Flying pie
Make a mold for a large pie, and in the bottom make a hole large enough that your fist can pass through, or even bigger if you please, and the sides around it should be slightly higher than the common usage; fill it with flour and cook in an oven. Once it is cooked, open the hole on the bottom and remove the flour; beforehand, prepare another small pie filled with good stuff that has been well cooked and seasoned and that has been made as big as that hole in the large mold; place this pie through the hole into the mold; and in the empty space that remains around the small pie, put some live birds, as many as it will hold; and the birds should be placed in it just before it is to be served; and when it is served before those seated at the banquet, you remove the cover above, and the little birds will fly away. This is done to entertain and amuse your company. And in order that they do not remain disappointed by this, cut the small pie up and serve.
Peach blossom sauce
Get some peeled, blanched almonds that have been well crushed with the bread white of some bread, a little ginger and cinnamon, verjuice, and red wine, and some pomegranate juice, adding to all of these things some sandalwood extract. Then thin and pass this mixture through a stamine, and make it sweet with red wine or tart for those who like it like that.
Autorul este: Maestro Martino of Como has been called the first celebrity chef, and his extraordinary treatise on Renaissance cookery, The Art of Cooking, is the first known culinary guide to specify ingredients, cooking times and techniques, utensils, and amounts. This vibrant document is also essential to understanding the forms of conviviality developed in Central Italy during the Renaissance, as well as their sociopolitical implications.
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Introduction
Maestro Martino
The Carneades of Cooks
Luigi Ballerini
Dear Reader: This is a cookbook—a historical cookery book. If you do not care to read about the world from which it grew (and it would be perfectly understandable if you didn’t), skip the present introduction altogether. No need to feel guilty about it. Read it only if you are the type that does not mind a little suffering. I promise that, at the end, you will hasten to search for a great chef, either in the outside world or within yourself, to obtain the culinary reward you undoubtedly deserve.
For a good number of years, a few centuries in fact, the only known mention of Maestro Martino was to be found in the writings of the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi, who was acquainted with him personally.
In other words, the name of an unknown person was known only by a “reporter” who in our day and age is just as unknown as his “reportee.” The muse of history contributed some additional humor along these lines. So enchanted was Sacchi (who in his own time was actually famous enough to need no introduction) with Martino’s gastronomic and rhetorical virtues that he did not hesitate to compare him to Carneades (213–129 b.c.e.), whom Sacchi’s contemporaries would have immediately recognized as the illustrious philosopher who headed the New Platonic Academy in Athens, and whose subtle eloquence and argumentative dexterity, appreciated and praised during that rebirth of classical culture we know as the Renaissance, would eventually fall into the same oblivion that now surrounds both the cook and the scholar.
There is more: ever since the hypertrophic question “Carneades, who was he now?” found its way into the pages of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed; first published in 1827), only to be repeated by generations of high school kids, Italians have adopted the name Carneades as the quintessential moniker of obscurity.1
Thus, to make sure that fame would not treat Martino unfairly, Bartolomeo Sacchi bestowed upon him the following encomium: “What a cook, O immortal gods, you bestowed in my friend Martino of Como, from whom I have received, in great part, the things of which I am writing. You would say he was another Carneades if you were to hear him eloquently speaking ex tempore about the matters described above.”2
Luckily, by the time the events in this story began to unfold, the printing press had become a permanent feature of European cultural life, with the result that Sacchi’s praise of Martino would be repeated a fair number of times, in the 1474 as well as in the numerous subsequent editions of his treatise De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health). But Sacchi’s treatise paid homage to Martino in a way that went beyond the exigency of a compliment, eventually yielding results that we are only beginning to appreciate more than five centuries later. By “lifting” Maestro Martino’s recipes and translating them into Latin, Sacchi ensured that the highly original approach of Maestro Martino’s De arte coquinaria (The Art of Cooking) would not remain confined to a few obscure manuscripts penned in the vernacular, but on the contrary would be disseminated throughout Renaissance Europe in the first cookbook deemed worthy of mechanical reproduction.3
To fully appreciate the novelty and impact of Martino’s gastronomy, we must situate him in time and place, studying the changes in culinary practice that his example helped to usher in. Given the paucity of historical information available about Martino himself, our study must be sketchy. We begin with the prologue-master, Sacchi, about whom much is known though little is remembered, and proceed from there to the leading man, about whom we now know a little more than we did a few decades ago, although certainly not enough to satisfy our appetite. Along the way, we will season the plot with accounts of supporting actors and extras (Renaissance popes and cardinals, for the most part, but even a twentieth-century American gentleman), and with a register of motives that will surely pique the interest of those who love good food and the history and art of gastronomy.
Bartolomeo Sacchi is much more recognizable by his pseudonym, Platina (plah-tee-nah), a Latinization of Piadena, the name of the small township in which he was born in 1421, poised between Cremona and Mantua in the heart of the fertile, humid Padanian plains. We can only imagine that he couldn’t wait to leave his provincial hometown, as is the case for many even today. Remembering his birthplace whenever he signed his name at the bottom of an epistle or some official document must have seemed to him jingoistic enough.
Judging from his future career as a humanist, we might surmise that he would have preferred to have been born in Greece, or at least to have perfected his competence in the language of literature, philosophy, and art by conversing with his peers in an appropriate academic garden or, lacking such a garden, under the roof of a well-constructed stoa.
But Platina had been born into a poor family that looked upon such Renaissance dreams as the ravings of a lunatic, and so he was forced to enlist in the service of two swaggering condottieri: Francesco Sforza (1401–66), who in 1450 would obtain the dukedom of Milan, and Niccolò Piccinino (1386–1444). In reality they were fine Renaissance soldiers, which means that they looked at their profession as an art and were likely to have possessed a bit more class than the Rambos of today.4 If Platina was present, as is highly probable, at the legendary Battle of Anghiari in 1440, in which Florence defeated Milan (and in which Piccinino was trounced), he probably heard mention of Ludovico Trevisan—it is unlikely that he actually saw him on the battlefield. Trevisan, on orders from the Holy Church, had brought four thousand men to the site of the conflict, and some years later would be served by Maestro Martino in Rome.5
Quickly tiring, we presume, of both the art of war and the soldier’s pay that came with it, Platina sought and obtained the protection of the Gonzaga family, the princely house that ruled Mantua. This enabled him to study with the famed humanist and preceptor Omnibonus Leonicenus, called by his friends Ognibene da Lonigo. When the latter, in turn, grew tired of instructing the Gonzagas’ children, Platina was handpicked by him as his successor.
From the Mantua of the Gonzagas, Platina made his way to the Florence of the Medicis, which by then could claim to have become a New Athens, possibly the greatest center of that “renewal of learning” by which Italy has managed to capture and exploit the cultural attention of the modern and contemporary world. There he studied with Byzantine humanist John Argyropoulos (1415–87), who had arrived in Florence in 1456 after fleeing Constantinople (which fell to the Ottomans in 1453) and could boast of having as students the most illustrious scholars and poets of the time, such as Marsilio Ficino, Poggio Bracciolini, Cristoforo Landino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Politian.
Highly cultured and restless, Platina left Florence for Rome in 1461, following his student Francesco Gonzaga, who had been made cardinal—at the tender age of eighteen—by the “humanist pope” Pius II, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini.6 And in Rome he would remain, through good times and bad, until he died in 1481 from the plague and was buried in the glorious basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, with funeral rites attended by a congregation of Roman literati.7
In the Eternal City, Platina sought fortune as persistently as misfortune sought him. After more than a hundred years of neglect on the part of her bishop and God-appointed master, the return of Pope Martin V, which concluded the so-called Avignon Exile or Babylonian Captivity (1309–1417), as well as the Great Schism (1378–1417), engendered an explosion of creative activity that quickly dissipated the anxiety generated by the penurious squalor into which Rome had been precipitated.8 Reflecting on those years, Platina himself commented that “Rome no longer looked like a city. . . . There was not even a trace of an urban reality.”9
With the vigor and zeal allowed only to those who derive their power directly from God, Martin V cleaned the streets, restored the great landmarks, demolished dangerous illegal constructions, and had criminals decapitated. In just a few years, his improvements to the city were so great that, in the Diarium Urbis Romae (Diary of the City of Rome), Stefano Infessura would recount how Paolo di Benedetto di Cola allowed himself to be won over with enthusiasm for the renewed urban life, and wrote that a man could travel undisturbed for miles and miles, night and day, throughout the Roman countryside, with his money in the palm of his hand.10
Once again you could breathe in Rome, both physically and metaphorically: the city had transformed itself from mephitic village to capital of the High Renaissance. Fledgling patronage attracted some of the greatest humanists to Rome, like Lorenzo Valla and Leonardo Bruni.11 These and others came to work in the papal chancellery. And though it did not take long for their passion in humanae litterae and their fundamental admiration of pagan culture to turn into (or merely be mistaken for) manifestations of immorality, Pope Martin V preferred to turn a blind eye to such calumnies and misunderstandings.
In its rebirth, Rome also attracted the most famous artists of the day: there was no lack of commissions or money to pay for them. For the frescoes (later destroyed by humidity) in the church of San Giovanni Laterano, Gentile da Fabriano received an annual compensation of three hundred florins during this period. Even the great Masaccio was drawn there, only to die of plague at the unacceptably early age of twenty-seven. So compelling was the allure of Rome reborn that the temptation to go there could not be resisted by Pisanello, Fra Angelico, and Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, among many others. Even though Florence retained its cultural supremacy for a while longer, Rome was rapidly becoming a formidable contender.
In undertaking this renovation, of course, the pope received considerable help. He soon realized that for his restoration project—one of the greatest the world has ever known—to succeed, the pride and the purse of the prelates and cardinals who had returned to Rome, each with his retinue of secretaries, chamberlains, pages, and most importantly (as far as we are concerned) cooks, had to be properly massaged and squeezed. His tactic was extraordinarily astute. After spending the astronomical sum of fifty thousand florins to refurbish the roof and portico of St. Peter’s, he obliged all the “princes of the church” to restore their titular churches, expecting of course that each of them would try to outdo the others.12 Once this was underway, there was no stopping the competition, nor was there anyone who was interested in doing so. In just a few decades, the courts of the Roman cardinals began to rival that of the Vicar of Christ. Any trace of asceticism vanished: the cardinals’ hedonist dispositions often blurred the line between their own lives and the kind of life they recommended for good Christians, a discrepancy that would in short time fuel the reformist zeal of Martin Luther. They excelled in their patronage of architecture, and also in what today we would call entertainment—otherwise known as gastronomy, or rather the art of throwing banquets.13
It is in this context that the momentous and critical contributions of Maestro Martino and Platina become discernible, for their gastronomic approach stood in stark contrast to the practices of Renaissance conviviality in which eating and feasting assumed primarily a political function.
