BeansLatin conchis (Lewis and Short, "kind of bean boiled with the pods") comes from Greek κόγχος (Liddell-Scott-Jones, sense III = "soup of lentils boiled with the pods"). According to Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 252, it means pea soup. Dalby says, "There is no evidence for the usual translation of conchis as 'beans cooked with the pods'."
If pale beans froth for you in a red pot, you can often say no to the dinners of the high-livers.
Faba
Si spumet rubra conchis tibi pallida testa,
lautorum cenis saepe negare potes.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, March 28, 2013
Simple Fare
Martial 13.7 (tr. D.R. Shackleton Bailey):