Customer Reviews

A Taste of Ancient Rome

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Although "A Taste of Ancient Rome" presents another translation of some ancient Roman recipes, this work is not just an historical curiousity. First, it provides some of the yummiest lamb recipes I've ever tasted (who knew the Parthians for epicures?). Second, there are quite a few spice and sauce combinations that were apparently lost with the Visigoths, and they're definitely worth reviving. Although a few of the recipes are a bit outlandish, most of them are easily prepared and very tasty. I use this book all the time as a practical cookbook. And, of course, for dinner parties, it's a great item of conversation.

I bought "A Taste of Ancient Rome" more out of historical interest than out of any real desire to prepare foods in the Roman style. One day, though, I ended up being given six frozen mallard ducks, and one of the recipes in this book, Duck with Turnips, caught my eye. I tried it, and it was absolutely amazing. Since that day I've prepared over half of the recipes in this book, and I've found most of them to be delicious, easy to prepare, and economical.

One of the more enjoyable facets of international cooking is seeing how cooks from different cultures meld flavours in a way most of us in North America would never think of. The recipes in this book contain many combinations that would seem to us to be insane. Duck with turnips? Cream of wheat or spelt with a ham bone? Cantaloupe with garlic and pepper? Tuna steak with dates? These blends sounds very bizarre, but they all work, and work well.

The writer has included a few recipes which couldn't be prepared in our time (such as the recipe calling for parrot!) simply to show the decadence of first-century Rome. But what surprised me the most about the other recipes is how many of them are absolutely accessible to the modern chef. One reason for this is the fact that the ingredients unfamiliar to us can for the most part be easily substituted with ingredients we have on hand. Apparently, even some Romans (Pliny the Elder, for instance) hated garum and substituted salt, so it's not inauthentic for us to do so. Another reason is simply that we still eat many of the foods the Romans did. Although they didn't have pasta, tomatoes, potatoes, soy, corn, or any of the other foods borrowed from the Far East or the New World, they did have most of the meats, fruits, nuts, and vegetables we eat on a daily basis.

That said, this book is not for everybody. There seems to be a subset of North Americans who eat nothing but conventional, middle-of-the-road food and who have no interest in anything the least bit unusual or new. If you shop for all your groceries at Wal-Mart, if you turn down any food that isn't aggressively conservative as being weird, foreign, or disgusting, and if TGIFridays or Appleby's is your idea of a really good restaurant, you probably won't enjoy this book. However, if you are able to go beyond your food comfort level and especially if you're interested in how people ate 2,000 years ago, A Taste of Ancient Rome might be for you.

Here we have a small collection of redacted Roman recipes, along with explanations of ingredients and concepts and some modern adaptations.

Frankly, I think it was quite cool. I particularly got a lot out of the explanation of garum -- it really changed my mind about a lot of things I used to think about Roman food.

The few recipes I've tried from here turned out well, though I'm not sure I'd want to try them all. Some sound a bit bizarre and are probably included as a culture-shock device. For the average home cook, I'm not sure I'd consider this a must-have unless that cook were very VERY adventurous. But for the historian looking for a sourcebook, this looks like a keeper. Thoroughly enjoyable and well-written.

Want to do a little time traveling with dinner? This book will take you back two thousand years. Ms. Giacosa starts with a few chapters of historical background, followed by the meat of the book - essentially Apicius for modern cooks.

The recipes are presented in a three-part form - first, the original Latin, then a literal translation of the original, then her adaptation and modernization. In some cases, she also describes a modern dish, usually from Italy, that may be related to the Roman version.

The originals normally don't give amounts or cooking instructions, so the modernized version is only one possible interpretation. (So, feel free to adjust them to your taste - the Romans probably would have.) As another reviewer pointed out, readers who are nervous about anything more exotic than cheeseburgers should stay away, but my family liked a lot of these reconstructions. Pork with apples, tuna with dates, asparagus patina (a patina is like a frittata, basically, though some of the patinas are more like quiche), carrots in cumin sauce... Some are complicated, but many are very simple - the best one I've tried so far is the sauce for tuna: Pepper, oregano, mint, onion, a bit of vinegar, and oil. This is DELICIOUS over cold broiled tuna steak.

Fun and fascinating!

This is a great book. It contains recipes from both De Re Coquinaria as well as other sources, and provides great insight into the way Romans ate. It has the original Latin followed by a direct translation and then a modern cookbook style recipe. It's also very informative and contains numerous sections of history and sociology besides the recipes themselves.

However, I have one criticism of this book. It contains a section of recipes on how to cook squash. Squash was not eaten in Rome, as it is a new world plant that was unknown to Europe until the 1500s at the least and wasn't common until years after that. This stems from certain Renaissance translations of De Re Coquinaria that were wildly inaccurate in their translations and tended to update most of the recipes to suit Renaissance Europeans and included many semi-Roman recipes that used squash. I think if this book were going to aim for such historical accuracy as I think the authors strove for, these recipes should have been excluded.

Overall, however, this is both a great cookbook and a great history book.

I checked a copy of "A Taste of Ancient Rome" out from my university library to prepare a menu for a "real" toga party in 2003. The food was a huge hit with my friends - we had the stewed apricots, the roasted meat, the green beans with cumin and I can't even remember what all else.

It took me five years, but I liked the cookbook so much that I've finally purchased my own copy. I'm not a cookbook buyer in general, but I liked that this one had a balance of interesting history and recipes I could make.

I am in a historical re-creation group, but I don't generally do food/cooking research. I found it perfectly suitable to my needs, but can't speak to it from a serious researcher's point of view. It feels more like the result of a serious researcher's work. Which is to say: this isn't a primary source, and if you're used to working at that level, there may be details missing that you'd like to see.

But as someone who just wanted to cook a tasty Roman meal, I found this well worth the price.

Amazing book, very useful if you want to learn some ancient recipes with a modern taste. All recipes are in latin but you'll also find everything in english, so there's no chance you'll misunderstand something. Fully recommended.

From eggs to fruit, this book on Roman cooking gives us the recipes, in both Latin and English, updated to fit modern tastes and modern ingredients. Some spices and herbs, frankly, no longer exist, but the author does her best to select the best replacements. But she does not end there? No, she also gives us the history of dining in Rome. Her book gives us a lot about dining, trade and preparation. She really fills out the background behind the food.

This book seems to be a great way to gain an understanding of the cuisine of Old Rome. The first section is an introduction in which the reader has a lot of the peripheral detail explained as a preparation for getting into the recipes. I've just stayed with one or two of the simpler items for now but perhaps I shall present a feast fit for Lucullus in the not too distant future.

Giacosa gives us the original latin text of several "recipes" from the ancient world, translates them into simple English and then gives us a list of ingredients we have available in our modern world from which to make these dishes. Very simple and not very exciting, it is of far more interest to the food historian or ancient historian than to any cook. I, for one, am glad I don't have to live on most of these dishes.