To illustrate the pomp and circumstance of the banquet tradition, let us turn to the Renaissance chronicler Bernardino Corio (1459–1519?), who in his Historia di Milano described in great detail a fabulous feast held in Rome in 1473.14 It was a true feat of gastronomic delirium prepared for the guests of Pietro Riario, cardinal of San Sisto, “who could himself be called a true pope”15 (the host was not his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, as is sometimes reported). The banquet was held in honor of Leonora, daughter of Ferdinand I of Aragon, king of Naples, who was passing through Rome on her way from Naples to Ferrara, where she was to meet her future husband, Ercole I d’Este.
Writing in the service of the Sforzas, who were involved with the cardinal in dubious political machinations, Corio had to persuade his readers that the pope was an easily expendable character, ready to abdicate and leave the Holy See to his nephew Riario. The Sforzas went out of their way to divulge this “secret” piece of information, which, however false it may have been, nonetheless resulted in harm: the cardinal died in 1474, probably poisoned, and Galeazzo Maria Sforza was murdered on December 26, 1476, by three young men who dreamed of freeing Milan from the tyranny of the Sforzas as Brutus and Cassius had done for Rome.
The combined display of theatrical pomp and culinary extravagance spells out in no uncertain terms the amphitryon’s plan to outshine whatever splendor the pope might have been capable of mustering. Since we cannot possibly recount in every detail this truly sumptuous event, in which admiration for food was more important than its consumption, let us resort to an abridged description of the banquet by Claudio Benporat, the brevity of which doesn’t lessen the visual, auditory, and even gustatory experience of the original:
The banquet . . . took place in a great hall [in the cardinal’s residence at Piazza Santi Apostoli] where there was a sideboard with twelve shelves on which gem-studded trays of silver and gold were featured. Two tables covered by four tablecloths were prepared in the middle of the hall: the first was for the seven nobles of the highest station while the other table was for the lesser among them.
In accordance with the custom in usage since the beginning of the century, the guests were still standing when they were served a meal that included trays of candied fruit covered with gold leaves and accompanied by painted glasses of malvasia. Once the guests were seated, musicians with horns and pipes announced the next dishes, which were divided into four services in correspondence with the four tablecloths that covered the tables.
The first service combined pork livers, blancmange, meats with relish, tortes and pies, salt-cured pork loin and sausage, roast veal, kid, squab, chicken, rabbit . . . whole roasted large game, and fowl dressed in their skin or feathers. Next came golden tortes and muscat pears in cups.16
And this was just the first service! At the risk of causing the reader stomach discomfort, the following is an unexpurgated list of the foods brought forth in the remaining three services (at the end of each the tablecloth would be removed, and the guests washed their hands because they served themselves from communal trays and forks were not in use): fried dough shaped like pine cones, smothered with honey and rose water; silver-wrapped lemons in sugary syrup; relishes; pies; sturgeon and lamprey; aspics; more tortes; junket drowning in white wine; Catalan-style chicken; green blancmange; stewed veal; mutton and roebuck; suckling pig; capon; and duck and black and sour cherries macerated in Tyrian wine. And dulcis in fundo: ices, almonds, coriander seeds, anise seeds, cinnamon, and pine nuts.
But the best gauge of the feast’s unparalleled choreography is Corio’s own mouth-watering description. He devoted great attention to the coperti, or “covers”: that is, the buns distributed throughout the table and wrapped in gold and silver leaves featuring the coats of arms of the host and guest families (but also that of the Sforzas). And he concluded his portrait of the convivium with the following flourish:
[There were brought forth] confectionery victuals, three of the Labors of Hercules, that is, the Lion, the Boar, and the Bull, and each one of them was in the shape of a common man. But first Hercules, nude, with the skin of a Nemean lion and with stars on his shoulder to signify holding up the Sky; and following the labors of Hercules, grand confectionery castles were brought forth complete with towers and fortifications inside, and an infinite number of confectioneries in all different manners; and these castles with confectioneries were plundered and tossed down from the tribunal into the square to impress those present; and it seemed a great storm. Then there was brought forth a large confectionery serpent on a mountain, very lifelike. And then a dish of wild men. Afterward, perhaps ten great ships with sails and ropes, all of them confectioneries and filled with nuggets of sugar. While still eating, there was also brought forth a Mountain, from which a man jumped out, who acted very impressed with the banquet, and he said some words, but not everyone understood them.
Of course, the serpent on the mountain is an allusion to the Sforza family (this image had appeared in the Milanese coat of arms from the times of the Visconti family). There is also a transparent homage to the house of Este, whose future was in the hands of Leonora’s husband, Ercole (Hercules) I.
To conclude, let’s quote again from Benporat’s description of the interludes between services:
In perfect harmony with the humanist culture of the century, the performance [reflects] the event to be celebrated, the riches of the guests, and the foods served to the dining companions. The scenes are inspired thus . . . by ancient Greek figures of mythology and the use of the myths and stories of Atlas, Hippomenes, Perseus, Orpheus, Hercules with Deianira, Jason with Medea, the battle between Hercules and the centaurs, the loves of Bacchus and Ariadne. And all of it was enhanced with songs and music, and by the best wines served in golden cups.17
But not all of the princes of the Church, who had been honing their social skills (not to mention their aesthetic and sybaritic inclinations) in Rome for fifty years, were as ambitious as Riario. Their titles were often acquired through the ready money of their families for purely political motives. The power conferred upon them by their cardinal’s hat must have been an abundant source of gratification. The ample margin of tolerance they enjoyed went hand in hand with their opportunity to ask for and obtain favors from a pontiff, who, ruling over them like a feudal lord, might need their support (and their resources) at any given moment. This fact clearly made the pope sensitive and vulnerable to their requests. In the final analysis, and no matter what the specific circumstances, their exchanges were the object of a refined semiosis that went far beyond the moralistically defined margins of adulation. Cardinals could even convince the pope to close his eyes when it came to questions of religious orthodoxy. No matter how grandiose these feasts may have been, they were often deplorably unsuited for the political ends intended by their architects.
Well aware of this, many of them preferred the company of a small number of carefully chosen souls inclined exclusively to refined entertainment. In fact, their mode of conviviality marked a fundamental break from the art of the banquet in previous generations. As food historian Massimo Montanari has shown, the traditional notion of the banquet called for victuals to be displayed before being served: the spectacle of the meal as an outward expression of power was the primary motive of the banquet. And in some cases, Montanari goes on to explain, the hosts did not even consume the foods they showed off. For the emerging generation food was instead an opportunity to explore the depths of one’s own culture and imagination. The new ecclesiastical gourmet was undoubtedly aware that excellence was by no means a right, but rather a privilege attained by guiding desire according to the demands of critical awareness.
The markedly ostentatious character of banquets, writes Montanari, exemplifying his assessment with the description of the Pantagruelian meal served in Bologna in 1487 by Giovanni II Bentivoglio (to celebrate the marriage of his son Annibale to Lucrezia d’Este), reveals the “progressive introspection and closure of the dominant classes. . . . The table was no longer a place of social cohesion centered on the leader, but rather one of separation and exclusion: a few were invited to participate; the rest were left to watch.”18 It is equally clear that the point was not so much to show the plebs the insurmountable distance separating them from the rich and powerful (an unfortunate given of the times), but rather to humiliate somewhat their equals: individuals, families, and clans who were also rich and powerful but not quite so much as the hosting party was or pretended to be.
By contrast, for Platina and his circle of associates and patrons, intimate gatherings were de rigueur, and the cooks they employed, chief among them Maestro Martino, were meant to prepare real food for real people.19 On the one hand, Platina was a Humanist (definitely with a capital H), envisioning every aspect of his life as an expression of Renaissance ideals, including the manner in which he dined, the persons with whom he broke bread, and the foods that were prepared. No dish was served at his table casually: each recipe and formula had a unique place in the humanist culinary hierarchy. Some foods had symbolic meaning; others were intended to balance the humors of his fellow revelers, and, indeed, as is clear from even a cursory reading of his On Right Pleasure and Good Health, Platina was keenly aware of his companions’ physical condition as well as their personal likes and dislikes.
On the other hand, Platina was shrewd at political jockeying. Perhaps by pure instinct, perhaps through keen observation of the world around him, he chose his means with judicious skill, although not with unerring acumen. In addition to his renown as a humanist, his culinary expertise must have helped to open the doors of the illustrious and powerful who sought to surround themselves with the greatest artists, thinkers, conversationalists, and gourmets of their day.
Platina’s association with Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga was typical in this respect, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that it was typical also of his relationship with other cardinals, such as Giovanni Bessarione (1402–72; a Greek humanist who attempted to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism). It was through Bessarione’s mediation that Platina was able to obtain a coveted seat in the College of Abbreviators, a prestigious appointment that lifted him from his chronic state of penury.20 Platina also believed (wrongly, as we shall see) that his powerful friends would shield him from the ill will of Pius II’s successor, Paul II (Venetian Cardinal Pietro Barbo, elected in 1464), who despised humanist culture and ultimately abolished the college: in his opinion, the Platinas of the world were nothing but reborn pagans and moral degenerates.
