In the course of Anthimus' life in Ravenna, he was sent as ambassador to the King of the Franks and wrote, perhaps as a sweetener to his fierce yet royal host, a letter about foods – which were good for you, which bad, and, sometimes, how to cook and serve them. It may reasonably be called the first French cookery book; and this is a new and more accurate modern language edition, printed with the Latin and English in parallel text on facing pages. Mark Grant provides a general historical introduction – which corrects various errors of fact in earlier editions, a Latin text based on the editio princeps of 1864, a modern English translation, and a full commentary on the work itself, with many cross-references to classical medical treatises, the literature of classical cookery and modern scholarship insofar as it knows anything of the food and cookery of the early Merovingian Franks.
