Apicius
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{{dablink|For people named '''Apicius''' see [[Apicius (disambiguation)]]}}
'''''Apicius''''' is the title of a collection of Roman cookery recipes, usually thought to have been compiled in the late 4th or early [[5th century]] AD and written in a language that is in many ways closer to [[Vulgar Latin|Vulgar]] than to [[Classical Latin]].
''Apicius'' is a text to be used in the kitchen. In the earliest printed editions it was given the overall title ''[[De re coquinaria|De re coquinaria]]'' ("On the Subject of Cooking"), and was attributed to an otherwise unknown "Caelius Apicius", an invention based on the fact that one of the two manuscripts is headed with the words "API CAE". The name Apicius had long been associated with excessive love of food, apparently from the habits of an early bearer of the name. The most famous individual given this name because of his reputation as a gourmet was [[Marcus Gavius Apicius]], who is sometimes mistakenly asserted to be the author of the book.
==Organisation==
The text is organised in ten books which appear to be arranged in a manner similar to a modern cookbook:
# ''Epimeles'' — The Chef
# ''Sarcoptes'' — Meats
# ''Cepuros'' — From the garden
# ''Pandecter'' — Various dishes
# ''Ospreos'' — Peas, beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc.
# ''Aeropetes'' — Fowls''''''
# ''Polyteles'' — Fowl
# ''Tetrapus'' — Quadrupeds
# ''Thalassa'' — Seafood
# ''Halieus'' — Fish
The contents are out of order, with some recipes in chapters not consistent with the chapter title. Some recipes are present in duplicate, some are believed to be truncated, sometimes a line seems to be missing.
The [[food]]s described in the book are useful for reconstructing the dietary habits of the ancient world around the [[Mediterranean]] basin, since many of the foods identified with that region today—[[tomato]]es, [[pasta]]—were not available in Antiquity. On the other hand, the recipes are geared for the wealthiest classes and a few contain what were exotic ingredients at that time, e.g. [[flamingo]].
In a completely different manuscript, there is also a very abbreviated epitome ''Apici Excerpta a Vinidario'' a "pocket Apicius" by [[Vinidarius]], made in the [[5th century]]. However, although it says so in the title, this booklet is not an excerpt from the manuscript we have today. It contains text that is not in the longer Apicius-manuscripts. Either text was lost between the time the excerpt was made and the time the manuscripts were written, or there never was a "standard Apicius" text, because the contents changed over time as adapted by readers of the text.
Once manuscripts surfaced, there were two early printed editions of Apicius, in [[Milan]] ([[1498]]) and [[Venice]] ([[1500]]). Four more editions in the next four decades reflect the appeal of Apicius. In the long-standard edition of C. T. Schuch (Heidelberg, 1867), the editor added some recipes from the Vindarius-manuscript.
==De re coquinaria==
''De re coquinaria'' ([[Latin]], "On the subject of cooking") was the Latin title given in early printed editions to the Roman cookbook now best known as ''Apicius''.
Between 1483 (the date of the first printed edition) and 1936 (the date of [[Joseph Dommers Vehling]]'s translation and bibliography of Apicius), there were 14 editions of the Latin text (plus one possibly apocryphal edition). The work was not widely translated, however; the first translation was into [[Italian language|Italian]], in 1852, followed in the [[20th century]] by two translations into [[German language|German]] and [[French language|French]].
Vehling made the first translation of the book into [[English language|English]] under the title ''Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome''. It was published in 1936. The translation is still in print, having been reprinted in 1977 by [[Dover Publications]]. It is now of historical interest only, since Vehling's knowledge of Latin was not always adequate to the difficult task of translation, and several later and more reliable translations now exist (see the [[Apicius#Bibliography|bibliography]] section of the article ''Apicius'').
== References ==
* Vehling, Joseph Dommers. (1936) ''Cookery and dining in imperial Rome''. (1977 reprint, Dover: New York. ISBN 0-486-23563-7.)
==External links==
===Latin text===
* [http://www.fh-augsburg.de/%7Eharsch/Chronologia/Lspost04/Apicius/api_intr.html Bibliotheca Augustana: De Re Coquinaria Libri Decem] Mary Ella Milham's edition, nicely presented (Latin)
* [http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/apicius.html Text of the cookbook in Latin] at [[The Latin Library]]
* {{gutenberg|no=16439|name=De re coquinaria}} (the edition of 1922 by Cesare Giarratano and Friedrich Vollmer, now superseded but still useful)
* [http://users.ipa.net/~tanker/apicius.htm Another version of the Latin text (source not stated)]
* [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Apicius/home.html Vehling English translation]
===Secondary material===
*[http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/apicius.html James Grout's ''Apicius'', part of the Encyclopædia Romana]
* [http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/ethnic/historical/ant-rom-coll.html Partial re-translation from a German translation, adapted for modern cooking styles]
==Bibliography==
===Texts and translations===
*Apicius, ''Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome'' tr. [[Joseph Dommers Vehling]]. 1936. [English]
*''Apicius, The Roman cookery book'' tr. Barbara Flower, Elisabeth Rosenbaum. London: Harrap, 1958. [Latin and English]
*''Apicii decem libri qui dicuntur De re coquinaria'' ed. Mary Ella Milham. Leipzig: Teubner, 1969. [Latin]
*Apicius, ''L'art culinaire'' ed. Jacques André. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974. [Latin and French]
*John Edwards, ''The Roman cookery of Apicius''. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks, 1984. [English]
*{{Harvard reference | Surname=Grocock | Given=Christopher | Surname2=Grainger | Given2=Sally | Title=Apicius. A critical edition with an introduction and an English translation | Publisher=Prospect Books | Place=Totnes | Year=2006 | ISBN=1903018137 }} [Latin and English]
===Secondary material===
*Elisabeth Alföldi-Rosenbaum, "Apicius de re coquinaria and the Vita Heliogabali" in ''Bonner Historia-Augusta-Colloquium 1970'' ed. J. Straub (Bonn, 1972) pp. 5-18.
*Matthias Bode: Apicius – Anmerkungen zum römischen Kochbuch. St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag 1999.
*Carol Déry, 'The art of Apicius' in ''Cooks and other people: proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995'' ed. Harlan Walker (Totnes: Prospect Books, 1996) pp. 111-7.
*Sally Grainger, ''Cooking Apicius: Roman recipes for today''. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2006.
*Mary Ella Milham, ''A glossarial index to De re coquinaria of Apicius''. Madison, 1952.
[[Category:Latin prose texts]]
[[Category:Cookbooks]]
[[Category:Roman cuisine]]
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