Like old cookbooks?

[Mik]

Have I got one for you, by Marcus Gavius Apicius. Quite a story. I'm pretty food focused, but this?

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm

The mythical man who wrote the only cookbook to survive from ancient Rome spent his entire fortune on food, and then offed himself because he was afraid of running out of money to eat...

His name was Marcus Gavius Apicius, and he lived in Rome during the reign of Emperor Tiberius in the first century AD. He had spent a fortune of 100 million sestertii on his kitchen, spent all the gifts he had received from the Imperial court, and thus swallowed up his income in lavish hospitality.

When Apicius calculated that he had only 10 million sestertii left, afraid of dying in relative poverty, he poisoned himself. Ten million sestertii was still an enormous sum of money by any standard of the ancient world. But Apicius looked at what he had left, did the math on what it would cost to keep eating the way he intended to eat, and decided he would rather die than live on a reduced table. Seneca, who documented the story, could barely contain his disgust.

And the excess was real as Pliny documents his partiality for flamingo tongues as evidence of a man who had lost all sense of proportion. He fed his pigs dried figs and then killed them with doses of honeyed wine so their livers would be engorged with sweetness before slaughter, essentially inventing an ancient Roman version of foie gras for pork. His method of fattening pig liver on figs gave rise to the Italian word for liver, fegato, a word still used in Italian kitchens today. Every time an Italian chef says fegato they are unknowingly referencing the most reckless gourmand in Roman history. He also advised that red mullet were at their best if, before cooking, they had been drowned in a bath of fish sauce made from red mullet. Not wine. Not water. Fish sauce made from the same species of fish that was about to be cooked in it. This was not a man doing things halfway.

The book that bears his name, De Re Coquinaria, is the only cookbook to survive from the ancient Roman world and it contains nearly 500 recipes spanning every course of the Roman table, from simple barley soup eaten by soldiers to roasted flamingo glazed with dates and honey served at imperial banquets.

I have spent the last year cooking through this book recipe by recipe, and next week I am in a professional studio photographing the finished dishes for my hardcover Ancient Roman cookbook coming in 2027.

Every recipe in the book traces back to this one document and this one extraordinary, reckless, brilliant man who cared more about food than survival itself.

The whole story feels almost too on-brand for the subject. Of course, the only Roman cookbook that survived belongs to the man who bankrupted himself eating and then died rather than stop. What other story could it possibly have been?