By a careful and thorough analysis of all the available evidence, she refutes such often repeated misconceptions as that the Romans used rotten fish sauce to flavor their food, and that they endeavored to disguise the natural taste of food by smothering everything in heavy sauces made out of an enormous number of ingredients. She argues convincingly that Roman poetry and visual art amply testify to a sensitivity of palate and a cultivated taste, which is implicit also in the Romans' concern for good farm management and in the pleasure they seem to have taken in horticulture and animal husbandry. This fine chapter suffers like the others when the author tries to fit the cuisine to the arts to prove her thesis. The last chapters cover the Medieval period, one on the early Middle Ages and Carolingian period, another on the waning of the Middle Ages, in art the Late Gothic International style. There is an ever increasing documentation from these periods of food production, beer brewing and other important aspects of foodways.
Famous cooks appear in aristocratic courts and they write cookbooks.
Scholastic systematization, influenced by the transmission of Aristotelian science and Galenic medicine that characterizes the culture, marks, as B. argues, the cuisine also. The book as a whole reflects formidable scholarly erudition based on wide ranging research literature. Its basic thesis, the coherence of cuisine and 'fine arts,' remains on the whole a statement of belief, possible but not proven. The cuisine described is that of the elite, while often the food of the common people is dismissed with gross generalization suggesting the simplest and poorest vegetarian subsistence. Human history is abundant in periods of famine, but during good years this characterization is grossly inaccurate.