But Platina’s most powerful protector remained Cardinal Gonzaga, through whom he was introduced to the legendary household of the famous and powerful Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, patriarch of Aquilea and employer—as previously mentioned—of Maestro Martino. It is highly probable that Platina was a member of Cardinal Gonzaga’s entourage when the latter stayed with Trevisan in Albano (just south of Rome) in June 1463. This summer month of ricreatione may have been the occasion on which Platina obtained his copy of Martino’s book.21
Born in Venice and educated in medicine at the University of Padua, Ludovico Trevisan (1402–65) was the son of a medical doctor. He became physician to Cardinal Condulmer, who would later, as Pope Eugenius IV, appoint him patriarch of Aquilea (where he would set foot only briefly, if at all) and titular cardinal of San Lorenzo in Damaso, where he built his legendary residence.22 It was through excellent military service (like his presence at Anghiari) and his Machiavellian ruthlessness that he rose to power.23 After the feared Cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi was jailed and subsequently died in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Trevisan was charged with collecting the spoils from the former’s loyalists: the fulfillment of this perilous duty was fundamental in the restoration of papal authority in Rome, and it brought him immense notoriety.24 By 1455, he had been appointed admiral of the Papal Fleet by Calixtus III, and he was the mastermind of a crucial victory over the Turks at Mytilene in 1457. At the Congress of Mantua in 1459, he opposed Pius II’s plans for a crusade against the Turks, and he would also be remembered for his vehement—if not self-serving—opposition to the expansion of the number of cardinals.25 The election of Venetian Cardinal Pietro Barbo, his archrival, as Pope Paul II in 1464 is generally believed to have accelerated Trevisan’s death the following year.26
But the brilliance of his political career did not in any way efface his fame as an epicure. Indeed, his love for the good life earned him the title “Cardinal Lucullus.”27 Trevisan was very well known and admired for his love of entertaining. His home in San Lorenzo in Damaso was the San Simeon of his day: there he collected unusual animals—like white asses, Indian hens, lapdogs, and goldfinches—and cultivated rare varietals of fruit that he obtained from his friends and from purveyors of foods.28
Trevisan’s earthly splendor is described indirectly in David Chambers’s essay “The Housing Problems of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga,” wherein he examines the young cardinal’s difficulty in procuring suitable housing for himself and his entourage:
Cardinals in the fifteenth century were expected to live in a style of magnificence tempered by decorum. It was not a simple formula to put into practice even at the mundane level of setting up a house, finding a seemly place of residence in Rome. . . . For just a moderate magnificence, to maintain a household of the minimum numbers which propriety demanded, accommodation could be expensive, but there was no regular system which provided cardinals with palaces or apartments in Rome as of right.29
Seeking to associate her cardinal son with a great personage of the Curia, Barbara of Brandenburg wrote in 1461 to the Mantuan ambassador in Rome, Bartolomeo Bonatto, that “it would be beneficial for Francesco to live near to Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan . . . , Apostolic Chamberlain.”30
A prominent member of Francesco’s escort, Guido dei Nerli, wrote to Barbara, insinuating that the young prelate should indeed set his sights on the palace of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan: “My most illustrious Lady,” wrote dei Nerli, “the Patriarch wears the crown in all things. His house truly seems like Paradise.”31 It would not be until 1467 (two years after Trevisan’s death), following many mishaps (including several plague scares), that Francesco would finally obtain the house he so coveted.32
We know with relative certainty that Trevisan “took a paternal interest in Francesco Gonzaga after the latter’s arrival in Rome” and that Trevisan was “among those exciting Francesco to Christian belligerency.”33 Along with the many exotic gifts he bestowed on Francesco, Trevisan must have exhorted him to cultivate his skills in entertaining and to excel in his hospitality when charged with papal visits.
So obsessed was Trevisan with obtaining the finest and most unusual foods and wines for his guests that his requests for certain delicacies could easily take precedence over discussing politics in his correspondence—even when the very balance of power in Italy was at stake. After no less than three missives to his friend and putative son Onorato Caetani, lord of Sermoneta, in which he requests fish—the “finest possible”—for a dinner he will host on the occasion of Pope Nicholas V’s visit to San Lorenzo in Damaso, Trevisan mentions almost as an afterthought a political event of epochal importance:
As of this day, we have written three letters to your Magnificence, which we have scribed with our own hands and which were delivered to you by your own secretary who was here. Strangely, we have had no response from you. Now, for this reason, we are writing you again and imploring you to provide us, by way of your fishmongers, with two portions of the finest sea fish possible, and we would prefer that all of it arrive by next Monday because the seventeenth day of the month, which will be a Tuesday, is the day of the visit [of the pope] to San Lorenzo in Damaso. So we are imploring you, if possible, to serve us with these two portions of fish and we will certainly pay the fishmongers however you advise us. And may it please you that you respond by the same messenger to this letter. We believe that you have heard how Francesco [Sforza] has obtained Milan. Otherwise, no news. Rome, March 10, 1450.34
In light of the fact that Francesco Sforza’s conquest of Milan was one of the great turning points in the balance of power in northern Italy, and that a mercenary like Sforza had transformed his career as soldier into that of one of the most sophisticated rulers of the Renaissance, the fish must have been very good indeed. According to Gelasio Caetani, annotator of the letters and descendent of the correspondent, they are supposed to have come from the famous fisheries of Fogliano in Friuli.35
It’s no wonder, then, that Trevisan also sought the services of the greatest cook of his times, Maestro Martino. But in order for us also to find Martino, we must return—albeit briefly—to our Platina.
Profoundly wounded in his pride as both a humanist and a consumer of fine foods by the sudden loss of his gainful employment and his subsequent return to the poverty he thought he had escaped once and for all, Platina reacted so intensely that the man who had made him redundant thought it best to lock him up in the recently renovated Castel Sant’Angelo.36 There was nothing Platina’s friends could do to ameliorate the pope’s disciplinary measures—except to nurture Platina when, upon his release, he “threatened” to leave Rome, never to return. Nor was his ill fortune over just yet. He had hardly begun to savor his newly acquired freedom when the rumor spread that members of the Roman Academy, of which he was a leading figure, and its founder, Julius Pomponius Laetus,37 were conspiring to assassinate the reigning Vicar of Christ, whom they regarded as the principal obstacle to the realization of their republican program.
Platina would soon be arrested again, and he was tried together with a number of his fellow academicians. They were all turned loose eventually, thanks to a long display of the legal ingenuity of their counselors and Platina’s writing of a number of epistles—not exactly the most dignified examples of apologetic literature—in which he asked the Holy Father’s forgiveness, not because he had actually attempted to harm him in any way, as it were, but merely for not having done enough to shield His Holiness from his enemies.38
Platina had fallen from grace as many times as he had risen again, and in the end Paul II granted clemency to nearly all the members of the Roman Academy. Three more years would elapse before this pope could join his predecessors in their eternal reward, during which time Platina stayed in Rome and enjoyed a sort of guarded freedom. But then Sixtus IV was elected pope in 1471: a spendthrift, an incorrigible nepotist, but also a wholehearted admirer of antiquity, the discovery of which, as well as the cult attached to it, was proving to be more and more exciting and had in fact reached the point of no return. Platina thus thought it advisable to dedicate to the new pope his Lives of the Popes, the first systematic survey of the papacy.39 This good deed landed him a remarkable job and the privilege of painterly immortality: he would be portrayed by Renaissance master Melozzo da Forlì (1438–94) in a fresco that can still be viewed today in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (the Vatican Picture Gallery).40
But what made Platina a citizen of high stature in the republic of gastronomy was his On Right Pleasure and Good Health, a text that outright cannibalized Maestro Martino’s The Art of Cooking. Not only does this text shed light on the history of Renaissance nourishment and dietary habits, but it is also an indispensable tool for learning about the “card-carrying” members of what the author liked to refer to as the contubernium pomponianum (the group of humanists who gathered around Pomponius Laetus and his Roman Academy), in terms of both their cultural formation and their guiding philosophies.41 By reading Platina’s pages, for instance, we become aware of the novel attention that this fellowship (young prelates, scribes and secretaries, papal abbreviators, etc.) paid to the figure of the cook, who, if possible, “should be completely like the man from Como [Martino], the prince of cooks of our age, from whom I have learned the art of cooking food.”42
Inscribed to Cardinal Bartolomeo Roverella, title of San Clemente in Rome and archbishop of Ravenna (1445–76), whose powerful patronage of Platina helped to make On Right Pleasure and Good Health the first gastronomic treatise ever printed, the book was begun sometime before the author’s incarceration in Castel Sant’Angelo in 1464, as Platina himself declares in an undated (and most revealing) letter to Cardinal Giacomo Ammannati Piccolomini:
Before my [first] prison term I wrote this little book, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, which I commend to your generosity, striving eagerly to win a patron for it.
As you are aware, it deals with the business of all the food merchants, and creeps through the taverns, and is, therefore a greasy and sordid [emphasis added] subject. But he who is versed in cookery is not far removed from genius, since the meals that are to be concocted are largely a matter of ingenious composition, and, therefore, he must be proficient in it; he who takes upon himself this work as a profession must inform himself. Of course in the last analysis, it appears to me a dry and unpolished subject, and therefore, I am cleaning it of imperfections [emphasis added] which, I have recognized, must be eliminated without fail. Surely, because good judgment in these matters will mostly benefit the superiors, I place this book, however dreadful (it certainly takes a chance with inspiring the ingenious ones, if you like) in your hands for your kind consideration and criticism, hesitatingly and also conditionally.43
There is no known response from Piccolomini, but it is fair to surmise that the project—which Platina perversely called “greasy and sordid” and “unpolished”—may not have appealed to him. Yet the idea epitomized by the perfect title, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, is nothing short of a stroke of genius. We must assume that Roverella’s intellectual acumen was, at least in this case, a tad sharper than Piccolomini’s.
Although it is customary to translate honesta (as in De honesta voluptate) as “right,” a more accurate rendering of the original might be “permissible,”44 that is, On Permissible Pleasure and Good Health, since the term challenged the ascetic prohibitions that for so long and under so many circumstances had doomed attempts to expand the notion of food beyond mere necessary sustenance.
The reorientation of the cultural axis that was taking place in Platina’s times, on the other hand, enabled him to approach his topic from a philosophical angle, recording his findings under a rubric that combined hedonism with health, according to which Epicurus (whose writings were now available directly, instead of through secondary sources) and the arch–medical doctor Hippocrates ate at the same table.45 It is thus crucial to emphasize the dietetic concerns indicated by the second segment of the title—et valetudine.
