o our chief authority Athenaeus,
Archestratus of Gela, the friend of the son of Pericles, the guide of
Epicurus, and author of the _Heduphagetica_, was a great traveller, and
took pains to get information as to how the delicacies of the table were
prepared in different parts. His lost work was versified by Ennius.
Other connoisseurs seem to have been Numenius of Heraclea, Hegemon of
Thasos, Philogenes of Leucas, Simonaclides of Chios, and Tyndarides of
Sicyon. The Romans, emerging from their pristine simplicity, borrowed
from the Greeks their achievements in gastronomic pleasure. We read of
this or that Roman gourmet, such as Lucullus, his extravagances and his
luxury. The name of the connoisseur Apicius, after whom a work of the
time of Heliogabalus is called, comes down to us in association with a
manual of cookery. And from Macrobius and Petronius we can gather very
interesting glimpses of the Roman idea of a menu. In the later empire,
tradition still centred round the Roman cookery favoured by the
geographical position of Italy; while the customs and natural products
of the remoter parts of Europe gradually begin to assert themselves as
the middle ages progress.

It is, however, not till the Renaissance, and then too with Italy as the
starting-point, that the history of modern cookery really begins.
Meanwhile cookery may be studied rather in the architecture of kitchens,
and the development of their appurtenances and personnel, than in any
increase in the subtleties of the art; the ideal was inevitably gross;
the end was feeding--inextricably associated in all ages with cooking,
but as distinct from its _fine fleur_ as gluttony from gastronomy.

Montaigne's references to the revival of cookery in France by Catherine
de' Medici indicate that the new attention paid to the art was really
novel. She brought Italian cooks to Paris and introduced there a
cultured simplicity which was unknown in France before. It is to the
Italians apparently that later developments are originally due. It is
clearly established, for instance (says Abraham Hayward in his _Art of
Dining_), that the Italians introduced ices into France. Fricandeaus
were invented by the _chef_ of Leo X. And Coryate in his _Crudities_,
writing in the time of James I., says that he was called "furcifer"
(evidently in contemptuous jest) by his friends, from his using those
"Italian neatnesses called forks." The use of the fork and spoon marked
an epoch in the pr