On the Subject of Italian Cooking
Italy recently celebrated it’s 150th anniversary as a unified country. To many Americans it comes as a surprise to learn that Italy is such a “young country,” but of course the regions that make up Italy represent some of the oldest cultures in the World. In fact, Italy is the source of one of the worlds oldest known cookbooks and perhaps the oldest with surviving text. Written in Latin by a Roman four to five hundred years after the birth of Christ, the book is known as Apicius or sometimes by it’s subtitle De re Coquinaria, which translates to “On the Subject of Cooking.” This remarkable text served as the model for all cookbooks for well over a thousand years and provides a fascinating view into ancient diets. Many of the foods we associate with Italian cooking were actually brought back to Italy from the new world by Christopher Columbus, including tomatoes! Still we can see the origins of modern Italian cooking in Apicius. The full text of a translation from the 1930s is available for free at the Project Gutenberg website. Divided into 10 books, it seems that the entire work does not survive, since there are no sections for breads and cakes, even though bread is mentioned as an ingredient throughout. Continue Reading…
