DeWitt Da Vinci's Kitchen

The Birth of Italian Cuisine
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4951-4346-5
Verlag: Sunbelt Media
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten

In his time, Leonardo Da Vinci was more famous for producing lavish banquets and spectacular theatrical productions than he was for his art. Ironically, he was a vegetarian who did not partake of the feasts. Da Vinci's Kitchen is a fascinating account of Italian cuisine from Da Vinci's Renaissance to modern times, with original recipes from the early masters of cooking, and it explores the history and relevance of Italian cuisine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

DeWitt, Dave

Leseproben

Chapter Two

THE FIRST SUPERSTAR CHEFS

One part of the glory of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of the world of the classics of Greece and Rome, mostly by book publishing, and the attempts to recreate that world. There was one culinary classic that was rediscovered during Leonardo’s time, Apicius’s De re coquinaria, or On the Art of Cookery. Apicius was, of course, the late fourthcentury a.d. Roman writer on food and cooking. Previously only available in manuscript form to scholars, De re coquinaria had an enormous impact when published as a book in 1498. “Suddenly there was revealed a very different cuisine,” writes food historian Roy Strong, “that of a highly sophisticated society which cultivated the pleasures of the table and surrendered willingly to the temptations of the appetite without any feelings of guilt.” Strong calls the impact of Apicius the “humanist revival of the foods of Antiquity,” and this impacted Renaissance cuisine by reviving interest in truffles and other fungi, seafood and caviar, chopped meats and sausages, and vegetables like asparagus and cabbages that were now “endowed with the aura of Antiquity” and thus became fashionable. And, of course, with the rediscovery of classic works like that of Apicius, there was a revival of another sort—the gastronome who was devoted to the joys of cooking and eating. There would be a few more gastronomes during the Renaissance who led the way for the multitudes that we have today.

FRESH FAVA BEANS IN MEAT BROTH

The following recipe is from Maestro Martino, and a nearly identical recipe appears in Platina, but with fava translated as “broad bean.”

Take the beans and remove their skins by soaking them in hot water as you would with almonds, then cook them in good broth, with some nice salt meat as well. When you think they are done, put in some chopped parsley and mint. This dish needs to be somewhat green to make it look attractive. You can cook peas and other fresh legumes in the same way, but there is no need to soak them in hot water like fava beans. Just leave them as they are in their thin pods.

MARTINO AND PLATINA

Maestro Martino, author of Libro de arte coquinaria, which he wrote in about 1460, was a scholar and a cook who worked in the kitchen of the Sforza court in Milan but preceded Leonardo’s arrival there. He also worked as the private cook for Pope Paul II and his successor, Sixtus IV. Roy Strong called his work “a book that signaled a new era in the history of cooking … a landmark on account of the clarity, organization, and exactitude with which the recipes are for the first time presented.”

The “book” is really a handwritten manuscript bound with board and calf leather that measures nine-by-five-and-three-quarters inches. There are eighty-five leaves containing 240 recipes written in Italian rather than Latin. About one-quarter of the recipes are known to be from earlier manuscripts, and the rest are Martino originals.

TO PREPARE A SUCKLING PIG

This recipe from Maestro Martino reads remarkably like the method used by many barbecuers in the United States today—except for the part about turning the piglet inside out!

First make sure that it is well cleaned. Then cut it open the length of the spine, remove all the innards, and wash it really well. Then take the liver and chop it fine, along with some good herbs, some garlic chopped fine, a little good bacon, some grated cheese, a few eggs, some crushed peppercorns, and a little saffron. Mix all these things together and put them inside your piglet, first turning it inside out as one does with tench [carp] so that the skin side is inside, then sew it together and truss it well. Put it to cook on a spit or on a grill, but let it cook slowly so that it is well done, both the meat and the stuffing. Make a little basting sauce with vinegar, pepper, and saffron and take two or three sprigs of bay leaves, sage, or rosemary and keep sprinkling this all over the piglet. You can do the same with geese, ducks, cranes, capons, or chickens.

