When in due course Martial finds himself without a patron – unremarkably, perhaps, given his propensity to bite the hands that fed him – he frets whether his latest publication will end up as scrap, used as a ‘cowl’ to wrap fried tuna, incense or pepper, the equivalent of finding one’s book remaindered (the custom survives in the Middle East and the Caucasus, where spices are still sold in cones of newspaper). Robert Herrick (1591–1674) borrowed the notion for a book of his own:
[T]hy injur’d Leaves serve well,
To make loose gowns for Mackerel,
Or see the Grocers in a trice,
Make hoods of thee to serve out Spice.
It was also Martial who started a long tradition of figurative use of spice, concerning a dinner guest more light-fingered or ‘peppery handed’ than Autolycus, patron of thieves. The conceit has survived in European languages in one form or another ever since, as in Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s challenge to Viola in Twelfth Night: ‘I warrant there’s vinegar and pepper in’t.’ Or the OED’s complaint of a misused servant: ‘My master pepered my ars with well good speed.’
As with its figurative uses, so it was at the table, where pepper apparently served much the same role as it does today, as a more or less universal seasoning. Concerning spices’ other culinary applications, reliable information is in short supply. The one significant exception is the cookbook known by the unspectacular title of De Re Coquinaria, or Cookery Book, the sole example of the genre to have survived from antiquity. Both the author and the date of composition are unknown, although traditionally it has been ascribed to a certain Apicius, a legendary gourmand of the first century AD. The version we have has passed through the hands of a compiler who rewrote the book in his late Latin of the fourth or fifth century. Most commentators tentatively date the original to the second century AD.
On the evidence of Apicius, it would seem that the Romans liked it hot. The De Re Coquinaria is as suffused with spices as, say, a more modern Italian cookbook is with olive oil. Pepper alone appears in 349 of the book’s 468 recipes. Spices are used to enliven vegetables, fish, meats, wine and desserts. The very first recipe is for a ‘spiced wine surprise’, followed by travellers’ honey-spiced wine. There are spiced salts ‘for many purposes’, including one mix for ‘digestion, and to move the bowels’, the latter including white and black pepper, thyme, ginger, mint, cumin, celery seed, parsley, oregano, arrugula, saffron, bay leaf and dill. The mix is described as ‘extremely mild, more than you would think’.
Mixtures such as these were evidently added after cooking, and many recipes end with the directive to ‘sprinkle on pepper and serve’ – no great change there. To modern eyes the most striking use of spices is in a huge variety of sauces, both hot and cold, either cooked as an integral part of the dish or added afterwards. There was a sharp sauce to cut the fat, made of cumin, ginger, rue, cooking soda, dates, pepper, honey, vinegar and liquamen, a fermented fish sauce much loved by the Romans. A digestive sauce helped the meat go down with the sharp-sweet combination of pepper, cardamom, cumin, dried mint, honey, liquamen, vinegar and various other aromatics. There was a green sauce of pepper, cumin, caraway, spikenard,* ‘all types of mixed green herbs’, dates, honey, vinegar, wine, garum and oil. Another was served cold with poultry, consisting of pepper, lovage, celery seeds, mint, myrtleberries or raisins, honey, wine, vinegar, oil and garum. Some sauces were more complicated, using spices with all manner of trussed and embellished meats: kid, lamb, suckling pig, venison, boar, beef, duck, goose and chicken. There were even dormice stuffed with pepper and nuts – presumably a fiddly operation. There was a peppery sauce for ‘high’ birds (literally ‘goatish’), by which the author meant not putrid but gamey. To subvert lettuce’s flatulent properties Apicius suggests a pepper sauce of vinegar, fish sauce, cumin, ginger, rue, dates, pepper and honey.
While most of Apicius’ seasonings grew within the empire, the Eastern spices occupied a prominent place in his spice rack: most conspicuously, ginger, cardamom and of course pepper. There is a learned debate on the possibility of others; some have speculated whether clove and nutmeg lie hidden under unfamiliar names. One notable absentee is cinnamon. Apart from a solitary reference in Pliny’s Natural History to a recipe for cinnamon-spiced wine, in Roman times the spice appears to have been reserved for more elevated purposes – a subject we shall return to.*
The Roman table, then, was apparently not so bizarre as some have been willing to believe. The De Re Coquinaria offers the same discordant mix of the strange and the familiar as one finds with so many other aspects of Roman civilisation. Minus exotica such as parrot, flamingo and dormouse, there is much here that would not be out of place on the average twenty-first-century table – in recent years there have appeared several editions of the work adapted to the modern kitchen. Many of Apicius’ seasonings can still be found in any well-stocked spice cupboard, and even the fermented fish sauces that revolted some early commentators were probably not so far removed from Vietnamese or Thai fish sauces, or for that matter the pungent anchovy relish much loved by English gents in the age of Queen Victoria. His spiced wines are not at all dissimilar to the mulled wines and vermouths still around today, and some of the spiced sauces are startlingly reminiscent of the pungent and sharp sauces enjoyed by the European nobility in medieval times and beyond. It would seem that the art of the sauce has been a perennial feature of elite cuisine, from Apicius’ day down to our own.
Even the notion of sweet-spiced desserts is not as odd as it might at first sight appear. To round off a meal Apicius suggests a variety of spiced desserts such as a peppered wheat-flour fritter with honey, or a confection of dates, nuts and pine nuts baked with honey and a little pepper. The spice is still used to add tang to sweet confections such as pan forte, now a speciality of Siena, but once widespread through medieval Europe. Were it possible to trace the ancestry of this Italian dessert the path would lead, I suspect, back to ancient Rome.
Palate
If Atticus feasts in style, be is considered very grand. Juvenal, Satires (AD 100–127)
One course of a Roman meal would lay us very low, probably, and strip our palates for many days of even the crudest perceptions of flavour.
M.F.K Fisher, Serve it Forth, 1937
Familiar is not, however, how most modern readers have seen Apicius. In the last few centuries his book has provoked more bafflement than admiration, particularly in the matter of spice. ‘Perhaps the craving for excessive flavouring is an olfactory delirium, a pathological case, as yet unfathomed like the excessive craving for liquor, and, being a problem for the medical fraternity, it is only of secondary importance to gastronomy’ – such was the verdict of one of his nineteenth-century editors. And this opinion is fairly representative of the received wisdom on Roman food. Until very recently, the ancient Roman meal was generally considered on a par with other notoriously lurid displays served up for public consumption, along the lines of gladiatorial bloodbaths and public crucifixions: harsh and brutal, more a subject for revulsion than emulation or serious study. Apicius’ cookbook in particular is regularly cited as proof of rampant excess in the kitchen, nowhere more than in the taste for overpowering, palate-stripping seasonings.
Well, maybe. But it is a confident judge who reaches a verdict on the cuisine of an entire civilisation on the basis of one cookbook, and in fact there are good reasons for reading Apicius with due caution. The physiology of the human palate has not evolved appreciably in the last two millennia, and it is no more likely that the Romans regularly seared their mouths with spices than we do. Nowhere