High-ranking officers of the Church, who were supposed to frown on culturally sanctioned pleasures that enhanced the well-being of the body, were among the first to welcome the new perspective introduced by Platina. The moral issues were nullified by the medical concerns, and no one would ever object to remedies that, frankly, had never tasted better.46 A savory, well-balanced meal could then be regarded as preliminary to a fine practice of intellectual pursuits. Openly contradicting the gargantuan extravaganzas of the guzzlers, gluttons, and profligates that ecclesiastical agencies had successfully dismissed for centuries, this notion canceled out the de facto connection between bodily pleasure and sin, introducing the far more sophisticated belief that culinary pleasure, on a par with pleasures of all kinds, was the ultimate goal of artistic research. The culinary arts, in other words, could be placed alongside architecture, conversation, music, war, diplomacy, politics, painting, pottery making, wood carving . . . and whatever else you might want to add to the list. On Right Pleasure and Good Health, writes Emilio Faccioli in the introduction to a recent Italian edition, is not
a simple manual, nor is it a compendium . . . but rather a systematic treatment of the art of cooking, dietetics, culinary hygiene, the ethics of eating, the pleasures of the table—all things that had been substantively illustrated in writings of previous eras, although in singular instances. . . . It is a treatment organized according to a criterion that alternated technical prescriptions with moral ones relative to nutrition, or to the contextuality of the ones and the others together with observations on the nature of various foods, their nutritional and curative properties, as well as their use and their side effects.47
Notwithstanding his great familiarity with the culture of the classical world and the superb ability displayed by the author in quoting from its literature (see, for instance, his comparison of the ripening of a mulberry to the blushing of the Egyptian girl Thisbe, delicately lifted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses),48 the fact that a humanist, and a famous one at that, spent time writing about food raised more than eyebrows. His choice of pastime inspired some more or less malicious epigrams, like the following one by Jacopo Sannazaro:
On the character, customs, life and death of the popes;
You used to write. A sharp history lesson it was.
Now, Platina, you write tractates on cooking millet
For the popes themselves to eat.49
Nor were Platina’s critics only Renaissance contemporaries. More than a century later, in his Ragguagli di Parnaso (Advertisements from Parnassus), Traiano Boccalini imagined that the philosopher Agostino Nifo da Sessa entered a shop where Platina was rolling pie dough and wrested the rolling pin from his hand to beat him with it.50 This act, as da Sessa later recounts to Apollo in the book, was a way to avenge himself for Platina’s slandering of da Sessa as “one of those useless persons, who delighting in gluttony, study nothing but how to eat well.” Despite Platina’s apology and attempt to clear himself (from what he considers a false accusation), Apollo reprimands the humanist, telling him how shameful it is for a philosopher to be caught visiting a food shop, “for the arms of men of honour, and of such a philosopher as is my beloved Nifo, ought to be seen in libraries, not in cooks shops, where none but those of smell-feasts ought to hang; for, there is no fouler defect nor vice, than to study how to please the palate, and to make the base and shameful profession to hunt after good victuals.”51
Like Traiano Boccalini, other detractors of Platina persisted in decrying him as a glutton. But their allegations would not have held up in a court of law. In fact, even a cursory reading of On Right Pleasure and Good Health reveals how, in the intimate relationship between “pleasure” and “health,” the compass leans more toward medicine than toward crapulence. But most of all, the interrelationship between these two concepts provided a perspective by which the Renaissance man could see himself in a positive light, fully the peer of the ancients, in his radical return to Epicureanism. It was perhaps Platina himself who, in his dedicatory letter to Roverella, best expressed the Renaissance gourmet’s excusatio, responding to his accusers and perfectly illustrating his ratio scribendi:
[Some] upbraid me about food as if I were a gluttonous and greedy man and as if I were proffering instruments of lust and, as it were, spurs to intemperate and wicked people. Would that they, like Platina, would use moderation and frugality either by nature or instruction; we would not see today so many so-called cooks in the city, so many gluttons, so many dandies, so many parasites, so many most diligent cultivators of hidden lusts and recruiting officers for gluttony and greed.
I have written about food in imitation of that excellent man, Cato, of Varro, the most learned of all, of Columella, of C. Matius, and of Caelius Apicius.52 I would not encourage my readers to extravagance, those whom I have always in my writing deterred from vice. I have written to help any citizen seeking health, moderation, and elegance of food rather than debauchery, and have also shown to posterity that in this age of ours men had the talents at least to imitate, if not to equal, our ancestors in any kind of [writing].53
Although he shows some humility—or is it false modesty?—in sizing himself up in relation to classical culture in his last sentence above, when it comes to gastronomy he does not hesitate to pass a verdict in favor of the moderns. Indeed, on the subject of blancmange, a recipe that he lifted nearly verbatim from Martino, Platina clearly states his preference for this condiment over any proposed by Apicius: “Even if we are surpassed by [the ancients] in nearly all arts, nevertheless in taste alone we are not vanquished.”54
Judging from the frenzy of reprints that immediately followed the editio princeps, there is no doubt that the book struck a chord at the right time: it was reprinted in Venice in 1475, 1498, 1503, and 1517; in Louvain and Cividale del Friuli, 1480; in Bologna, 1499; in Strasbourg, 1517; in Cologne, 1529, 1537; in Paris, 1530; in Lyon and in Basel, 1541.
Of course Platina, just like his fellow humanists, wrote in Latin, a language in which they probably even dreamed. But a good number of readers trained in the redignified profession of cooking needed some help in deciphering his text. As a consequence, the book’s life was extended in an even greater number of translations: into Italian in 1487, 1494, 1508, and 1516; into German: 1530, 1533, 1536, 1542; and into French: Lyon, 1505, 1528, 1548, 1571, and Paris, 1509, 1539, 1559, 1567. The extremely wide diffusion of the work into the major languages of Europe is testimony to the primacy of the Italian culinary canon throughout the sixteenth century. Consequently, the myriad translations into French (the language that would definitively replace Italian as the European koine by the eighteenth century) played a clear role in the future Francophilia of European cuisine.55 Undoubtedly, Caterina de Medici’s presence in France, as well as that of her cooks with their advanced technique, also reinvigorated French cuisine with an infusion of Italian know-how and tastes around the same time that Platina’s book was becoming the first bestseller in cookery book history.56
Perilously balanced between gustatory enthusiasm and his claims of Franciscan sobriety, Platina sought to demonstrate that he truly practiced what he preached, maintaining that his friends—Julius Pomponius Laetus, above all—were people who shunned the idea of gulping down peacocks and pheasants, “dishes of distinguished people, and especially of those whom not virtue and hard work but fortune and the rashness of men [had] raised, by luck alone, from the depths.”57 They were perfectly content to dine on a few meager vegetables. Whether or not these observations are an echo of the theory whereby different social categories are endowed with varying degrees of digestive and metabolic capabilities is a matter of pure speculation: can it not be proven that there are noble and rich stomachs suited for beef steak, while there are poor stomachs at best able to digest beans, as asserted in certain socially questionable regimina sanitatis of the Middle Ages and in the fourteenth-century De sanitatis custodia, a dietary guide scribed by the renowned doctor Giacomo Albini?58 Speculative as this might be, Platina’s unbridled fondness for onions, garlic, and leeks is attested to by at least two witnesses, one of them rather conspicuous.
The first was Platina’s detractor Giovanni Antonio Campano, from whom we learn that our author was unable to sing because his mouth was full of leeks and his breath reeked of onions: “Calvus, aricini sordent qui prandia porri/Laetum nec bulbos ore obulente carit.”59 The second was no less a charismatic personage than Leonardo da Vinci. Among the many curious aspects of Leonardo’s personality was the fact that he did not eat meat. This was so remarkable for the times that Florentine traveler Andrea Corsali related in a letter to Duke Giuliano de’ Medici, “Certain infidels called Guzzarati [Hindus] . . . do not feed upon anything that contains blood, nor do they permit among them any injury be done to any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci.”60 (Aesthetic considerations aside, might it be inferred that the protracted execution of the fresco at Santa Maria delle Grazie [1495–98] could be attributed to the artist’s embarrassment before the spectacle of saints dining on lamb’s flesh?) Indeed, for Leonardo, meat eaters were on a par with cannibals: man, he wrote, was not the king of animals but rather the king of beasts, whose gullet was the “tomb for all animals.” In a direct appeal to humankind, he asks, “Does not nature bring forth a sufficiency of simple things to produce satiety? Or if you cannot content yourself with simple things can you not by blending these together make an infinite number of compounds as did Platina and other authors who have written for epicures?”61
It is perfectly legitimate to surmise that Pomponian suppers comprised more than just arugula and chicory. The “permissible” pleasures that they pursued included, besides chicken in verjuice (so dear to Poggius’s son, Giovanni Battista), roast suckling pig, ground liver balls, sausages, partridge, veal’s brain, and kid in garlic.62 At any rate, there are a great number of purely vegetarian dishes in Platina’s recipe collection. And this, in and of itself, was an entirely novel concept. In the Middle Ages it was the poor who ate vegetables exclusively, mostly in the form of sops. Now, instead, the dietetic benefits of eating vegetables came to the foreground. Vegetables were recommended for those who wished to keep their minds free by not overburdening the stomach. But it was not just a select group of humanists for whom vegetables were a central part of the diet. With their cult of chard, parsnips, and parsley, grains, legumes, and sweet fruits prepared in savory dishes, the Italians caught all of Europe by surprise, overturning the old medieval preconception of meat for the rich and cabbage for the poor. As late as the end of the sixteenth century, English traveler Robert Dallington would write:
Concerning herbage, I shall not need to speake, but that it is the most general food of the Tuscan, at whose table Sallet is as ordinary, as salt at ours; for being eaten of all sorts of persons and at all times of the yeare: of the riche because they have to spare; of the poor, because they cannot choose; of many religious because of their vow, of most others because of their want.63
Nor we should we neglect the writings of Giacomo Castelvetro, who after fleeing to England to escape “the furious bite of the cruel and pitiless Roman Inquisition,” decided to teach his hosts the virtues of the many greens that were consumed in Italy. The English had actually begun to appreciate them in limited numbers, but often only as means “to beautify their gardens.” Castelvetro’s Brieve racconto di tutte le radici di tutte l’erbe e di tutti i frutti che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano (Brief Account of the Origins of All the Herbs and Fruits, Raw or Cooked, That Are Eaten in Italy) is not only a small literary gem, but also a precious sign confirming the influence exerted by Platina’s work on the dietetic customs of Europe more than a hundred years after its initial publication.64
Before taking leave of Platina and giving into the allure of Maestro Martino himself, it is important to note that the Cremonese humanist was unable to accomplish in Latin what his source had triumphantly achieved in the vernacular tongue. Platina’s humanist Latin lacked the lexical flexibility inaugurated by Martino. For example, where the latter discusses distinct types of cherries—for example, cornel cherry (cornioli), black cherry (cerase negre), and sour cherry (visciole)—the former is forced to subsume all kinds under one heading, cerasia, specifying that “some are tart, some sour, some sweet.”65 Indeed, the all-encompassing (and still unfinished) Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) cites Martino’s text, for example, as the first registered appearance of the term rosselli, or rose apples (see the recipe for rose-apple sauce, on page 000).
