In fact, the self-importance of chefs became a merry subject of satire in plays. The comic playwright Plautus features a stage cook ridiculing the efforts of his peers: "I don't season a dinner the way other cooks do They serve up a whole meadow in their dishes. So this nouvelle cuisine arrived, and the newly-rich could display their wealth through their food, spices like silphium being very costly.The chefs of the day may have been slaves, but they could bring great kudos to their masters. It was the refined and educated Greeks who created the haute cuisine of their day, aspiring to elevated levels of social behaviour.

Food and wine was but part of an evening symposium (literally drinking together) which included discussion, music, plays, poetry, even acrobatics.Until around 200BC, says Ms Grainger, the Romans had been considered "porridge-eating barbarians." Now Rome absorbed the kitchen skills of the Greeks and further added the concept of conspicuous consumption. She makes a distinction between Greek cooking and Roman cooking. Enzymes in the gut react with the whole salted fish to produce this strongly flavoured brine. The Romans knew it as both garum and liquamen, and there were factories for its manufacture. Even in Roman Britain there was one, close to a little trading post on the Thames, known then as Londinium.Salty garum and pepper were predominant flavours. And honey, grape juice (defrutum), spiced wine (mulsum), sweet wine (passum) and vinegar.