Author: Apicius

Apicius is the name attached to De re coquinaria, the only cookery book to come down to us whole from ancient Rome. It is traditionally linked to Marcus Gavius Apicius, a wealthy gourmet of the first century CE who lived under Tiberius and whose spending on the table was still cited by Seneca and Pliny the Elder as a byword for extravagance, though the collection itself was assembled by other hands around the late fourth or early fifth century from older Roman material. The English text here is by Joseph Dommers Vehling (1879 to 1950), born at Dülken in the Rhineland and put into a cooking school at fourteen, who worked in European hotel kitchens, emigrated to the United States in 1904, and became a collector and historian of cookbooks. Frederick Starr, an anthropologist formerly of the University of Chicago, wrote the introduction.