Customer Reviews

Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

While others who have commented on the book take the author/translator to task for substitutions, mistranslations and other faults, I found that by and large the redactions were not terribly different from others I have read. These include several versions, so I am aquainted with Apicius and his recipes and have tried quite a few, and not from just one source.

What I find most praiseworthy about this book is Dommers Vehling's obvious interest in gastronomy in general and in ancient cookery in particular. He makes a fairly honest attempt to fill in some of the background for the reader. And although he may be guilty of having his own point of view, we must remember that he was writing over sixty years ago.

Dommers also gives the Latin names of the recipes, makes comments on many of them and makes references to other translattions of Apicius' De Re Coquinaria.

And so I feel that this book is worth reading, especially for the price.

Recipes from before the 15th Century are difficult to find, as many of the documents are now missing, and most cooks of the earlier times passed their secrets by word of mouth. The documents from which this edition is translated were mentioned as being from about 800-900 CE. In several of his recipes, Vehling includes Bell peppers, which while tasty, are definitely New World. He further neglects to have his Latin originals for comparison. When compared to the Anthimus letter, written in about 450-470 CE, the techniques and ingredients used by Vehling are very modern indeed. All in all, a book of good recipes, but lacking in the scholarship required to make it an authentic translation from that period of history.

Vehling was a professional chef, not a scholar of Latin, and his grasp of Latin was limited, so his translations are not good. Also they are not based on the earliest available copies of the Apician cookbook. Instead, he used humanistically "enhanced" Renaissance texts. And he didn't understand the history of the various editions he was looking at. Thus Vehling's translations are full of gross inaccuracies. When his book was first published, readers had little access to anything much better. But today there are quite a few much more accurate translations, and more accurate translations lead to more accurate interpretations, when one wants to cook a recipe.

I won't even go into an analysis of his faulty translations, but, assuming most buyers want to cook food of the Roman Empire, I'll go straight to examples in his worked-out recipes...

Vehling uses a roux (a technique in which flour is browned or at least lightly colored in hot fat before having the fluid stirred in) to thicken sauces in many of his recipes. This technique was not common until the 17th century. Clearly the Romans used other techniques, and we can use them, too.

Vehling includes vegetables not known in Europe even in the 15th century, let alone during the Roman Empire, such as French beans aka green beans aka string beans (when the Romans used green fava beans, quite a different item), and bell peppers and kidney beans and pumkpins (which are all native to the Americas, unknown to Europeans until the 16th century).

In one recipe he even substitutes pate à choux (used for things like eclairs and cream puffs) for spelt or emmer grits (early forms of wheat)!

Additionally, he substitutes "broth" for "liquamen", that is, fish sauce, one of the hallmarks of Ancient Roman cuisine!!!

In fact, in many of his worked out recipes he "corrects" the original recipe to make it more like modern European cuisine, losing the flavor of the original and destroying its Roman character. Some of his worked out recipes are so transformed as to be nearly unrecognizable when compared to the original recipes.

If there were no other translations available, Vehling might be useful. But there are. And Vehling is misleading, erroneous, and wrong. Get a better book.

While this book is a good research tool for readers of Latin, I find Mr. Vehling took too many modern liberties in his redactions of the recipes. He often substitutes, adds, or deletes ingredients without explanation or just cause.

I rather wish there was a more recent, open-content translation of Apicius. Vehling's was long known to be borderline-horrible, but sadly this is probably the only readily available translation for the casual cook in English. Beyond that I've not much to say about the translation; others far more conversant with Latin than I have commented at length on it.

This book doesn't lack for other flaws though. For one thing, Vehling's ranting, somewhat sniffy tone is weirdly remniscent of German-speaking cranks such as Petr Beckmann (Czech) and Erich von Däniken (Swiss) -- it makes for rather strange and uncomfortable reading, as if a chef with a stereotypical mad scientist accent is shouting at you. Another issue -- Vehling freely confuses and substitutes New World ingredients without saying much of anything about the Old World ingredients being replaced (he mentions pumpkins quite frequently, for example, and gives "broth" for the fish sauce liquamen when Worcestershire sauce would probably be more appropriate in the early 20th century; both are nearly inexcusable errors for a supposedly scholarly work). Finally, the typography is abysmal, with the recipes translated from the Latin presented in all caps, enhancing the "shouting" effect of Vehling's prose.

The book isn't irredeemable, necessarily. With some extra background (most readily available in FAQ documents and the like on the internet) it can be quite a serviceable introduction to upper-class Roman cuisine. The question is, however... there is a very good chance that this book might be someone's first introduction to Roman cookery. How are they going to know to go looking for more background while reading?

although more modern works have appeared this Edition is good for those (like myself) on a budget.

Spared the horror of paying good money for this, I concur with the other reviewers that this is a letdown.

The measurements have been tampered with and the reliability of the historicity is questionable.

There is a reductionist spirit here at work.

The book I have to say are decent and the recipes, defiantely reproducable, if you are looking for a cookbook then this is your book, if for some crazy hobby of trying to cook with ingredients impossible to get then this is not your book. The author adds or omits ingredients that you would simply not find, anywhere, even Sicily, promise. The dishes are close to true and if you are interested in Sicilian cooking you get a very different perspective. Try reading Pomp and Sustenance after this book and you will see what I mean. As for the "Christian" zealots in the other reviews, get a life, please, from the Roman point of view it is CE, AD is just so narrow minded, and take a look around we are not the only people on this earth.

I haven't read the book, so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt with five stars. I just wanted to comment briefly on the whole A.D. / C.E. controversy. First, A.D. stands for Anno Domini, not "After Death" - the Christ is said to have died in 33 A.D., not 0 A.D. Second, the "Common Era" designation is nothing but a euphemism, and as such I find it hard to understand how it can be deemed an "improvement" over the A.D. designation - when you use the "C.E." designation, you're still taking the alleged year of the birth of Christ as your chronological reference point. In other words, this "Common Era" verbiage is pure window dressing. Those with a proclivity for pointless euphemisms are of course free to identify their dates under the C.E. system - just don't be too self-righteous about it.

The main failure of this book is its lack of integrity regarding history & honesty of ingredients in the recipes. Beyond that, I am most offended by the AGGRESSIVE attempt @ revisionist/politically correct history; at trying to portray our epoch as anything other than A.D. (After Death of Christ). It seems as though even the culinary sciences are not free from the counter cultural revolutionary dogmatists.