 Thus, pastries were often cooked especially for large banquets, and any pastry cook who could invent new types of tasty treats was highly prized.Around 1 AD, there were more than three hundred pastry chefs in Rome, and Cato wrote about how they created all sorts of diverse foods and flourished professionally and socially because of their creations.Cato speaks of an enormous number of breads including; libum (sacrificial cakes made with flour), placenta (groats and cress), spira (modern day flour pretzels), scibilata (tortes), savaillum (sweet cake), and globus apherica (fritters).