Publius Cornelius Lurcus was bored to death. Reclining on a couch in his lavish villa on the Janiculum, he half-heartedly snacked on some flamenco tongue pastries while scratching his groin. He meditated on the satiety produced by the food they served him, always known and predictable. Cornelio Lurco was a patrician full of money, whose greatest pleasure was the most exclusive and expensive delicacies and wines. Other hobbies of his, such as raping prepubescent slaves or watching some clumsy servant being flogged to the point of skinning, did not satisfy him as much as eating and drinking until he became sick in the company of other nobles of the same condition and tastes as him.
About fifty years old, Cornelio Lurco was short and extraordinarily obese. His head was populated by four hairs, uneven and poorly distributed. A huge double chin shared his face with livid circles under his eyes. His arms were short, like those of a little squirrel, and were topped by chubby fingers covered in rings. His appearance was dirty and disheveled, because he did not bother to change his tunic until it became useless due to grease stains, traces of vomit and other traces of his excesses. Cornelio Lurco, as we see, was a repellent being, inside and out.
In his reflections, Cornelio lamented the disappearance of elegant and sophisticated Roman cuisine, full of surprises and excesses. The past masters, Apicius, Lucullus and Petronius had been forgotten; Emperors like Elagabalus—some of whose legendary banquets Cornelius had attended as a young man—were a thing of the past. Today, they were all dwarfs compared to the giants of yesteryear.
He was in these dark musings when a luminous thought came to his mind: he himself would be the new Lucullus or the new Elagabalus. Money, he had plenty, and power and influence, he had no shortage. To fight boredom and renew Roman cuisine, he would organize dinners that would be talked about in future times. Without further ado, he spoke to his friends, who enthusiastically applauded the idea. To attract his talent, he would award a prize of twenty thousand gold to the cook who, throughout the successive agapes that would be organized in his villa on the Janiculum, managed to impress and surprise the diners the most. The reward was enough to buy freedom and a villa with arable land in Latium. All expenses for the function, of course, would be borne by the organization.
Cornelius Lurco published his announcement in the Forum and sent messengers to the main cities of the Roman world, such as Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople.
Furthermore, he spread the news throughout the Empire: from Lusitania to Armenia, and from Britain to Egypt and Stone Arabia.
The notice spread and soon the first contestants began to arrive. The first to arrive were those from areas close to Rome, such as the Italian peninsula or Greece. These first dinners were an absolute failure: the cooks limited themselves to offering dishes that, although refined and complex, were well known. Thus, they tasted sow vulvas and teats, dormice fattened with figs and honey, unborn goats and lambs, wild boar intestines fried in aurochs fat and, finally, all kinds of meat and fish seasoned with thick sauces, more appreciated the more ingredients intervene in its preparation. The spectacular dishes mixed all kinds of flavors and were composed of such a quantity of products that they could perfectly be used as a treatise on natural sciences.
From Hispania came cooks who deployed all possible types of salted fish and countless varieties of garum to season them. A contestant from Cyrenaica contributed various preparations of silphium, a plant that was believed to have been extinct for more than two hundred years but which, according to the North African, could still be found in a place that only he knew.
From beyond the kingdom of the Parthians, from the valley of the Indus River, some dark-skinned men came who cooked elephant trunks on charcoal, seasoned with a mixture of more than three hundred spices that they called masala. An Egyptian dug and flooded a wide ditch around the town; In this space a naumachia was performed to the delight of the diners and, when the combat ended, a rosary of slaves emerged from the winning ship, each carrying a platter with a different fish. Behind, in pairs, other slaves carried cauldrons with the thick sauces that would accompany the dishes.
Stuffed giraffe necks, candied camel humps, a spectacular turbot, more than two meters in diameter - for whose preparation a custom container had to be built -, spiced wines with myrrh, cardamom, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, saffron, resin , sea water or sweetened with honey. All these sophistications and extravagances pleased Cornelio, but he couldn't quite find what he was looking for: something really different, surprisingly spectacular and truly innovative. And then Paulo appeared.
***
Cornelio Lurco raised his eyebrows when he found out who the next contestant would be: it was a scullion from his own kitchens. The normal thing was for the cooks to be slaves, always men; some high-level slaves, very expensive, highly trained and highly valued—in fact, their owners rented them and shared their profits; It was even possible that the prize of this tournament would go to the master and not to the cook himself—but the fact that a plaice, the last lentil in the amphora, dared to enter the contest, left him disconcerted. However, in order to keep the party going, he approved their participation: one way or another they would have fun.