Of course, “linguistic innovator” is only one of the many titles accumulated by the Carneades and prince of cooks, who, after such a long excursus, finally takes center stage.
The extraordinary importance of Maestro Martino’s The Art of Cooking becomes crystal clear when his text is viewed as the cornerstone of the culinary edifice built by Platina. To begin with, all but 10 of the 250 recipes in Platina’s book (books 6–10) belong to Maestro Martino. They are often listed in the same order in which they originally appeared and are nothing more than verbatim translations. An example of this is the recipe for red chickpea torte (see page 000). In Martino, the recipe reads as follows:
Cook a libra of red chickpeas, crush well, and together with their broth66 pass through a very thick stamine; and get a libra of well-peeled, blanched almonds that have been very well crushed, because they should not be passed through a stamine; and together with the almonds, crush two ounces of raisins and three or four dried figs; likewise an ounce and a half of slightly crushed pine nuts, not ground, adding some sugar, rose water, cinnamon, and ginger, mixing all these things well together. To make it thicken, incorporate some fine starch or some pike roe, as above,67 and cook it with a crust on the bottom; and when it appears to you to be nearly done cooking, top with some sugar and some rose water, and apply heat again from above from a high flame. Note that this torte should be short.
In Platina, as such:
Crush red chick-peas, well cooked in their own juice and with a bit of rose water. When they are crushed, pass through a sieve into a bowl. Add to this and mix a pound of almonds so ground up that it is no task to pass them through a sieve, two ounces of raisins, three or four figs crushed at the same time, besides an ounce of semipounded pine nuts, as much sugar and rose water as is enough, and the same amount of cinnamon and ginger. When they are mixed, spread in a well-oiled pan with a lower crust. Some add starch or pike eggs so that this pie becomes firmer. When it is almost cooked, you will make it browner by putting fire above it. It should be thin and covered with sugar and rose water. This food helps only the liver and stomach [emphasis added].68
Platina’s only contribution here is the medical advice added at the end of the recipe.69
The modern revival of interest in Maestro Martino and his relationship to Platina began in 1927, when Joseph Dommers Vehling (1879–1950), American chef and hotelier, gentleman, scholar, and bibliophile, purchased a copy of Martino’s manuscript from an Italian antiquarian. In the October 1932 issue of Hotel Bulletin and the Nation’s Chefs, of which he was editor, he published a notice of his discovery that the author was indeed the very same Martino whom Platina had acknowledged as his source. He would later develop this piece, “Martino and Platina: Exponents of Renaissance Cookery,” into his major oeuvre, Platina and the Rebirth of Man (1941).
The manuscript, which for many years was the only known text attributed to the Renaissance cook, was eventually donated to the Library of Congress (where it still is kept) in 1941. In the 1930s, Vehling lectured on ancient and Renaissance cookery at Cornell University (in 1936, he published the first English translation of Apicius’s De re coquinaria, which, together with his Platina and the Rebirth of Man, represents a great contribution to the study of historical gastronomy). Scholars and food historians are greatly indebted to the enthusiasm and entrepreneurship of Mr. Vehling, who nearly singlehandedly restored Platina’s name to the annals of food scholarship and history after centuries of denigration and neglect. His library of rare culinary tractates, which includes more than four hundred titles, including two editions of On Right Pleasure and Good Health (one of them, the first printing, from 1494, and a later 1516 edition), is housed at the Kroch Library at Cornell.
As to the specific circumstances under which Platina and Maestro Martino may have turned a casual acquaintance into a fruitful friendship, it is not implausible to surmise that the cook was himself a member of the Roman Academy, as Claudio Benporat has boldly suggested—if not a full member, then at least a prominent fellow traveler. From a letter sent to the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Sforza, by the duke’s ambassador to the Roman Curia, Augustinus de Rubeis (Agostino de Rossi), we are given to understand that the society was, in the sender’s opinion, nothing but a den of iniquity: “They [the Pomponians] are of the opinion that there is no other world than that in which we live; they believe that once the body dies so does the soul and that nothing has any value except the enjoyment of all kinds of pleasure and delight.” The academy was made up of “scholars, youths, poets, and philosophers . . . including Calimacho from Venice, secretary to the most reverend cardinal of Ravenna; Glaucho Condulmero, also from Venice; Petreo, secretary to the most reverend cardinal of Pavia,” and many others. And it did not discourage socially less powerful individuals from increasing its ranks, which “grew with persons of every station, and for the most part, with servants of cardinals and prelates.”70
Given Platina’s expressions of enthusiasm for the exceptional culinary dexterity and artistic genius of Maestro Martino, it is also plausible to allow not only that he may have occasionally shared with him the sobriety of the Pomponian table, but also that he had ample opportunity to enjoy the lavish meals that Martino prepared for his master and his master’s friends (we know of at least one occasion, as we’ve noted above, where they spent up to a month together).
Much more elusive is the question of where, when, and how Maestro Martino was first engaged by Cardinal Trevisan. No document thus far has emerged that defines the temporal contours of their association. The matter is further complicated by the epithet on the title page of the Riva del Garda manuscript (see Jeremy Parzen’s textual note at the end of this volume), which declares “the Eminent Master Martino di Rossi” to be a native of “the Milanese Valley of Bregna [Blenio]” and not of Como, as Platina wrote, “born to the House [Monastery] of San Martino Viduale” and “cook to the Illustrious Seigneur Gian Giacomo Trivulzio.”71
This has given rise (but little credit) to the conjecture—a term its supporters would find terribly restrictive—that there must have been two Martinos: one, the Maestro Martino from Como employed by Trevisan, and the other, the Maestro Martino de Rossi, or de Rubeis, from Blenio, employed by Trivulzio.72
The general uncertainty shadowing Maestro Martino’s biography is barely sufficient to induce a smile at the acrobatic efforts made by Aldo Bertoluzza, in his edition of the Riva del Garda manuscript, to certify the existence of a doppelganger.73 Bertoluzza pays no attention to the affinities of the codices and handles “his” document as if it were an autograph rather than a copy, which, as such, was inevitably subject to manipulation (see the textual note). Had Bertoluzza proceeded more prudently, he would have realized that the Riva del Garda manuscript is a composite of recipes taken from the tradition represented by the Library of Congress and Vatican collections, and by others gleaned from an unknown source outside the Maestro Martino tradition.
The area of influence of this rather desperate belief does not extend much beyond a gastronomic community bent on the understandable but nonetheless problematic exploitation of a jewel miraculously mounted in an otherwise anodyne crown: the Municipal Library of Riva del Garda. Regrettably, it would seem that among their ranks we might also find Giuseppe Chiesi, whose well-documented contribution, “Martino Rossi, un cuoco bleniese alla Corte Ducale” (Martino Rossi, a Cook from Blenio at the Ducal Court), outlines Martino’s years of culinary apprenticeship at the rectory of San Martino Viduale.74 It also establishes the cook’s later presence in Milan as one of many “Swiss” cooks who had traditionally migrated to the centripetal residence of the Viscontis, and later of the Sforzas, one of the greatest cultural—culinary and otherwise—centers of Renaissance Italy.75
Naturally, these laborers were Swiss only in an incipient manner, hailing as they did from very distinct areas of the canton Ticino, whose cultural profile has always been much influenced by its geographical and linguistic proximity to Milan. At the time of Maestro Martino, the valleys of both Blenio and Leventina “belonged” to the canons of the Duomo of Milan and were governed by Milanese rulers. After reversals of fortune, the political ties with the Lombard capital were definitively severed by Ludovico the Moor’s downfall during the last year of the fifteenth century,76 brought about largely by Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, who fought against him on behalf of the French king after having valiantly served under Ludovico’s father, the great Francesco Sforza himself.
The gastronomic splendor that peaked in Milan under Ludovico the Moor, together with a number of other Renaissance splendors in the fields of music, painting, architecture, engineering, and classical studies,77 had not been neglected by his predecessors, as can be inferred from the documents of the “Fondo Sforzesco,” preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Milano, and in part published recently by Grazia Rossanigo and Pier Luigi Muggiati in their hastily compiled Amandole e malvasia per uso di corte (Almonds and Malvasia Used at Court). Among these documents, fragments of letters, lists of supplies, recipes (from Maestro Martino), and dietetic observations are mysteriously juxtaposed.78 None of the Sforzas, however, relied so much—politically speaking—on entertainment and conviviality as Ludovico the Moor. Ludovico’s amphitryonic inclination was so great that in 1492 he put up some Venetian ambassadors (who were passing through Milan on their way back from a visit to the emperor) at the Tre Re, the very best hotel in town.79
While information abounds about the rich and famous, we are not totally ignorant of what was likely to be considered a good meal by a solid bourgeois of the time. If a sonetto caudato (a “tailed” sonnet, i.e., a sonnet with two quatrains and as many tercets as desired, commonly used in sixteenth-century satirical poetry) can be treated as a bona fide source of historical knowledge, this is what we learn about such a meal from Antonio Cammelli (better known as “il Pistoia”), who, for as long as he found it convenient, devoted much time and energy to singing the virtues “beyond compare” of Ludovico the Moor:
When I dined with Marco Nigrisollo,
the tablecloth was as white as snow.
The first serving was a mug
of sweet Malvasia and candied fried dough.
Then arrived the son of Tereus stuffed and roasted [i.e., fowl],
the Argus pheasant, the partridge and the quail,
and she [i.e., the sheep] who defecates the immaculate [lamb] on the hay,
and the brother with his testicles removed [mutton].
The poor souls snared in the net [more fowl]
were there, just as she who no longer washes
her muzzle in the clear water once her consort has died [the goat].
The child of the sow was also at court,
fatty in its broth, cheese, and pastry [a veal pie]
and seeds in their shells who had died in their prison [beans],
Bacchus of a thousand sorts [wines]
now flowing to the west, now to the east,
to some he seemed a dwarf, to others a giant.
Gorgeous white Ceres
was there, as was the white juice
from a sow’s teat on the aspic fronds.
