the time.

The seemingly outlandish methods of Apician food preparation become
plain and clear in the light of social evolution. "Evolution" is
perhaps not the right word to convey our idea of social perpetual
motion.

Apicius used practically all the cooking utensils in use today. He
only lacked gas, electricity and artificial refrigeration, modern
achievements while useful in the kitchen and indispensable in
wholesale production and for labor saving, that have no bearing on
purely gastronomical problems. There is only one difference between
the cooking utensils of yore and the modern products: the old ones are
hand-made, more individualistic, more beautiful, more artistic than
our machine-made varieties.

Despite his strangeness and remoteness, Apicius is not dead by any
means. We have but to inspect (as Gollmer has pointed out) the table
of the Southern Europeans to find Apician traditions alive. In the
Northern countries, too, are found his traces. To think that Apicius
should have survived in the North of Europe, far removed from his
native soil, is a rather audacious suggestion. But the keen observer
can find him in Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Baltic provinces
today. The conquerors and seafarers coming from the South have carried
the pollen of gastronomic flowers far into the North where they
adjusted themselves to soil and climate. Many a cook of the British
isles, of Southern Sweden, Holstein, Denmark, Friesland, Pomerania
still observes Apicius rules though he may not be aware of the fact.

We must realize that Apicius is only a book, a frail hand-made record
and that, while the record itself might have been forgotten, its
principles have become international property, long ago. Thus they
live on. Like a living thing--a language, a custom, they themselves
may have undergone changes, "improvements," alterations, augmentation,
corruption. But the character has been preserved; a couple of thousand
years are, after all, but a paltry matter. Our own age is but the
grandchild of antiquity. The words we utter, in their roots, are those
of our grandfathers. And so do many dishes we eat today resemble those
once enjoyed by Apicius and his friends.

Is it necessary to point the tenacity of the spirit of the Antique,
reaching deep into the modern age? The latest Apicius edition in the
original Latin is dated 1922!

The gastronomic life of Europe was under the complete rule of old Rome
until the middle of th