ed physician, complaining about the secrecy that was being
maintained by his colleagues as regards their science. To be sure,
those fellows had every reason in the world for keeping quiet: so
preposterous were their methods in most cases! This secrecy indeed
must have carried with it a blessing in disguise. Professional reserve
was not its object. The motive was purely commercial.

Seeing where the information given by Apicius is out of reason and
unintelligible we are led to believe that such text is by no means to
be taken very literally. On the contrary, it is quite probable that
weights and measures are not correct: they are quite likely to be of
an artful and studied unreliability. A secret private code is often
employed, necessitating the elimination or transposition of certain
words, figures or letters before the whole will become intelligible
and useful. If by any chance an uninitiated hand should attempt to
grasp such veiled directions, failure would be certain. We confess to
have employed at an early stage of our own career this same strategy
and time-honored camouflage to protect a precious lot of recipes.
Promptly we lost this unctuous manuscript, as we feared we would; if
not deciphered today, the book has long since been discarded as being
a record of the ravings of a madman.

The advent of the printing press changed the situation. With Platina,
ca. 1474, an avalanche of cookery literature started. The secrets of
Scappi, "_cuoco secreto_" to the pope, were "scooped" by an
enterprising Venetian printer in 1570. The guilds of French mustard
makers and sauce cooks (precursors of modern food firms and
manufacturers of ready-made condiments) were a powerful tribe of
secret mongers in the middle ages. English gastronomic literature of
the 16th, 17th and even the 18th century is crowded with "closets
opened," "secrets let out" and other alluring titles purporting to
regale the prospective reader with profitable and appetizing secrets
of all sorts. Kitchen secrets became commercial articles.

These remarks should suffice to illustrate the assumption that the
Apicius book was not created for publication but that it is a
collection of abridged formulae for private use, a treasure chest as it
were, of some cook, which after the demise of its owner, collector,
originator, a curious world could not resist to play with, although
but a few experienced masters held the key, being able to make use of
the recipes.

M