In article , Bob Pastorio
wrote:

I got this on a mailing list I subscribe to. It was forwarded by one
of the subscribers. Looks like an, um, interesting read. And only
$200. kof

Pastorio

snip

An interesting early study of food, drink and table habits. The author
lets little escape his notice, and covers various types of food,
meals, wine, special occasions, and all sorts of other material from
the pantry, including- The French Cafes; The Ancient Cook and His Art;
The Making and Marring of Wine; Imperial Drinkers and Incidents in
Germany; The Tables of the Ancient and Modern Egyptians; The Caesars
at the Table; Strange Banquets; Authors and their Dietetics, and a
whole lot more.

The text is all the more interesting because Doran will repeat just
about anything he has heard, as for example- "I have spoken of
gigantic asparagus; the Jews had radishes that could vie with them, if
it be true that a fox and cubs could burrow in the hollow of one, and
that it was not uncommon to grow them of a hundred pounds in weight.
It must have been such radishes as these that were employed by
seditious mobs of old, as weapons, in insurrections. In such case, a
rebellious people were always well victualled, and had peculiar
facilities, not only to beat their adversaries, but to eat their own
arms".

Sounds rather like Soyer's "Pantropheon". What is it about the
nineteenth century that led to such spotty (I was gonna say feeble, but
I suppose it's not really pandemic) scholarship? Maybe it's just that
what we would recognize as the sciences of logic, critical thinking,
and forensics have evolved over the years, but so many works of classic
19th-century scholarship are a little dubious in the area of
conclusions based on insufficient or improperly examined/presented
evidence.

Phil