Old recipes are more memory cues for experienced cooks than the modern step-by-step guide for amateurs we are used to. They're scanty in detail because they assume quite a lot of existing knowledge.

It's the difference between "a chicken stew flavoured with turmeric and cumin, then rice enough to cook in and fully absorb the broth" and "first, take 500g of boneless skinless chicken thighs..."

> I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.

That's going too far. The person recording them might be the same person who is used to making the food, or might be taking literal dictation from that person.

Knowing how to make food isn't the same skill as knowing how to explain the process in a way that someone who isn't already trained to make the food can follow.

Max had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. He did all the steps, didn't stop at the 'jesus that's disgusting' phase. Saw it through to the end. Even the complaints from his neighbors, he put up with. And got the most divine, golden syrupy sauce you can imagine, at the end. After all the gagging and stirring, straining and filtering and pressing.

Fermented mushroom sauce sounds so much better than ketchup! Tell me more. Does it still exist commercially?

My understanding is that while wool knitting may have been a later invention (and that's disputed) and gloves a need for colder climates than the majority of the Roman Empire (assuming just function over fashion, and the Romans didn't seem immune to fashion), the Romans still had some forms of knitting (and/or "nalbinding" if you want to get extremely technical, but knitting seems a useful enough catch all word), it was just mostly knitting of things that weren't wool. One of the related theories I've seen is that the dodecahedrons may have been for knitting gold and surviving gold necklaces with intricate knit patterns do exist. (That theory maybe also helps explain why the dodecahedrons were often found among "jewelry boxes" and gold stashes.)

Also, even if the Roman Empire had wool knitting a lot of it wouldn't have survived archaeological records (textiles rarely do, which is a shame in general, and also arguably why there is so much bias against certain types of textiles in "historical records") and it seems hard to entirely dismiss the Roman Empire from having wool knitting given the extent of the Empire and how deep the history of wool knitting in the British Isles goes, at the very least, to which the Roman Empire had contact and trading.