11 



quartz, and scoria of iron, to help attrition. When we come to 

 understand the character of Roman cookery, we shall see why the 

 remains of mortaria are so common. 



We now come to a most important matter; the consideration of 

 the Roman sauces as given in the pages of Apicius. On sauces 

 Mr. Coote remarks, "As sauces are the demonstrations of cookery 

 as a fine art, so they are the measure and gauge of its excellence." 

 In fact the excellence of any particular school of cookery is to be 

 measured by the excellence of its sauces. 



The general sauces of English cookery are formed of meat 

 gravy with the flavouring of onion, spices, and fines herbes, the 

 whole being inspirited by the addition of wine. To this conjunction 

 is added ketchup, rarely anchovy ; and where it is required the 

 sauces are thickened by flour or arrowroot. The Roman sauces 

 are the same in principle, and, with some exceptions, nearly the 

 same in fact. The Roman cooks used honey for perfecting these 

 sauces, where we now use sugar — cane, beet, or maple. Cane 

 sugar was only just known to them by travellers' tales ; beet and 

 maple were not invented. But you must not imagine the Roman 

 cooks used honey in the state we eat it at breakfast : it would be 

 clarified, and manufactured, and the product (the dere honey of 

 mediaeval cooks,) clarified by the whites of eggs and other means, 

 would not be unlike our sugar. In fact honey, as we use it, would 

 bear about the same relation to it as used by the Roman cooks 

 that the raw sugar-cane juice does to manufactured white sugar. 

 Again, the Roman cooks used oil, where we use butter, "barbarian 

 butter " Mr. Coote calls it, and there can be no doubt that in 

 cookery oil is infinitely superior to butter. But it is essential that 

 the oil should be fresh and good, and it is very difiicult indeed in 

 this country to get. 



Instead of meat essence, which our cooks use largely, the 

 Romans used wine, and various decoctions of wine, as we English 

 did in mediaeval times, viz. merum, defrtitum, carcenum, mulsum, 

 passum, all of which, except the first, were wines boiled down in 

 different degrees, sometimes with honey. 



The Romans used herbes potageres very largely. I give you a 



