Reference edition:

Apicius, L' art culinaire, texte établi, traduit et commenté par J. André, Paris 1987 (I ed. 1974) pp. 120-132 (Collection des Universités de France).

The excerpta Apicii are thirty-one short recipes that were collected by an otherwise unknown Vinidarius.  They are preserved in a single manuscript (Par. lat. 10318, 7^th-8^th c.), written in uncial script, which is called Salmasius’ codex because it was once owned by the French humanist Claude Saumaise.

Philologists are greatly divided about the relationship between these brief extracts and Apicius’ original text.  Some have maintained that they are original, and thus should be inserted into the De re coquinaria (e.g. Vollmer); others, however, have deemed them entirely foreign to Apicius’ work, basing their judgment on the predominance of Vulgar Latin in the excerpts (e.g. Ihm).  This dispute derives from the fact that the brief and prescriptive nature of the recipes appears vaguely Apician, but that very few of them correspond to preparations contained in the De re coquinaria.  If Vinidarius really drew his excerpta from Apicius’ text, therefore, we must envision a fairly aggressive process of authorial emendation aimed at translating the original recipes into a Latin that was more intelligible to the vernacular used during the excerptor’s lifetime (between the end of the 5^th and the start of the 6^th c. AD).  This possibility notwithstanding, it appears more likely that the collection merely reflects the diachronically stratified nature of the De re coquinaria.  [A. Borgna; tr. C. L. Caterine].