Food, Cookery, and Dining in Ancient Times

Soyer was of French birth but lived most of his life in England working as a chef for various influential personages and writing several books about cooking and food. This particular tome ends with a description of the menu for a banquet for the Prince Consort, Albert the preparations of which Soyer oversaw and served in 1850.

Originally published in 1853, there is flowery prose and amusing, to me, comments on the lives and habits of early civilizations. He particularly dwells on the banquets of the Roman nobility during the centuries of the Empire. Soyer managed to convince me that a typical menu for one of these feast contains very little that I would be happy consuming.

The book took me nearly two months to get through, mostly because show more it's the kind of prose and subject matter that lends itself to being read in small doses of a few pages at a time. I am, however, glad that I kept going and read the entire book. show less

Some of the recipes don't seem to add up, however this is a great book.

Published in Boston in 1853, this volume in the American Antiquarian Cookbook Collection is recognized as a great classic of gastronomy literature. Soyer was a French chef, cookery writer, diet reformer, and culinary inventor who provides a fascinating history of food from ancient Greeks and Romans to his present day, covering everything from the treatment of dinner guests and agricultural milling to ingredients used to season and flavor.
Published in 1853 in Boston, The Pantropheon provides a fascinating history of food focusing on the table of classical antiquity. Author Alexis Soyer was a renowned “gastronomic genius” in his day, as well as a chef and culinary writer. With beautiful black-and-white illustrations, Soyer presents a show more wealth of information about food in ancient times: agriculture, milling, recipes, mythological origin, ingredients, utensils, exotic dishes, dining habits and customs, and spices and seasonings. Within this cornucopia of food history, Soyer calls upon Jean Anthelme Brillat Savrin’s quote, “Tell me what thou eatest and I will tell thee who thou art” to perfectly capture the essence of his tome, and it is precisely for this reason that his compendium is still culturally significant today and widely read among historians, food writers, and chefs.
This edition of The Pantropheon, or, History of Food, and Its Preparation was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and successful printer and publisher, the society is a research library documenting the lives of Americans from the colonial era through 1876. The society collects, preserves, and makes available as complete a record as possible of the printed materials from the early American experience. The cookbook collection comprises approximately 1,100 volumes.
(Andrews McMeel) show less