Melon seeds planted in
sugar from Messina [marzipan]
were the last victuals served us.
And when the conversation was over,
The body satiated, the soul consoled,
we washed our hands in rose water.80
Pertinent information about bourgeois and aristocratic culinary practices and nutritional concerns can of course be gleaned more profitably by analyzing—as we shall soon do—the book of recipes ascribed to Maestro Martino, whose presence in Milan is confirmed by written documents.
On June 27, 1457, Francesco Sforza granted his cook permission to return to his native valley, provided that he speedily returned to the city of Milan: “Permission is granted to Maestro Martino, cook at this court, to go to the valley of Blenio for the time specified herein and then to make his return to this city.”81
Many of the briefs mentioning Martino’s family name are available, but caution is recommended in assuming that the “Rubeus de Blegnio” (cited in a littera passus, June 11, 1458, and a mandatum, January 8, 1461, signed by the duchess) and the Rosso addressed in the briefs written by the duke to his vicar at Blenio (November 6 and 7, 1460; June 18, November 9, 1461;82 November 2, 146283) are one and the same as our Maestro Martino: the names Rossi, Rosso, Rubeus de Rubeis (depending on whether the document is written in Italian or in Latin) were and still are rather frequent in those parts. Furthermore, in at least one case (November 6, 1460), the “Rubeus from this valley of ours” is explicitly called Petrus, and in yet others his professional qualification is that of a mere famiglio (servant), not that of coquus (cook).
Whether Martin or Peter, cook or lackey, they all seem to be as keen to visit their native village for the purpose of collecting monies owed to them as the duke is to have them back in the kitchen: “Rosso, our servant, carrier of this brief, is here to solicit payment of some credits of his, as well as to attend to some business which he says he has with his brother. As he cannot be away too long, I am asking you to assist him in carrying out his affairs as quickly as possible, so that he will not be detained there.”84
Assuming that the hypothetical existence of a doppelganger has been successfully brushed aside, we can now quickly address, and just as quickly dispose of, a second hypothesis, which not even its principal proponent held for very long: that Martino was first cook to Condottiere Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, and later to Patriarch Ludovico Trevisan.85 This sensational change in scene (from Milan to Rome) on the part of Martino is supposedly reported in the Hermaphroditus, a work by the celebrated and licentious poet Antonio Beccadelli, better known as the Panormite (i.e., “of Palermo,” from the Latin name of the Sicilian city, Panormos). Beccadelli writes that an “outstanding” cook (named Martino and nicknamed “Polyphemus” due to his portly stature) laments that his former master Matesilano (yet another Carneades?) has decided to avenge himself for the loss of his services: the cook’s inhumation will be carried out during a starless night and without allowing so much a single candle to be lit, despite the fact that he was one of greatest vivandiers of all times and that he showed love and appreciation for “young men keen on study.”86 Despite the fact that it would be difficult to find a portrait of Maestro Martino’s Roman life and deeds more fitting than the one provided by Beccadelli, treating this document as a reliable source of identification may be ill-advised.
To begin with, the text was composed in 1425 (or early 1426), when Trivulzio was not even a glimmer in his father’s eye (he was born around 1441).87 It assumes, moreover, a degree of fame that Maestro Martino could not have achieved by that time, unless of course he was blessed with an extraordinary and quite implausible longevity. Thus while a defection by a cook named Martino may have inspired Beccadelli, the assumption that his Martino and Maestro Martino are one and the same could be proven only with biographical evidence that we simply do not possess.
If Gian Giacomo could not be counted upon as the man behind Martino’s incipient success, the problem of how and where Martino’s reputation was established remains a haunting one.88 In this respect, it may not be inappropriate to lend a favorable ear to Emilio Montorfano’s speculative but hardly far-fetched reconstruction of the cook’s early career.
Uncertain, as he confesses to be, about Martino’s age “at the time of his leaving his valley” and suggesting, however, that “it may have occurred, quite plausibly, when he was in his ‘advanced teens,’{hrs}” Montorfano suggests that his tenure with Trevisan might date as far back as 1439, when the latter was made patriarch of Aquilea. And the prospect of a transfer to Rome must have worked wonders to persuade the cook to accept the offer. As to the intermediate phase (Martino’s presence in Udine, which was in fact the official residence of the patriarch of Aquilea), this is what Montorfano has to say:
It is more than likely that he [Martino] may have accompanied to Udine some prelate from Como. Ever since the so-called Schism [Controversy] of the Three Chapters (in 543 b.c.e.?), the two cities had maintained close and very special ties predicated on their adoption of analogous rituals of public worship.89 This entailed the presence in Udine of members of the clergy from Como. . . . Some have even suggested that as a member of a high prelate’s retinue Martino himself may have been a man of the cloth. The fact that, in times of widespread illiteracy, he knew how to write and did so with some refinement would seem to support this hypothesis. . . . The image of a monastic Martino is not in harmony, however, with Platina’s description of their lively gastronomic exchanges.90
But we are confronted by a deplorable lack of foolproof documents, and it may be safer to assume that the hiring occurred in Rome—where, by the way, Trivulzio also resided occasionally, discharging a number of diplomatic functions on behalf of Francesco Sforza.
Claudio Benporat has proposed a sojourn of Martino, in Naples and other southern Italian locations, between 1458 and 1467.91 If these dates seem to conflict with the cook’s presence in Rome (but accompanying one’s own master on a trip or a mission cannot be considered an insurmountable obstacle), they could hardly be more fitting for the grooming of Trivulzio as a “magnifico,” and thus as a worthy employer of a celebrated cook, whose movements after Trevisan’s demise cannot be imagined with the slightest degree of certainty. So here they are, in all their puzzling splendor: the tantalizing tidbits of an impossible quest.
We have even less information regarding when the first and most significant cook of Renaissance Italy (significant for reasons that we shall soon make clear) may have reached his final destination—the locus, that is, where the torments awaiting the followers of Epicurus were tempered by the epiphanies brought about by exquisite flavors and aromas. The same thick clouds obscuring Martino’s life have for some time “protected” Martino’s text. To begin with, because of the wide and multifarious diffusion of On Right Pleasure and Good Health, the pages penned by the Swiss-Lombard cook remained exactly where he had put them: in the drawer of his writing desk.
Later on, plagiarized and expanded versions of The Art of Cooking transmitted Martino’s work into the seventeenth century. In the end these too vanished and no more news was heard of Martino until Vehling recovered the text upon which the present edition is based (again, see the textual note), identifying its author as Platina’s culinary inspiration. In the meantime, Nic[c]olò Zopino and Vincenzo Compagni, printers in Venice, published in 1517 a book entitled Epulario, by a certain Giovanni de Rosselli (who claimed to be a Frenchman). This book, which is nothing more than a nefarious compilation of a large number of Martino’s recipes, met with enormous success and was reprinted seventeen times between that year and 1750. (An English translation appeared as early as 1598, published in London by Barley, with the addition of other recipes as well: Epulario, or, the Italian banquet: wherein is shewed the maner how to dresse and prepare all kind of flesh, foules or fishes: as also to make sauces, tartes, pies, etc., after the maner of all countries: with an addition of many other profitable and necessary things/translated out of Italian into English.) In 1973, Alberto Riccio produced yet another reprint of Rosselli’s work, thus bringing the total number to eighteen. This edition, however, is barely legible and once again makes no mention of the fact that under the mendacious profile of Rosselli looms that of the patient and sagacious Maestro Martino of Como.92
Having perhaps said enough, and hopefully no more than necessary, about the cultural environment that gave rise to The Art of Cooking, all we have to do now to conclude our itinerarium ad cibum (though unfortunately not ad potum) is to highlight briefly the features that make this book an essential pivot in the structure of Western gastronomy, one that divides the history of cooking into two distinct epochs: before Martino and after Martino.
To begin with, however, it is necessary to warn against the frequently encountered, but erroneous, hypothesis that Martino was influenced by Apicius. While the rediscovery of Apicius during the Renaissance elicited a lively discussion among philologists, his work had little if any impact on the philosophy of gastronomy and culinary practices of Martino, or on the writers inspired by his example.93 Whereas Apicius declares triumphantly that with his treatment “no one at the table will recognize what he is eating,” Martino makes an effort, as we shall see below, to maintain or even enhance the unique flavor of each ingredient, applying seasonings sparingly and with great care.94
Far from being a mere list of recipes, as was custom of culinary manuals at the time, The Art of Cooking is a veritable treatise, which not only diligently divides various types of food into separate chapters (meats, broths, soups, pastas, sauces and seasonings, tortes, eggs and omelets, fish), but also reveals the secrets of the art itself, seeking to disseminate the tricks of the trade. The book identifies the number of persons that a given recipe will serve, the quantity and kinds of ingredients required, the proper method of cooking (such as whether to boil or roast), the most suitable cookware to achieve the desired results, and the time required to cook the dish.95 In short, the book describes each and every phase of the culinary process in some detail, such that it can be utilized by anyone capable of following instructions. Since instructions of this sort are standard in the cookbooks of today, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate fully the novelty of Martino’s contribution and the impression that it made on his contemporaries. In short, the Art of Cooking is to the Renaissance what August Escoffier’s Le Guide culinaire (1903) is to contemporary French cuisine.96
Prior to Martino, detailed specifications were not a feature of culinary manuals, since they were not aimed at persuading as many readers as possible of the convenience 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 the author-chefs how to produce a desired effect given a list of ingredients. And good practitioners, when confronted with formulas that were not their own, would know the right proportions and suitable procedures to execute the dish.
But there is perhaps another, more caustic 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 bravura—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. Think, for example, of Aldus Manutius’s creation of the italic typeface, an innovation that indelibly changed printing and script and created a new standard for excellence in typography.97 In any activity, cooking included, where excellence depends on a special technique of execution, “only the favorite apprentice would be made heir or shareholder,” Vehling writes in his book on Platina, “after his worthiness has been demonstrated to the master’s satisfaction—usually by the payment of a tidy sum of money, apprentice’s pay.”98
With The Art of Cooking by Maestro Martino, and even more so with Platina’s On Right Pleasure and Good Health, which carried its wisdom and flavors to the four corners of the known world, this ceased to be the case. In an age of general prosperity, at least among a wide stratum of the population in many Renaissance urban centers, the happy few were growing in number, and hence in their expectations. This occurred, quite simply, because the merchant class that replaced the medieval aristocracy (or compelled the latter to adapt to new political, economic, social, and military imperatives) had a cultural project of its own, which was predicated upon the idea that wealth (and patronage) were no longer to be measured against land and privileges inherited from God, but in terms of work done and credit extended. This meant personally accounting for one’s own deeds, which is in stark contrast with the abnegation of responsibility typical of today’s affluent society.
