A History of Food in 100 Recipes

No one can pinpoint when cheese into being, although as cheese came into being, although as cheese historian Andrew Dalby says, ‘It was surely no momentous event.’ As milk curdles quite quickly if not kept cool, it can’t have been long after man (Neolithic, around 7000 BC) started to keep domesticated animals for milk that he discovered cheese.

We can imagine the scene. An Arab nomad jogs through the desert one warm sunny day. Over his shoulder he carries some milk in a container made of animal stomach. Reacting to the rennet in the stomach lining, the milk quickly curdles. Then, when our nomad pauses for a swig, he finds there are white lumps (curds) in the mixture. It might not refresh him, but he likes the taste. Thus cheese is born.

Given that, naturally, milk would be seasonal, cheese becomes the way to store and consume it and its valuable nutrients. Historians describe the discovery of cheese as part of the ‘secondary products revolution’, which marks the time before which animals were just used for their meat, bones and hide.

By the time Pantaleone was writing, cheese-making had become sophisticated, as had its consumption. He champions cheese made in the Aosta Valley as being particularly good when cooked. ‘It becomes stringy,’ he says, no doubt having enjoyed a good fondue. In fact cheese-makers from the region still quote his recommendation of their cheese when publicising it today.

He also discovers cheeses in Piedmont that are ideal for those on a tight budget. These have ‘a spicy flavour, so much so it is said they are useful to the poor; firstly, because of their hot flavour, they eat very little of it’. It’s not a very right-on argument but he redeems himself a little as he continues: ‘Secondly, it is said to be useful to the poor because in the dishes prepared by them, thanks to the sharp taste of the cheeses, there is no need for spices and salt.’

Pantaleone was a pioneer of taste. He encouraged a more sophisticated view of food and demonstrated how writing about a specific foodstuff could be used to encapsulate ideas on the economy, well-being and culture. His enthusiasm still encourages one to sniff out a good Brie or cook up some Gouda in a cheesy tart. For my money he’s up there with Aquinas.

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Ravioli for non-Lenten times (#ulink_18a8e418-53c1-54b5-96b8-e308d4e7a71e)

1465

AUTHOR: Martino de Rossi

FROM: Libro de arte coquinaria (Book on the Art of Cooking)

To make ten servings: take a half libra of aged cheese, and a little fatty cheese and a libra of fatty pork belly or veal teat, and boil until it comes apart easily; then chop well and take some good, well-chopped herbs, and pepper, cloves, and ginger; and it would be even better if you added some ground capon breast; incorporate all these things together.

Then make a thin sheet of pasta and encase the mixture in the pasta, as for other ravioli. These ravioli should not be larger than half a chestnut; cook them in capon broth, or good meat broth that you have made yellow with saffron when it boils. Let the ravioli simmer for the time it takes to say two Lord’s Prayers.

For centuries Martino de Rossi played a bit part in culinary history. He was the man who’d got a mention, albeit a very flattering one, in a seminal cookbook published in 1475. Its author was Bartolomeo de Sacchi, a writer and humanist who lived and worked in Rome and went by the name of Platina. His work, De honesta voluptate et valitudine (‘On Honourable Pleasure and Health’), was credited with dragging cooking from the medieval dark ages to the enlightened Renaissance. With its 250 recipes it was revolutionary in everything from ingredients to techniques. His recipes heralded not just the birth of modern Italian cooking, but it was the first printed cookbook, it enjoyed wide distribution and was translated into at least four European languages.

As Platina lapped up the praise and adulation, he spares a thought for the man who, he says, inspired his recipe writing. ‘What a cook, oh immortal gods, you bestowed in my friend Martino of Como,’ he writes of the man he describes as the ‘Prince of cooks, from whom I learned all abut cooking’.

And that’s it. We hear no more of Martino, who he was, where he lived, when he lived, who he worked for and whether he himself published any recipes. The man disappears from the culinary radar. That is until 1927 when a studious German-American chef, hotelier and scholar, one Joseph Dommers Vehling, comes across an ancient manuscript owned by an antiquarian bookseller in Italy. The author’s name catches his eye and he buys the handwritten manuscript with the title Libro de arte coquinaria, or ‘Book on the Art of Cooking’. Having got his hands on it, he begins to translate the Italian text and realises the discovery he has made. The author, Maestro Martino de Rossi of Como, is the man mentioned in a book he knows well, written, of course, by Platina.

Vehling finally wrote up his findings in October 1932 in the publication Hotel Bulletin and the Nation’s Chefs and in it he brought to light his most astonishing revelation. Martino didn’t just influence Platina’s book; all but ten of Platina’s 250 recipes were his, word for word. The other ten, incidentally, being those of Apicius. On Vehling’s death in 1950, the manuscript was gifted to the Library of Congress in Washington, where it still resides.

Scholars, who had wondered exactly how it was that a man whose main job was writing papal briefs came to know so much about cooking, now had their answer. Was Platina simply the biggest recipe plagiariser of all time?

