Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth a Read, May 30, 2001
By A Customer
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.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Recipes are tasty, but author lacks scholarship., September 17, 1998
By A Customer
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.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Victorian Fantasy of Rome, December 13, 2006
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 splet 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.
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