Paulo had been sold as a child by his parents, Gallic peasants who already had a dozen sons and daughters. His Gallic name was Gaultix but, due to his short stature, he was given the nickname “Paulo”, which meant “small”. He was blonde, very attractive and had great natural charm. Everything he lacked in height he made up for in intelligence and, since he was little, he had become essential in the kitchens of Cornelio Lurco's villa, with enough cunning to learn without attracting too much attention from cooks and freedmen. Now, at the approximate age of twenty, he had seen his opportunity coming and decided to try his luck.
"My lord," Paulo began his speech, addressing the host. For many years I have worked in your kitchens and I have come to the following conclusion: Your Excellency does not enjoy the food due to the irrational manipulations to which the food is subjected. Endless and crazy cooking and preparations, thick sauces like paste made with an infinite number of ingredients, many of them incompatible with each other. Aberrant and crazy mixes of products, whose objective is to hide flavors and textures, not enhance them. For this reason - Paulo continued, raising his tone and gaining the center of the triclinium, where Cornelio and his guests were -, I have prepared a menu observing the following principles: do not overcook the food; use fresh, quality products that have not been raised, fished, hunted or collected more than twenty miles from where they are served; use light sauces so as not to mask flavors and, above all, make the food light, so that the diner gets up from the table without embarrassment and remembering with pleasure the last bite.
—And what will be the menu that sustains these wonders? "If you'll allow me to ask the question, Master Paulo," Cornelio asked, while he directed knowing glances and winks at the rest of the diners.
—I will be happy to detail it for you, my lord. We will start with some asparagus shoots, collected this morning without the sunlight having touched them; They will be served with a light vinaigrette. We will continue with some peas that are so tender that they have barely been fried in the pan so that they can be enjoyed in all their flavor. We will continue with some lentils with leeks, seasoned only with olive oil. The next dish will be some mullets that were still alive a few minutes ago; They have undergone a brief frying which, I believe, will be enough to obtain the maximum flavor of this delicacy. The main course is some capons, roasted with great care on spits of my invention, designed so that excessive temperatures do not cause the birds to lose their qualities. For desserts, some seasonal fruits will be presented which, at the end of May, cannot be other than cherries and apricots. Except for the fish, which was transported alive this morning from the coast of Ostia, all the ingredients come from this same farm. With the vegetables we will serve a new and refreshing wine made here; with the fish a dry albano, without any additives; for the capons, a cécube with a light touch of pepper and, after the desserts, a sweet falerno with fifty years of aging and rest will be served.
The recitation of the menu left all the diners with their mouths open.
Truly, Paulo's proposal was the most revolutionary, innovative and surprising thing that had been presented to them at the contest. Then, everyone started laughing out loud.
***
In the basement of the Flavian Amphitheater, while waiting his turn to be thrown to the lions, Paulo met another man ahead of his time. It was Marcus Tullius Licinius, a freedman of Thracian origin who had revolutionized the Quirinal neighborhood with his ideas that all men are born free, that no one has the right to enslave anyone and that, if someone wants another person to be at his or her service, he should compensate him with a fair salary, not make him work more than eight hours a day and give him a couple of days off a week. Faced with such madness, Tullius Licinius was admitted to the temple of Bacchus, where the insane were housed and had no one to take responsibility for them. However, when he began to preach his ideas among the madmen and organize them to assault the Senate, the priests said “this far” and sold him as noxii, so that he could serve as food for the wild beasts and as entertainment for the Romans he had tried to redeem. .
—Oh, Paulo! But how naive you are! What I propose is nothing compared to what you do. Pay close attention to what I'm telling you: when humanity realizes that slavery is something abominable and prohibits it, more than a hundred years will have to pass until some great chef imposes simplicity on the table. Don't you understand that, in reality, what people like Cornelius seek is not the delight of their senses but rather to distinguish themselves and surpass others? That's why they like rare, exotic and very expensive ingredients, complex and endless preparations, and spectacular and absurd presentations. Good taste and wealth do not usually go together: something close, harmonious, delicate and simple will never satisfy a creso, because it will not have an exorbitant price that he can boast about to his guests. To innovate in cooking, as in art, philosophy, politics or science, you need two things: first, a genius, and it is possible that you and I are those geniuses, but also a prepared, willing and receptive public. We have been unlucky: we have seen the light when the conditions were not met to be able to transmit that illumination to others.
This is how Tulio Licinio spoke to Paulo after learning his story and he, bowing his head, assumed his naivety and prepared his spirit for the new gastronomic experience that awaited him: instead of choosing and preparing the food, it was going to be the main dish. Of course, he was going to avoid the humiliation of being served marinated, swimming in garum, garnished with myriads of ingredients of remote origin or seasoned with exotic spices.
