Do you recognize it? This formula sounds as phantastic, as "weird" and as "vile" as any of the Apician concoctions, confusing even a well-trained cook because we stated neither the title of this preparation nor the mode of making it, nor did we name the ingredients in their proper sequence. This mystery was conceived with an illustrative purpose which will be explained later, which may and may not have to do with the mystery of Apicius. Consider, for a moment, this mysterious creation No. 2: Take bananas, oranges, cherries, flavored with bitter almonds, fresh pineapple, lettuce, fresh peaches, plums, figs, grapes, apples, nuts, cream cheese, olive oil, eggs, white wine, vinegar, cayenne, lemon, salt, white pepper, dry mustard, tarragon, rich sour cream, chop, mix, whip well. Worse yet! Instead of having our appetite aroused the very perusal of this quasi-Apician _mixtum compositum_ repels every desire to partake of it. We are justly tempted to condemn it as being utterly impossible. Yet every day hundreds of thousand portions of it are sold under the name of special fruit salad with _mayonnaise mousseuse_. The above mystery No. 1 is the justly popular tartar sauce. Thus we could go on analyzing modern preparations and make them appear as outlandish things. Yet we relish them every day. The ingredients, obnoxious in great quantities, are employed with common sense. We are not mystified seeing them in print; they are usually given in clear logical order. This is not the style of Apicius, however. LATIN CUNNING We can hardly judge Apicius by what he has revealed but we rather should try to discover what he--purposely or otherwise--has concealed if we would get a good idea of the ancient kitchen. This thought occurred to us at the eleventh hour, after years of study of the text and after almost despairing of a plausible solution of its mysteries. And it seems surprising that Apicius has never been suspected before of withholding information essential to the successful practice of his rather hypothetical and empirical formulæ. The more we scrutinize them, the more we become convinced that the author has omitted vital directions--same as we did purposely with the two modern examples above. Many of the Apician recipes are dry enumerations of ingredients supposed to belong to a given dish or sauce. It is well-known that in chemistry (cookery is but applied chemistry) the knowledge of the rules governing the quantities and the sequence of the ingredients, their manipulation, either separately or jointly, either successively or simultaneously, is a very important matter, and that violation or ignorance of the process may spell failure at any stage of the experiment. In the kitchen this is particularly true of baking and soup and sauce making, the most intricate of culinary operations.