West­ern schol­ar­ship has had “a bias against study­ing sen­su­al expe­ri­ence,” writes Reina Gat­tuso at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the rel­ic of an Enlight­en­ment-era hier­ar­chy that con­sid­ered taste, touch, and fla­vor taboo top­ics for sober aca­d­e­m­ic inquiry.” This does not mean, how­ev­er, that cook­ing has been ignored by his­to­ri­ans. Many a schol­ar has tak­en Euro­pean cook­ing seri­ous­ly, before recent food schol­ar­ship expand­ed the canon. For exam­ple, in a 1926 Eng­lish trans­la­tion of an ancient Roman cook­book, Joseph Dom­mers Vehling makes a strong case for the cen­tral­i­ty of food schol­ar­ship.

“Any­one who would know some­thing worth while about the pri­vate and pub­lic lives of the ancients,” writes Vehling, “should be well acquaint­ed with their table.” Pub­lished as Cook­ery and Din­ing in Impe­r­i­al Rome (and avail­able here at Project Guten­berg), it is, he says, the old­est known cook­book in exis­tence.

The book, orig­i­nal­ly titled De Re Coquinar­ia, is attrib­uted to Api­cius and may date to the 1st cen­tu­ry A.C.E., though the old­est sur­viv­ing copy comes from the end of the Empire, some­time in the 5th cen­tu­ry. As with most ancient texts, copied over cen­turies, redact­ed, amend­ed, and edit­ed, the orig­i­nal cook­book is shroud­ed in mys­tery.

The cook­book’s author, Api­cius, could have been one of sev­er­al “renowned gas­tronomers of old Rome” who bore the sur­name. But whichev­er “famous eater” was respon­si­ble, over 2000 years lat­er the book has quite a lot to tell us about the Roman diet. (All of the illus­tra­tions here are by Vehling, who includes over two dozen exam­ples of ancient prac­tices and arti­facts.)

Meat played an impor­tant role, and “cru­el meth­ods of slaugh­ter were com­mon.” But the kind of meat avail­able seems to have changed dur­ing Apicius’s time:

With the increas­ing short­age of beef, with the increas­ing facil­i­ties for rais­ing chick­en and pork, a rever­sion to Api­cian meth­ods of cook­ery and diet is not only prob­a­bly but actu­al­ly seems inevitable. The ancient bill of fare and the ancient meth­ods of cook­ery were entire­ly guid­ed by the sup­ply of raw materials—precisely like ours. They had no great food stores nor very effi­cient mar­ket­ing and trans­porta­tion sys­tems, food cold stor­age. They knew, how­ev­er, to take care of what there was. They were good man­agers.

But veg­e­tar­i­ans were also well-served. “Api­cius cer­tain­ly excels in the prepa­ra­tion of veg­etable dish­es (cf. his cab­bage and aspara­gus) and in the uti­liza­tion of parts of food mate­ri­als that are today con­sid­ered infe­ri­or.” This appar­ent need to use every­thing, and to some­times heav­i­ly spice food to cov­er spoilage, may have led to an unusu­al Roman cus­tom. As How Stuff Works puts it, “cooks then were revered if they could dis­guise a com­mon food item so that din­ers had no idea what they were eat­ing.”

As for the recipes them­selves, well, any attempt to dupli­cate them will be at best a broad interpretation—a trans­la­tion from ancient meth­ods of cook­ing by smell, feel, and cus­tom to the mod­ern way of weights and mea­sures. Con­sid­er the fol­low­ing recipe:

WINE SAUCE FOR TRUFFLES

PEPPER, LOVAGE, CORIANDER, RUE, BROTH, HONEY AND A LITTLE OIL.

ANOTHER WAY: THYME, SATURY, PEPPER, LOVAGE, HONEY, BROTH AND OIL.

I fore­see much frus­trat­ing tri­al and error (and many hope­ful sub­sti­tu­tions for things like lovage or rue or “sat­u­ry”) for the cook who attempts this. Some foods that were plen­ti­ful­ly avail­able could cost hun­dreds now to pre­pare for a din­ner par­ty.

SEAFOOD MINCES ARE MADE OF SEA-ONION, OR SEA CRAB, FISH, LOBSTER, CUTTLE-FISH, INK FISH, SPINY LOBSTER, SCALLOPS AND OYSTERS. THE FORCEMEAT IS SEASONED WITH LOVAGE, PEPPER, CUMIN AND LASER ROOT.

Vehling’s foot­notes most­ly deal with ety­mol­o­gy and define unfa­mil­iar terms (“laser root” is wild fen­nel), but they pro­vide lit­tle prac­ti­cal insight for the cook. “Most of the Api­cian direc­tions are vague, hasti­ly jot­ted down, care­less­ly edit­ed,” much of the ter­mi­nol­o­gy is obscure: “with the advent of the dark ages, it ceased to be a prac­ti­cal cook­ery book.” We learn, instead, about Roman ingre­di­ents and home eco­nom­ic prac­tices, insep­a­ra­ble from Roman eco­nom­ics more gen­er­al­ly, accord­ing to Vehling.

He makes a judg­ment of his own time even more rel­e­vant to ours: “Such atroc­i­ties as the will­ful destruc­tion of huge quan­ti­ties of food of every descrip­tion on the one side and the starv­ing mul­ti­tudes on the oth­er as seen today nev­er occurred in antiq­ui­ty.” Per­haps more cur­rent his­to­ri­ans of antiq­ui­ty would beg to dif­fer, I wouldn’t know.

But if you’re just look­ing for a Roman recipe that you can make at home, might I sug­gest the Rose Wine?

ROSE WINE

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 ADD A SACK OF NEW PETALS WHICH ALLOW TO DRAW FOR ANOTHER SEVEN DAYS. AGAIN REMOVE THE OLD PETALS AND REPLACE THEM BY FRESH ONES FOR ANOTHER WEEK; THEN STRAIN THE WINE THROUGH THE COLANDER. BEFORE SERVING, ADD HONEY SWEETENING TO TASTE. TAKE CARE THAT ONLY THE BEST PETALS FREE FROM DEW BE USED FOR SOAKING.

You could prob­a­bly go with red or white, though I’d haz­ard Api­cius went with a fine vinum rubrum. This con­coc­tion, Vehling tells us in a help­ful foot­note, dou­bles as a lax­a­tive. Clever, those Romans. Read the full Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the ancient Roman cook­book here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Cook Real Recipes from Ancient Rome: Ostrich Ragoût, Roast Wild Boar, Nut Tarts & More

How to Bake Ancient Roman Bread Dat­ing Back to 79 AD: A Video Primer

Watch a 4000-Year Old Baby­lon­ian Recipe for Stew, Found on a Cuneiform Tablet, Get Cooked by Researchers from Yale & Har­vard

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness