ANCIENT CULINARY ART

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21520, 17 June 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

ANCIENT CULINARY ART

OLD COOKING DEVICES ROMAN HAGGIS In ancient chronicles we read that our first parents had little use lor culinary knowledge. Tho world was created in the autumn and the fruits of the earth were ripe and ready for their maintenance,. All that might have been required was the boiling or roasting of the cruder products, or the preservation of richer kinds. Wo are told, also, that after tho fall the sinful couple were not allowed to eat the flesh of the animals which had developed in the interval. But, following tho Flood, tho ban was removed, and Noah and his family thus " indulged " —lived sumptuously thereafter. The brevity of this note about old-time cookery makes it imperative to pass to less imaginary data. Refinement of the culinary arts in the Western world came with the Greeks, whose highly-esteemed cooks introduced to Athenian kitchens spices and sauces from the and from Egypt, as aids to appetite and digestion. Many of the Greek recipes were adapted by the Romans, whose taste, however, lacked tho nuances of the Greek. At first they cared more for abundancy than for the delicacy of their dishes. But at tho apogee of their civilisation profusion gave way to succulent incentives to their palate. Hare was greatly esteemed by the Romans, and Caesar was astonished when ho learned that his English colonists would not touch it. They had also a passion for pork. Pigs were fed on figs until they died of " apoplectic pain," which, as a writer says, was the nearest aproach to the " dying of a rose in aromatic pain." Scotsman may caro to know that the Romans were the first to make the " true and original haggis " of pork instead of mutton. It was called " ventrem porcinum," and in Apicius there is a full list of its numerous ingredients. The aborigines of Britain lived tho simple life. They had no oil, barbarian butter is not mentioned, and neither hares, geese nor hens were eaten "from a notion of superstition." They lived mainly on milk and flesh. The Normans it was who inaugurated .a period of " grand entertainments." Richard 11. was renowned for the " splendour and elegance of his table, his niceness and delicacy in eating, like Heliogabalus, whose favourite dishes are said to have been the tongues of peacocks and nightingales, and the brains of pheasants." From these records we pass to the time of the rare first edition of a volume on cookery, which was compiled by Bartolomeo Scappi private cook to Pius V., and published in Florence in 1570. Among the various remarkable pictures in this book are an instrument for raising large pots on.to the'fire and a mill with three spits revolving simultaneously above a big fire, each at a different speed, regulated by clockwork machinery.