One of my newly-discovered pleasures of research is coming across a meditation, a valentine or a rant in a place where I don’t expect to find it. Witness this footnote in Apicius’ Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, edited, translated and annotated in 1926 by Joseph Dommers Vehling (I have the 1977 Dover Publications edition). Keep in mind that this is a footnote to a recipe for “making a little laser go a long way.” (Laser is a strongly-flavored seasoning, possibly asafetida, which is used today in Indian cookery.)
This article illustrates how sparingly the ancients used the strong and pungent laser flavor (by some believed to be asa foetida) because it was very expensive, but principally because the Roman cooks worked economically and knew how to treat spices and flavors judiciously. This article alone should disperse for all time all stories of ancient Rome’s extravagance in flavoring and seasoning dishes. It reminds of the methods used by European cooks to get the utmost use out of the expensive vanilla bean: they bury the bean in a can of powdered sugar. They will use the sugar only which has soon acquired a delicate vanilla perfume, and will replace the used sugar by a fresh supply. This is by far as superior method to using the often rank and adulterated “vanilla extract” readily bottled. It is more gastronomical and more economical. Most commercial extracts are synthetic, some injurious. To believe that any of them impart to the dishes the true flavor desired is of course ridiculous. The enormous consumption of such extracts however, is characteristic of our industrialized barbarism which is so utterly indifferent to the fine points in food. Today it is indeed hard for the public to obtain a real vanilla bean.
I don’t know what surprises me more: the fact that I came across a fine and angry elegy for the vanilla bean under an entry for a smelly resinous seasoning, or that even back in 1926, there were people warning of the dangers to our palates from a degraded, overindustrialized food supply. Either way, I am full of wonder these days.