Our Viands. Whence they come and how they are cooked with a bundle of old recipes from cookery books of the last century / by Anne Walbank Buckland.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Our Viands. Whence they come and how they are cooked with a bundle of old recipes from cookery books of the last century / by Anne Walbank Buckland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    And yet, during the early part of the Empire, sumptuary laws were in force regulating the expenses to be incurred at banquets, and even the number of dishes, and it is said that Julius Caesar frequently sent lictors to suspected houses, and had the dishes carried off from the tables if they exceeded the number permitted by law; whilst Augustus decreed that an ordinary repast should not cost more than 200 sesterces (about £1, 12s. 6d.), or 300 on feasts or days of solemnity, and 1000 at a wedding. If we compare this with the luxury of Nero and Elagabalus and later emperors, when a single fish cost fifty guineas, when pearls were dissolved in vinegar and drunk, not for pleasure, but only to add to the cost of a feast; and when the senate was convened to con- sult as to the best manner of dressing a turbot for the emperor’s table, we shall hardly be surprised at the decline and fall of Rome. Yet this excess of luxury was a great incentive to com- merce, for merchants who scoured the seas for things rare and costly were sure of a market on their return; whilst they carried with them in their wanderings to distant shores not only many useful wares by way of barter, but also those germs of civilisation, destined to grow’ up and bear fruit when the pomp of the Roman emperors which had caused their transplantation had withered and fallen into an un- timely grave.