Game cookery, Roman style
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The Roman orator Cicero thought that being a cook was a disgraceful occupation. Despite cooking’s connections with the sacred — at a public sacrifice, celebrants would scoff the meat, leaving the gods to enjoy the smell — the skill was very much associated with the lower classes. No ancient Nigella dispensed advice on roasting dormice with a winning smile and a wink.
We don’t have much evidence from antiquity about how the everyday ancients actually cooked. There is quite a lot of food in the literature, ranging from the heroic to the ridiculous. When, in Virgil’s epic Latin poem the , the hero Aeneas shoots seven stags to feed his men, they polish them off immediately. No hanging is necessary. The men
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