Cooks in an early Italian kitchen, stylized

North Wind Picture Archives

Martino scraps the classical method of opening a cookbook with fruit and sweeter things, but rather jumps right into the meat dishes in the first chapter. And his seasonings suggest what Renaissance Italian food was all about. “What is striking,” writes Roy Strong, “is the sign of a move away from imported spices in favor of using native aromatic herbs such as mint, marjoram, parsley, garlic, fennel, bay, sage, and rosemary, although spices were still to reign until the middle of the seventeenth century.”

Medieval cuisine historian Bruno Laurioux reflects on Martino’s enormous achievement: “It is no wonder then that compared with works of the previous century, Martino’s Libro de arte coquinaria was seen as avantgarde gastronomy. … The profoundly innovative character of Martino’s work gave it a virtual monopoly of the Italian culinary scene for almost a century.”

Prior to Martino, detailed specifications were not a feature of cookbooks, since they were written to persuade a large number of readers about the techniques or superiority of a given cooking style. In fact, just the opposite was true: food writers wrote primarily for themselves, and their notes were intended merely to remind them how to produce a desired effect given a list of ingredients. And good cooks, when presented with recipes that were not their own, would know the proper proportions and procedures to create the dish.

But there is perhaps another explanation for the scantiness of information contained in culinary manuals prior to Martino: the desire not to divulge professional secrets. Like chemists, doctors, dowsers, soothsayers, wood carvers, painters, silk dyers, and so on, cooks were quick to realize that their prestige (and compensation) would increase in proportion to their command of more knowledge—if, that is, it did not become an easily accessible commodity. Unlike the purported individualism of today’s consumer capitalism, which boils down to the persistent push to keep up with the Joneses, Renaissance individualism was largely the outcome of a search for distinction. This did not mean acquiring what everyone else was induced to own, but possessing what no one had yet discovered. Even books, one of the earliest artifacts to be reproduced mechanically, were at times printed in such a way as to seem unique—with different bindings for the same edition, for example.

MARTINO’S MARZIPAN TART

Carefully shell and skin the almonds and pound them as fine as possible since they are not going to be sieved. Note that to make the almonds whiter, tastier, and sweeter in the mouth, they should be soaked in cold water for a day and a night or even more; in this way the skins can be removed just by rubbing them in your hands. Sprinkle with a little rose water when pounding them so that they don’t become oily. To make this tart really sweet, use equal amounts of sugar and almonds, a pound or so of each if you like. Mix well with one or two ounces of rose water. Take some wafers made with sugar, soak them in rose water and line your tart dish with them, then put the mixture in, spread it out flat, sprinkle with more rose water and some powdered sugar, and press it down well with a spoon. Cook very slowly in the oven or on the hearth, like the other tarts, taking care to moderate the heat and checking frequently to make sure it does not burn. Remember that this tart needs to be on the whole somewhat low and thin, rather than too deep and thick.

But Martino’s book would never have had the impact it did had it not been for the “plagiarizing” of it by the librarian of the Vatican, Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina. His book, De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health), which was written between 1465 and 1468, is generally regarded as the first printed cookbook. It was first printed in 1472 (some say 1475). Of the 250 recipes in the book, 240 were taken directly from Martino’s work. However, there are many original parts of Platina’s book, including descriptions of herbs. It should be pointed out that the two men knew each other and may have collaborated for a time. Platina acknowledged Martino in his book: “Martino de’ Rossi of Milan, prince of cooks in our time, from whom I learnt about cooking.” There was no real concept of plagiarizing in those times—writers and artists commonly borrowed from each other without attribution, both in literature and fine art.

The word “voluptate,” or pleasure, in the title derives from “voluptas,” which in medieval Latin meant sin. Platina is promoting the idea that the physical pleasure of dining could be, in the proper circumstances, “honesta,” or right. In this way, Platina legitimizes eating and drinking beyond mere physical necessity to emphasize the physical...