Cooking, and enjoying the results, is one of my pleasures in life, so when I am writing a novel I very much relish the research activity of exploring the cuisine of the country in which my story is set. For The Echoes of Love, which is set in Italy, I was quite in my element reading recipe books and trying out dishes. Of course, my characters in the novel eat modern fayre, but the more I read, the more I found myself fascinated by the history of Italian cuisine – and my imagination was soon fired up by an ancient Italian recipe book called Apicius.

For anyone researching Italian cuisine, Apicius: De re coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking) is fascinating reading. The book was purportedly written by a man named Marcus Gavius Apicius who lived in the first century and gained a reputation for being a lover of gourmet food and a luxurious lifestyle (legend has it that he killed himself with poison when he fell on hard times and could no longer afford to eat the very best of foods!). The published book dates back to the fourth century and, amazingly, is still in print today!

Cooking from the book now isn’t entirely feasible. First, there is the vague nature of the recipes. For example, here is a recipe for nut custard:

Toast pine-kernels and chopped nuts, pound with honey, pepper, liquamen, milk and eggs. A little oil.

Neither ingredients nor method are clear. Some say Apicius was deliberately obtuse in order to protect the secrets of his cooking. Others believe that his contemporaries would have sufficiently understood this shorthand style of recipe writing.

The other, perhaps more compelling reason why Apicius cooking is difficult, is the fact that many of the ingredients of antiquity are not those we turn to today. Take the following recipes:

• Roast flamingo
• Fattened dormice
• Jellyfish omelette
• Boiled parrot
• Ostrich ragoût

Not types of ingredients readily available to the modern chef, nor appealing, nor, one presumes, legally edible!

However, some of the Apicius recipes are less risqué to the modern palate. In his book Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome, food historian Patrick Faas offers up a range of Roman recipes ‘reconstructed for the modern cook’, including some based on Apicius. This web page offers examples of several: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html. The roast tuna and  veal escalope recipes look quite delicious to me.

In addition, take a look at Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today by ‘leading reconstructionist cook’ Sally Grainger. As the blurb reads:

Sally Grainger has gathered, in one convenient volume, her modern interpretations of 64 of the recipes in the original text. These are not recipes inspired by the old Romans but rather a serious effort to convert the extremely gnomic instructions in the Latin into something that can be reproduced in the modern kitchen and which actually gives some idea of what the Romans might have eaten.

A Google search for ‘Apicius recipe’ also brings up a host of results for recipes adapted from or inspired by the ancient book.

Seek inspiration from any of these sources and what you cook ties into a legacy of 16,000 years. Even without the flamingo, that’s a history to excite any modern cook who is interested in how we’ve come to eat as we do.