Seeking excellence in all fields of activity, under the pretense of “imitating” classical antiquity, was by far more rewarding to a Renaissance man than the inert archaeological protection of cultural artifacts that underpins today’s notions of sophistication. And the notion of imitation, in any event, did not preclude the enthusiastic adoption of new technologies. Taking advantage of the printing press to disseminate how-to books (and treating both classical and contemporary texts as instructional material) can be seen, for instance, as an anticipation of the modern “cybernetic” concept of “distant learning.”99 If a would-be chef could not learn from Maestro Martino as an apprentice, he could at least learn how to please his employer by studying the maestro’s treatise.100
Martino’s aim, however, was not only to compile and organize a set of specific instructions, the absence of which could lead to (and in fact did lead to) deplorable results.101 His method was that of an innovative synthesis based as much on his firm confidence as on his matchless practical knowledge. The opening paragraph of his book has the stylistic poise of a writer who has analyzed his subject and its every implication, and who can write about it with that lapidary simplicity that is ultimately the best captatio benevolentiae—similar to the opening lines of Machiavelli’s most famous treatise, Il principe (The Prince) (“How many kinds of principalities there are and how they are acquired . . .”):
The fatty meat of oxen and that of beef should be boiled, the loin should be roasted, and the haunch made into cutlets.
All the meat of mutton is good boiled, except for the shoulder, which is good roasted, as is the haunch.
Although pork meat is not healthful—no matter how you cook it—the chine should be roasted with onions, and when roasted, pork meat should be salted to taste.
All the meat of kid is good roasted or boiled, but the hind quarters are best roasted. The same holds for lamb.
Nor should Martino’s writing style be viewed exclusively as an example of consummate rhetoric. Rather, his most meaningful and lasting contribution was the establishment of a clear and reliable gastronomic lexicon. This becomes apparent when we note that his task was not simply to transliterate foreign terms into a highly specialized jargon—as is the case with bianco mangiare (blancmange), from the French blanc manger, or mirause to the Catalan mig-raust (Provençal, mieg-raust), meaning “half-cooked” or “half-roasted.” Martino’s semiotic concerns are visible, moreover, in the linguistic clarifications he offers his readers, as in the case of pitartima as a common name for coriander, or cannella as an alternate name for cinnamon.
To appreciate how “thorny” the problem of lexical norms is, consider the example of fish. While the name of any particular fish is the same in ichthyological manuals throughout the world, their commonly used names may vary from restaurant to restaurant. This normative aspect of Martino’s text, which I would argue is a sign of his socio-linguistic commitment, is summarily dismissed by Bruno Laurioux as merely the by-product of his professional service or the adoption of local customs. Thus, according to Laurioux, the fusion of Venetian linguistic elements with typically Roman denominations in the classification of fish can be explained as follows:
In the former we detect the need to accommodate the whims of the [Venetian] patriarch of Aquilea, while the latter can be explained quite obviously by the influence of the environment in which Martino worked for some time. Having been at the service of personalities as diverse as Francesco Sforza, Lodovico Trevisan, and Gian Giacomo Trivulzio must have enriched the experiences of the cook, making the various version of his work both a veritable repertory of Italian cooking at the time and a perfect example of the culinary cosmopolitanism of the end of the Quattrocento.102
If Laurioux underestimates Martino’s taxonomic contribution, he truly ignores the value of Martino’s linguistic inventiveness. Take, for example, the case of rape armate (garnished or “armored” turnips, page 000). Had Martino not given an intriguing name to what are essentially turnips, a description of the ingredients of the dish alone would probably evoke an impression of poverty and be shunned by most food devotees. Nor does Laurioux’s assessment capture the intensity of the travail gastronomy had been undergoing for quite some time in the search for a semantic tranquillity of its own. Before Martino’s The Art of Cooking, even a seemingly innocuous term such as macaroni would cause a great deal of confusion as to its meaning.
Many point to Boccaccio’s Decameron as one of the earliest places where the term macaroni appears. In the third story of the eighth day, in fact, Calandrino, whose gullibility knows no bounds, overhears a conversation (held for his benefit) in which a Florentine gentleman, Maso, maintains that certain miraculous stones (among them, one that grants invisibility to those who carry it in their pocket) are abundant in “Berlinzone, a city of the Basques, in a country called Bengodi, where the vines are tied up with sausages and a goose can be had for a farthing, with a gosling thrown into the bargain.” Moreover, Maso tells Calandrino,
in those parts [Cornucopia] there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese, on whose slopes there were people who spent their whole time making macaroni and ravioli, which they cooked in chicken broth and then cast it to the four winds, and the faster you could pick it up, the more you got of it. . . .
Seeing that Maso was saying this with a completely straight face, the simple-minded Calandrino took every word of it as gospel, and he said: “It’s too far away for me, then; but if it were nearer, I can assure you that one of these days I’d come with you, so as to see all that macaroni tumbling down, and feed my face on it.103
Some debates have arisen over the nature of the mythical food macaroni, and culinary historians, as well as philologists, have offered evidence that it may not have been macaroni at all. It seems safe to assume that in the language spoken in Florence at the time of the great storyteller and shortly after, during the Renaissance, macaroni meant gnocchi, or “dumplings.” This theory is supported by descriptions that suggest small lumps of pasta are maccat, that is, pressed against a cheese grater. The fact that they tumble headlong down a hill of cheese suggests an indisputably round, dumplinglike shape. Macaroni—in the modern and Martinian sense of the word—would fail to roll and would simply get stuck.
By contrast, when Martino speaks of “Sicilian macaroni,” he describes unequivocally a type of pasta that is obtained by rolling sheets of dough around a narrow rod, leaving no doubt about the object to which the term refers: Martino’s macaroni are quite similar to today’s Neapolitan fusilli. What sets them apart is the use of egg in the present-day version, absent in the dough used to make Martino’s Sicilian version.
An early and peculiar event in the life of Martino’s book sheds light on the beleaguered process of lexical sedimentation that he endeavored to bring about. When the terms that Platina had lifted from Martino’s The Art of Cooking were “translated” into Italian by translators who had scant knowledge of gastronomic secrets and jargon, the results were patently absurd. While Martino’s original maccaroni becomes isicium frumentum in Platina’s Latin translation (Platina’s Latin was not Cicero’s, for that matter), the Italian “translation” of Platina proffers exitio frumentino, a food that no Italian, then or now, would recognize as edible. And Platina’s cibarium album, which is his candid translation of Martino’s bianco mangiare, rather than being “Italianized” is Hellenized as leucofago, a word more reminiscent of an incurable disease than of a food.104
Finally, Martino formulated many neologisms that have since taken root in the “official” language and entered, as such, into ordinary linguistic usage. So, although Martino’s name is not explicitly connected to literature, which furnishes the lion’s share of new terms, it certainly belongs on the list of authors whose work left a mark on the particular definition or understanding of a given term. As we noted above regarding rosselli, or rose apples, Martino’s text is cited as the first instance for a number of terms in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana.
Despite Maestro Martino’s monumental effort to promote a modicum of terminological standardization, a full consciousness of the necessity of a univocal gastronomic lexicon would not dawn until several centuries later. In fact, a high degree of terminological clarity was achieved only after the unification of Italy, with the publication, over many decades, of Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.105 In the meantime, a number problems remained unresolved. The term ravioli is a case in point, appearing in twenty-seven recipes, whether named explicitly or referred to by way of analogy.
As Odile Redon and Bruno Laurioux have correctly observed:
The content of the recipes throws doubt on the unified nature of type. Certain recipes stay on course: a thin dough envelops a stuffing of cheese, herbs, and chopped meat. These ravioli, the size of chestnuts, cooked in broth and served sprinkled with spices and grated cheese, are close to the classic ravioli of contemporary Italian cuisine. However, the term ravioli is also used to define foods covered with dough of smaller dimensions, such as “eggs in the form of ravioli,” and it can even extend to dishes formed into little balls or rolls without the envelope of dough, simply rolled in flour (ravioli bianchi Buhler 5r).106 Often, they must be fried in oil or lard, thus making it difficult to differentiate them from beignets or frittelle. One can say as much of tortelli.107
An exceptional resource for lexicographical studies, the full impact of Maestro Martino’s The Art of Cooking cannot be assessed without considering at least some of the many practical suggestions and techniques that constitute his culinary art. These include not only cooking methods and procedures, but the various ways of displaying dishes, and novelties in the selection of ingredients and seasonings. In this regard, the book reflects the radical transformation of medieval dietary and convivial customs (of which a few significant traces remain, to be sure) during the Renaissance, an era in which the rich “pretend” to eat, the bourgeois eat and become grassi, or “fat,” and the cooks of sophisticated prelates are encouraged to view the food restrictions their masters had the audacity to impose on the famished and destitute lower classes as wonderful opportunities to indulge the holiness of their own palates.
Consider, for example, the following recipe for Lenten imitation eggs (see page 000), where rich pike broth, starch, and almonds make for a “fat” dish for “lean” times:
Get some cleaned almonds that have been blanched as much as possible and crush well, moistening them with a little rose water so that they do not purge their oil. Thin with cooled, good, fatty, and rich pike broth; pass through a stamine, turning it into milk; get a half libra of rice that has been cleaned and washed, or more or less, as needed; cook it well in half of the above almond milk, and also take three ounces of the best and whitest starch you can get, and add it to the remaining milk until you see that the starch is fully dissolved; then boil this milk and starch together for a half-quarter of an hour, stirring continuously with a spoon, and make sure that it does not burn. Once this has been done, take the rice with all the milk and pass together through a stamine by the force of your hand; the thicker the mixture, the better it will be, and do not forget to add a generous amount of sugar. At your discretion, take the quantity or part of this mixture that you think is sufficient, make it yellow with saffron, and shape it into small round balls like egg yolks; then get two wooden molds made especially like eggs; and if you do not have the molds, you can use two egg shells in their place; put the white mixture beneath and above and all around the egg yolks, thus making it look like eggs. And one by one, arrange them on a dish, and they will appear to be hard-boiled eggs that have been peeled. Thin and make liquid a little bit of the white composition with rose water and sugar, hot or cold as you please, and you can use it to top the eggs and it will appear to be milk. If you like them dry, leave them as they are without topping with this liquid, but in its place top with fine, powdered sugar.
