In Crystal King's Feast of Sorrow, Apicius and his slave, Thrasius, develop their own cookbook. A quick search into Roman history reveals that Marcus Gavius Apicius actually did publish such a book (or rather a series of them), which most historians consider the first cookbook ever written. However, nowhere in the 450-500 recipes in this eponymously titled tome is there a reference to a slave by name. King made this literary leap, jumping to the conclusion that it was highly likely that a slave invented and/or produced recipes for the Apicius household, and not the master himself. The fact that several sources I found note that the language used in these books was more "vulgar" than "classical" Latin would also support this idea – even literate slaves would use less sophisticated language than their patrician masters.
What is amazing is that this cookbook, which is about 2000 years old, is still around today. I found numerous references to publications of this particular collection of recipes in the original Latin, starting from the year 50 in Rome, again in 500 in Greece, and continuing across the centuries, with some translations into Italian and German along the way. The Guttenberg Project has the Frederick Starr translation of this cookbook first published in Chicago in 1926. In the preface, it says "The present version has been based chiefly upon three principal Latin editions, that of Albanus Torinus, 1541, who had for his authority a codex he found on the island of Megalona, on the editions of Martinus Lister, 1705-9, who based his work upon that of Humelbergius, 1542, and the Giarratano-Vollmer edition, 1922." Starr, who was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, claims to be the first to translate this book into English.
