‘Author’s Voice’

There is no author’s voice in Apicius. There is also, crucially, no compiler’s voice either. We simply do not hear at all from any of the cooks as individuals, as we might expect had the book been written, even in part, by a confident and successful ex-slave cook. We might also expect to hear from someone who, as a controlling hand, may have compiled the book, but we hear nothing. This has led us to believe that Apicius was not compiled by a single hand, but that it grew ‘organically’ from a small original collection into its final form as recipes were added haphazardly in the kitchen. The person responsible for transmitting the book was a disinterested scribe rather than a compiler. The existence of this scribe explains many of the inadequacies of the text: the repetitions, the confusions over the titles of the recipes and the general lack of precision.