pose which will be explained later, which may and may
not have to do with the mystery of Apicius. Consider, for a moment,
this mysterious creation No. 2: Take bananas, oranges, cherries,
flavored with bitter almonds, fresh pineapple, lettuce, fresh peaches,
plums, figs, grapes, apples, nuts, cream cheese, olive oil, eggs,
white wine, vinegar, cayenne, lemon, salt, white pepper, dry mustard,
tarragon, rich sour cream, chop, mix, whip well.

Worse yet! Instead of having our appetite aroused the very perusal of
this quasi-Apician _mixtum compositum_ repels every desire to partake
of it. We are justly tempted to condemn it as being utterly
impossible. Yet every day hundreds of thousand portions of it are sold
under the name of special fruit salad with _mayonnaise mousseuse_. The
above mystery No. 1 is the justly popular tartar sauce.

Thus we could go on analyzing modern preparations and make them appear
as outlandish things. Yet we relish them every day. The ingredients,
obnoxious in great quantities, are employed with common sense. We are
not mystified seeing them in print; they are usually given in clear
logical order. This is not the style of Apicius, however.

LATIN CUNNING

We can hardly judge Apicius by what he has revealed but we rather
should try to discover what he--purposely or otherwise--has concealed
if we would get a good idea of the ancient kitchen. This thought
occurred to us at the eleventh hour, after years of study of the text
and after almost despairing of a plausible solution of its mysteries.
And it seems surprising that Apicius has never been suspected before
of withholding information essential to the successful practice of his
rather hypothetical and empirical formulae. The more we scrutinize
them, the more we become convinced that the author has omitted vital
directions--same as we did purposely with the two modern examples
above. Many of the Apician recipes are dry enumerations of ingredients
supposed to belong to a given dish or sauce. It is well-known that in
chemistry (cookery is but applied chemistry) the knowledge of the
rules governing the quantities and the sequence of the ingredients,
their manipulation, either separately or jointly, either successively
or simultaneously, is a very important matter, and that violation or
ignorance of the process may spell failure at any stage of the
experiment. In the kitchen this is particularly true of baking and
soup and sauce making, the most int