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MEDITERRANEAN KITCHEN

Such culinary craftsmanship had taken a long time to develop about 1,500 years. It began with the Romans but not with the Romans that most people think of, a nation addicted to sumptuous banquets and unbridled orgies. This notion is made to order for wide-screen motion pictures in Flamboyant-Color, and the Hollywood and Italian moviemakers have not failed to exploit it. In inperial times, we have been told, exotic eating was the rule. Like most gross exaggerations, this one contains an element of truth. From Petronius, Juvenal, Lucian, Martial and other Roman writers we learn that peacocks, flamingos and herons were in fact served with their full plumage carefully replaced after cooking; that wolves, hedgehogs and puppies were considered choice eating; that dormice small rodents resembling squirrels were confined in barrels to keep them from exercising and were force-fed to obesity for the table. According to Pliny, Macenas was the first to serve ass's mest, in the First Century B.C.. Most epicures seem to have preferred a wild variety of donkey, the onager. Elephant trunk is reputed to have been a great delicacy, and at least one emperor, Elagabulus, delighted in servig camel's foot. The food of the fabled Roman banquets, traditin has it, was not only exotic but was consumed in staggering amounts. The Emperor Maximus (235-238 A.D.) is said to have eaten 40 pounds of meat daily, washed down with 40 quarts of wine. As a kind of command performance to amuse the Emperor Aurelian, the actor Farone on one occasion consumed a whole sheep, a sukling pig and a wild boar, along with 100 buns. He washed the repast down with 100 bottles of wine.

But although it is true that great feasts did occur in Rome, they were rare even during the spectacular death throes of the degenerating Empire.

Most Romans simply did not have the means to offer extravagant meals to their guests. Aside from the court of the emperor himself, there were probably no more than 200 great houses that could afford a luxurious table. The most ostentstious banquets were staged not by patricians, but by the newly rich, who in all ages have been the most conspicuous spenders. Trimalchio, whose famous feast (one course involved a boar stuffed with live thrushes) is described in the Satirycon of Petronius, was a Levantine freedman, ostensibly a shipping magnate, but actually a profiteer in every shady traffic known to an age of license. If Petronius and other writers described the lavish banquets of their times in meticolous detail, it was not becouse the events were typical of the ordinari life of Rome, but becouse they were not. These extravagant feasts aroused the attention of writers precisely becouse they were astonishing, extraordinary and excessive.

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