Dining in Rome

The Apician recipe book existed and was used in a hot Mediterranean environment. Italy, North Africa, Spain, Greece and Turkey was its sphere of influence. The Roman day in this Mediterranean world would have been somewhat different from the span of the working day in northern Europe and particularly in Britain. The weather and the amount of daylight hours would have surely altered the traditional daily routine and also the kinds of foods on offer. In northern regions even the foods available to those wealthy enough to buy from traders would have been very different from the fresh produce in Italy. We know that the most wealthy Romans living in Britain would have been able to control such things as temperature and light as well as being able to purchase the very best imports so that they could pretend they were still in Italy, but they could never entirely deny their geography. The recipes in Apicius are not British and should not be transferred directly to a British context without taking account of the differences. Slave-cooks in Britain may well have used similar recipes but there is no direct evidence that they did and certainly no evidence that these recipes had a measurable effect on our culinary heritage. Such influence that Roman food had on that came much later, through the international medieval cuisine that subsequently developed from Roman food and spread across Europe in the late Middle Ages.