An interesting read through some important moments in history as tied to the theme of hospitality. Browner starts off with an excellent discussion of the essence of hosting and hospitality. He then scampers all over history telling anecdotes about Hitlers hospitality, through to Nero and Caligula...
a.d. 66: Having been falsely implicated in a plot to assassinate the emperor Nero, Titus Petronius has a choice: await the executioner at dawn, or die a noble Roman death by his own hand. Deciding that his will be a suicide like no other the world has ever seen, he summons a small circle of intim...
Wes felt anything but joyful as he climbed the stoop. He had hoped that a long walk through the dark and quiet city would give him some perspective, but it hadn’t worked out that way. In other circumstances, it might have been an adventure but it was all nothing but a blur, thoughts as flimsy and...
Ludwig Uhland, A Pork-Soup Song In 1938, the German Oberkommando der Wehrmacht published a remarkable document titled Speisenzusammenstellung unter Mitverwedung von Edelsoja Mit Kochanweisungen (Formulation of menus including pure soya, with recipes). It was an official German army recipe book ba...
Almost everything we know about Titus (sometimes Gaius) Petronius Niger (born c. 27 A.D.) comes from two paragraphs of Book XVI of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome. The events described in this novel are largely consonant with that account. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder recounts the st...