The end result is imitation eggs (today’s imitation eggs are made from egg whites with the yolks discarded) that have an uncanny resemblance to the real thing, but have an entirely different (yet delicious) taste.
The above recipe is a leftover from the Middle Ages, when extravagant recipes were developed over hundreds of years to address the many fast days in the Catholic calendar. There are at least two other traces of medieval cookery in Martino’s book: recipes that hark back to the Catalan tradition and the satisfaction derived from a conspicuous desire for visual gratification (a dish was greatly appreciated if it tasted good, but when presented in an unusual manner, it was astoundingly good). The fact that a certain number of Martino’s recipes are accompanied by the qualifier “Catalan” (like that for Mirause, partridges, squash, etc.) or the fact that blancmange, a common dish in Catalan cuisine, is dealt with obsessively in Martino is a reflection of Catalan dominance in the culinary arts of that period (just as, after Martino up until the time of Marie de France, it would be Italian, and then French; and today: who knows?).
As far as visual gratification is concerned, albeit less theatrical and phantasmagorical than in the Middle Ages (or in Roman times: who can forget Trimalchio’s dinner party, in Petronius’s Satyricon?), there are some extraordinary examples of mirabilia gulae in Martino, like the recipes for “how to dress a peacock with all its feathers, so that when cooked, it appears to be alive and spews fire from its beak,” where the scenic effect is easily obtained by stuffing the bird’s mouth with cotton soaked in alcohol and then lighting it on fire. Even more “special” are those for the “flying pie” (the closing recipe in the Library of Congress and Vatican manuscripts) and “how to make aspic in a carafe with a live fish inside,” which appears only in the Neapolitan manuscript and could very well be a subsequent addition to the Martinian tradition.
In the case of the first formula, live birds are placed into an already baked pie, in which another “real” (and smaller) pie has been placed. Once the crust is removed, the little birds take flight, eliciting “oohs” and “ahs” from onlookers. In the second, little fish are made to slide through a pitcher with a spout. Inside the pitcher a chamber of water has been created with gelatin above and below. Satisfied with this ingenious formula, Martino, or perhaps a scribe who may have added the recipe to the collection later on, writes, “send it as a gift to anyone you please” (see page 000).
While Martino’s approach to cooking is somewhat influenced by the tradition of the banquet-as-spectacle, as well as by the nearly dominant modi coquinandi derived from Arabic culture, it is not the product of thoughtless observation and mechanical repetition. Martino’s habit of sprinkling victuals with sugar and spices, as well as the idea of flavoring sauces with raisins, prunes, and grapes, undoubtedly reflects practices fundamental to Arabic cooking. The same can be said about the employment of such staples as rice, dates, pomegranates, and bitter oranges—the availability of which goes back to the Arabic occupation of Spain. First introduced by the Arabs to the island of Cyprus, the subsequent presence of sugar cane in Sicily, on the other hand, accounts for the passion Italians developed for sweets in the thirteenth century. As Willan notes, “Martino is one of the first cooks to use sugar in large quantities to make dishes that are specifically sweet, such as fritters, almond paste cookies, and sugared apples, rather than treating it as a seasoning like salt, in the medieval manner.”108
But Martino’s most remarkable talent lies in his subtle ability to combine old and new ingredients. It is perhaps the most salient aspect of his art—a trait which makes him the first incarnation of a modern cook. For it is a mark of sophisticated artistry to know, for example, when one drop of oil adds flavor but two ruins a dish, or to appreciate that different cuts of meat manifest textural differences that require specific methods of cooking. It is also worth noting the care with which Martino specifies that, while an ingredient must be well crushed in a mortar and passed through a ubiquitous stamine, it is sufficient for others to be roughly or finely chopped.109 The allure of Martino’s The Art of Cooking, which is at once a culinary decalogue, a compendium, and a memoir, can be understood only when one keenly observes such small but essential gestures, the rigorous alchemical subtleties woven throughout the text, and, lastly, the author’s trust in his own imagination.
Other verbs compliment this mosaic of gestures: dilute, chop, mince, and so on. None of these procedures were required or advocated by medieval gastronomy, which used mostly the spit and the cauldron, cookery staples which of course did not disappear in Maestro Martino’s time. But we know, thanks to him, that the success and taste of a dish cooked with these utensils depends on how one stirs or turns the skewers. In short, we know that rhythm is no less important to successful cooking than invention.
With regard to ingredients, Martino (and his “disciple” Platina, even more so) advises his readers that proximity to regional sources is often synonymous with quality. When in Rome, he writes, cook the unusual varietal of Roman broccoli; when in Lombardy, the unique species of pike found in Lake Garda. But even the right provenance in ingredients is no guarantee for success in cooking. Staples and condiments must be combined in such a way that they render more flavor than when they were in their natural state. This aspiration, of course, is an ancient one, but it has often created more frustration than satisfaction. With Maestro Martino, its fulfillment is no longer merely the outcome of chance but of conscious effort and calculation. In a departure from past practices, in which meats, fish, cabbage, and eggs were assaulted from the outside and drowned in spices or sauces, Martino stipulates that the ingredients employed to enhance the flavor of foods should be sought by keeping in mind the nature of the staples themselves. In some sense, condiments, sauces, flavorings, and the like should be seen as extensions of what is being cooked. It is as if the ingredients of a dish “required” one specific treatment rather than another. This is what contemporary Italians refer to as la morte (the death) of any given food, curiously lending to the expression a positive value: if lard is better than any other agent to enhance the flavor of fried meat, then lard becomes its death. The smart cook is thus he who draws pleasure in conjuring up the verdict, the outcome of which will be a mouth-watering execution.110
The development of new culinary habits, furthermore, did not depend at all on the discovery of new ingredients. Long before corn, potatoes, and tomatoes brought from America revolutionized the diets of Europeans (although for centuries they responded to these enticements with contempt), a systematic interest for wheat flour and common backyard vegetables (such as carrots, celery, and onions) and herbs enabled the formation of a radically new diet that only recently has been dubbed “Mediterranean” by shrewd mass-media publicists.111
Typically, flour led to pasta (although the name pasta referred to a host of products made with lesser grains, such as barley, spelt, and millet). In his book The Culture of Food, Massimo Montanari has convincingly argued that ever since pasta began to be dried and thus preserved in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it might have been a popular food in those areas where it was produced.112 If eaten fresh, on the other hand, it bore the connotation of luxury and gluttony. Eating food that could spoil gave the consumer an enhanced social status. This is indeed the image of “maccheroni or lasagne” that we can glean from books of ‘high cuisine’ where such dishes are depicted as richly buttered, smothered in cheese, and dusted with sugar and sweet spices.”113 Martino devotes much attention and space to pasta in brodo (pasta in broth), and, as in the above-mentioned case of ravioli, to pasta filled with meat, cheese, or vegetables. He devotes an equal amount of space and attention to fava beans, peas, chickpeas, squash, cauliflower, elderberry, fennel, eggplants, and still other vegetables. Thanks to Martino, vegetable dishes that had been the hallmark of the pauper’s diet for centuries shed their demure aspect and found a dignified place next to the roast and brined fish on the tables of the rich.114
Above and beyond this rehabilitation of vegetables, Maestro Martino turned his ingenuity toward assigning new functions to onions, dill, parsley, celery, and carrots (which, oddly enough, were not orange, but purple)—functions quite similar to those Italians ascribe to them even today. It is hard to say whether these preparations were a full-fledged anticipation of today’s household battuto (the common chopped onion, carrot, celery, and parsley base that would become a staple of Italian cuisine from the nineteenth century onward), but it surely came close.
To be sure, radical changes in culinary habits in this period were in large part forced on the “consumer” by dramatic political changes occurring in vast areas of the eastern Mediterranean basin, which had fallen under the control of the Ottoman empire. With trade routes virtually cut off or made wildly circuitous, traditional foodstuffs and spices imported from the East—first among them pepper—became extremely scarce.115 Although their dietetic value was insignificant, no ancient or medieval gourmet would have done without them.
It is a well-known story that reaches its climax with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The ships of the Most Serene Republic of Venice returned from the East with half-empty hulls. The prices of the spices escalated to an unsustainable level that even the wealthiest could no longer afford. Before solutions could be devised to avoid an economic disaster (for the Republic of Venice, anyway)—that is, before a catastrophe could be turned into a new incipit—people who paid no attention to Martino’s battuto (and consequently no attention to the possibility of diminishing their reliance on spices that had become impossible to obtain) began to promise monarchs and potentates that they had envisaged new routes to reach the old supply centers.116 Among them, a Genovese licensed to navigate on behalf of the Spaniards fixated (against the better judgment of his peers versed in science) on the idea of buscar el levante por el ponente (seeking the East by voyaging westward). True, he did not quite succeed in doing so, but only because of an inconvenient “new world” that he stumbled upon halfway between Spain and Cathay. And to add insult to injury, this new mysterious land was not half as rich in spices as the territories were supposed to be that he had promised his sponsors he could reach.
So it became necessary to make the best of an unfavorable situation: to seek refuge not along sea routes, but in the kitchen. Much less heroic, certainly, than the idea of smothering food with pepper, the modest proposal suggested by Maestro Martino was accepted as a compromise and temporary solution. To be absolutely preposterous, we could even say that because of this sudden paucity in the supply of spices, and because of the colossal geographical trompe l’oeil, the Italian way of cooking—that is, Martino’s way—was able to invade continental Europe (putting an end to the exaggerated use of pepper, which may not be so healthy anyway). This invasion was short-lived, as quite soon the grande cuisine of the Italians’ cousins beyond the Alps erased even the faintest trace of Martino’s teachings. More recently, of course, events have taken yet another turn: there has been a worldwide renaissance of Italian cuisine, and Italians have become vociferous in flaunting their culinary pedigree. More preposterous still, a claim could be made that had Maestro Martino’s battuto taken root more rapidly and widely in daily culinary practice, the “discovery of America,” as a by-product of the mad and obsessive search for pepper, could have been postponed for who knows how long.
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