Cooking Apicius

To accompany the new scholarly edition of Apicius, Sally Grainger has gathered, in one convenient volume, her modern interpretations of 64 of the recipes in the original text. These are not recipes inspired by the old Romans but rather a serious effort to convert the extremly gnomic instructions in the Latin into something that can be reproduced in the modern kitchen and which actually gives some idea of what the Romans might have eaten. Not all the recipes are for mad Roman luxuries such as lark's tongues and boar's bottoms; Grainger has taken care to include perfectly do-able and affordable dishes such as cucumber with mint dressing, duck with turnip, roast lamb with coriander, carrots or parsnips in a cumin-honey glaze, almond and semolina pudding, and deep fried honey fritters. The advantages of this manual over those that have come before lie not only in its accuracy, but in the fact that it benefits from all the hard work that Sally Grainger and Christopher Grocock have put into getting the text of Apicius into working order.