliny also casts light. “Asinius Celer, a man of consular rank and noted for his expenditure on mullet, bought one at Rome during the reign of Gaius Caligula for eight thousand sesterces. Reflection on this fact,” continues Pliny, “will recall the complaints uttered against luxury and the lament that a single cook costs more than a horse. At the present day a cook is only to be had for the price of a triumph, and a mullet only to be had for what was once the price of a cook! Of a fact there is now hardly any living being held in higher esteem than the man who knows how to get rid of his master’s belongings in the most scientific fashion!”
Much has been written of the luxury and enervation of Romans after the republic, how they feasted scented with perfumes, reclining and listening to music, “nudis puellis ministrantibus.” The story is old of how Vedius Pollio “hung with ecstasy over lampreys fattened on human flesh;” how Tiberius spent two days and two nights in one bout; how Claudius dissolved pearls for his food; how Vitellius delighted in the brains of pheasants and tongues of nightingales and the roe of fish difficult to take; how the favorite supper of Heliogabalus was the brains of six hundred thrushes. At the time these gluttonies went on in the houses of government officials, the mass of the people, the great workers who supported the great idlers, fed healthfully on a mess of pottage. The many to support the super-abundant luxury of a few is still one of the mysteries of the people.
But in the old Rome the law of right and honest strength at last prevailed, and monsters gave way to the cleaner and hardier chiefs of the north. The mastery of the world necessarily passed to others;—it has never lain with slaves of the stomach.
The early folk of Britain—those Cæesar found in the land from which we sprang—ate the milk and flesh of their flocks. They made bread by picking the grains from the ear and pounding them to paste in a mortar. Their Roman conquerors doubtless brought to their midst a more elaborated table order. Barbarous Saxons, fighters and freebooters, next settling on the rich island and restraining themselves little for sowing and reaping, must in their incursions have been flesh-eaters, expeditiously roasting and broiling directly over coals like our early pioneers.
This mode of living also would seem true of the later-coming Danes, who after their settlement introduced, says Holinshed, another habit. “The Danes,” says that delightful chronicler, “had their dwelling ... among the Englishmen, whereby came great harme; for whereas the Danes by nature were great drinkers, the Englishmen by continuall conversation with them learned the same vice. King Edgar, to reforme in part such excessive quaffing as then began to grow in use, caused by the procurement of Dunstane [the then Archbishop of Canterbury] nailes to be set in cups of a certeine measure, marked for the purpose, that none should drinke more than was assigned by such measured cups. Englishmen also learned of the Saxons, Flemings, and other strangers, their peculiar kinds of vices, as of the Saxons a disordered fierceness of mind, of the Flemings a feeble tendernesse of bodie; where before they rejoiced in their owne simplicitie and esteemed not the lewd and unprofitable manners of strangers.”