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Thirty-five years of marriage sometimes wear away the jagged edges of cohabitation. It holds true at the Hill household, especially in the kitchen, where time has shown I enjoy cooking but abhor doing the dishes, while my mate is the opposite.

Nevertheless, I feel sympathy for Briana Pouncy of Fort Worth, Texas, who lived with Joseph Boykins only four months before being arrested for attacking him with a picture frame and sword and biting him because he repeatedly refused to either help with the dishes or move out.  I like Fort Worth and consider it a charming city, despite my recent column about its odorous rat factory. In fact, the estimated 500,000 rats and mice produced by the city’s Big Cheese Rodent Factory provide necessary nutrition for the exotic-pet market. Furthermore, rats aren’t disparaged universally, as evidenced by a quick visit to “Granny’s Favorite Rat Recipes” Web site, www.roofrats.org/roof_rat_recipes.htm.

Besides modern favorites like enchilades el roof rat and roof rat pie, the site includes some historical gems, like one dish that was “popular during the Middle Ages,” entrecôte à la Bordelaise, in which “rats are skinned and eviscerated, brushed with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots, then grilled till tender and juicy.”

“The Forme of Cury,” written in 1390, mentions neither rat cuisine nor Indian food. It was the first English-language cookbook and consists of 196 recipes compiled by Edward II’s master cooks and court philosophers. Its title translates from Middle English as “The Art of Cooking,” with “cury” being the Anglicization of “queurie,” an Old French word meaning “cookery.”

“Cookery” is also the accepted library subject heading for cookbooks, and our library is loaded with them. A search for “cookbooks” in the library catalog produced 990 titles that combined cover almost every national cuisine. We even have books about cookbooks, such as “Cookbooks Worth Collecting” by Mary Barile and “The Delectable Past” by Ester Aresty.

In “Cookbooks Worth Collecting,” the section titled “The Very First Cookbooks” notes that ancient “Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all were known to have recipe collections complete with directions for preparing everything from beer to flamingos,” and Mesopotamian tablets recorded “techniques such as braising, boiling and roasting, and the foods were prepared with a sophisticated taste for seasoning and flavoring.”

She adds that ancient cookbooks reflected only upper-class dining, since lower classes couldn’t afford the ingredients.  Historically, chefs have been male. Greek chefs could copyright their creations, but according to Barile, “the earliest extant cookbook from the western world,” “De Re Coquiranaria,” aka “The Art of Cooking,” was “believed to be authored by Marcus Gavius Apicius in the first century AD.”

Barile wrote that it’s “probably the longest in-print cookbook as well, with editions and selections appearing for nearly 1,500 years. … Even Queen Anne of England owned a copy in 1705, the publication of that edition was paid for by well-known men of the day, including Isaac Newton.”

Apicius lived during the Emperor Tiberius’ reign, and was by most accounts pretty despicable. He took gluttony to new depths, popularized bizarre foods like hummingbird tongues and gave astoundingly expensive dinner parties. He also gave his boy-toy, Lucius Sejanus, a leg-up in the Roman social hierarchy, which Sejanus parlayed into becoming head of the Praetorian Guard and de facto ruler of Rome, where he implemented a notably cruel reign of terror.

Speaking of difficult personalities, that figures prominently in another famous cookbook, the ubiquitous “Joy of Cooking.” Its creation and subsequent evolution is described in detail in Anne Mendelson’s “Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America the Joy of Cooking.” It tells of Irma Rombauer, a St. Louis society matron who was financially desperate following her husband’s suicide in 1930.

An inept young widow, Rombauer collected recipes and cooking tips assiduously and self-published her collection, “The Joy of Cooking,” in 1931. It was enormously successful, eventually selling more than 18 million copies and becoming the only cookbook on the New York Public Library’s list of the 150 most influential books of the Twentieth Century.  Rombauer had ugly relationships with her dutiful daughter and co-author, Marion Becker, and her publisher, Bobbs-Merrill. It got really nasty, but it actually all boiled down to what Sir Balthazar Gerbier described in 1662: “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”