serving exqui- site food brought from their simple country houses.
The Romans loved disguising food to express the distinction between appearance and reality. The poet Martial (circa A.D. 40-103), for example, once "knew of a chef who could make a whole banquet out of gourds." Edrnunds concludes that culinary deception derives from the belief that a person's outward appearance masked his inner nature. "The Roman ban- queter," he notes, dined "upon his world view."

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