“Cook Apicius showed a remarkable ingenuity in developing luxury,” the old Roman says at another time, “and thought it a most excellent plan to let a mullet die in the pickle known as ‘garum.’” It was ingenuity of cruelty as well as of luxury. “They killed the fish in sauces and pickled them alive at the banquet,” says Seneca, “feeding the eye before the gullet, for they took pleasure in seeing their mullets change several colors while dying.” The unthinkable garum was made, according to Pliny, from the intestines of fish macerated with salt, and other ingredients were added before the mixture was set in the sun to putrefy and came to the right point for serving. It also had popularity as a household remedy for dog-bites, etc.; and in burns, when care was necessary in its application not to mention it by name--so delicately timid was its healing spirit. Its use as a dish was widespread, and perhaps we see in the well-known hankerings of the royal George of England a reversion to the palate of Italian ancestors. But garum was only one of strange dishes. The Romans seasoned much with rue and asafetida!--a taste kept to this day in India, where “Kim” eats “good curry cakes all warm and well-scented with hing (asafetida).” Cabbages they highly estimated; “of all garden vegetables they thought them best,” says Pliny. The same author notes that Apicius rejected Brussels sprouts, and in this was followed by Drusus Cæsar, who was censured for over-nicety by his father, the Emperor Tiberius of Capreæ villas fame. Upon cooks and the Roman estimate of their value in his day Pliny also casts light. “Asinius Celer, a man of consular rank and noted for his expenditure on mullet, bought one at Rome during the reign of Gaius Caligula for eight thousand sesterces. Reflection on this fact,” continues Pliny, “will recall the complaints uttered against luxury and the lament that a single cook costs more than a horse. At the present day a cook is only to be had for the price of a triumph, and a mullet only to be had for what was once the price of a cook! Of a fact there is now hardly any living being held in higher esteem than the man who knows how to get rid of his master’s belongings in the most scientific fashion!”