Meanwhile, from Martino’s own writings we now know a little bit more about the man himself. His recipes show a degree of Spanish influence, he cooked for a time for a family in Milan, and then moved to Rome where his employer was Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, a powerful and high-ranking Catholic prelate whose name is cited on the book’s title page.

But it is the recipes themselves that are revolutionary. Until this point, as we have seen, cookbooks worked more as aides-memoires for experienced chefs. They listed the ingredients needed for particular dishes and recorded extravagant banquets and feasts. Many were highly illuminating, culturally, but in practical terms at the low end of the helpful scale. Martino’s book is different, however. Not only does he give actual quantities, he provides cooking times for the reader.

Take his recipe for game consommé, for example. He mentions ‘an ounce of salt cured meat, 40 crushed peppercorns … three or four garlic cloves, five or six sage leaves torn into three pieces each … two sprigs of laurel …’ And, at last, the bit we’ve been waiting for since the dawn of time: ‘let it simmer in the pot for seven hours’. When it comes to the minutiae of minutes, he is helpful but is reluctant to throw himself totally into the modern world. His favoured method of referring to two minutes, for example, being ‘the time it takes to say two Lord’s Prayers’. But given what had gone before, that was pretty useful even so.

Likewise he brings a little colour to his description of techniques. In a recipe for a ‘dainty broth with game’, he adds ‘a generous amount of lard that has been cut up into small pieces like playing dice’. Likewise in making pie with deer or roebuck, he instructs you to ‘first cut the meat into pieces the size of your fist’.

Yet his recipes are more than just useful. There are new techniques (he shows how egg can be used to clarify jelly, for instance), his recipes for pastry are all edible, he uses shorter cooking times, promotes the natural taste of food and adds considerable degrees of subtlety to cookery in general. He understands that one drop of olive oil can add flavour, two can ruin the dish. Garlic is ‘well crushed’; before it was always ‘roughly’ or ‘finely’ chopped. A pedantic detail, perhaps, but one that good cooks will understand. He uses sugar not just to season dishes but to make them properly sweet. He also cooks vegetables al dente. In his recipe for ‘Roman broccoli’ he removes the vegetable from the pot when it is ‘half cooked’, at which point he adds a few knobs of chopped lard and finishes it back on the heat, using some of the retained water, for just ‘a short time’.

Octavo Corp and The Library of Congress

The first book to mention actual quantities and cooking times in the recipes as well as useful techniques, the Libro de arte coquinaria was groundbreaking as the first printed cookbook.

Gone were the peasant days of boiling veg to the point of mush. It took until my parents’ generation in the 1970s to start all that again. In fact he actually introduced vegetables to the nobility that he worked for, demonstrating that although they might be the food of peasants they could very respectfully appear alongside the meat dishes of the rich.

Even so, Martino can’t resist a nod to the trickery and extravagance of the grand banquet. There’s a recipe 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’ (using camphor and cotton wool soaked in alcohol). But his instinct was towards smaller, more convivial dinners, while the fashionable prevailing wind was still for showy feasts. His recipes cater for much smaller numbers. So one could also make the claim that Martino invented the dinner party.

With his recipes for sauces, tortes, fritters, eggs and other dishes he fused traditional ingredients with more modern produce. His cuisine was a fusion of two eras that brought cooking closer to the modern world.

But what of Platina? Should he be cast aside for fraudulence? The answer is actually no. Because, were it not for him, Martino’s ideas might have remained in oblivion. By translating his work into Latin and publishing the first ever printed cookbook, Platina ensured these new ideas rightly reached a wide audience. Platina also added an introduction and a chapter on diet and health. Good food was, he argued, not just about decadence and gluttony. His book would ‘assist the well-bred man who desires to be healthy and to eat in a decorous way’. It was not aimed at one who ‘searches after luxury and extravagance’.

Platina’s own life was not without discomfort. One might have though that writing papal briefs would keep him out of trouble. But Platina was a man with opinions and in 1464 he had a row with Pope Paul II, who slung him into the prison of the vast Castal Sant’Angelo, built originally by Emperor Hadrian as a family mausoleum. ‘It was probably the worst dungeon you can imagine,’ says a current Vatican curator. A sixteenth-century inmate, the artist Benvenuto Cellini, went further, recalling how his cell would ‘swell with water and was full of big spiders and many venomous worms’, while his hemp mattress ‘soaked up water like a sponge’.

When Platina was released one might have thought he’d play it safe to avoid more such discomfort. But he got into trouble soon after, this time charged with conspiracy to assassinate the pope. Lack of evidence led to another release and he then tried a better tack, which was to write a flattering Lives of the Popes. This did the trick. Not only did he stay out of trouble, but he was ennobled by Pope Sixtus IV with an appointment as prefect of the Vatican Library, an event immortalised in a painting by Melozzo da Forli which can be seen in the Pinacoteca Vaticana museum.

Perhaps it was his time in jail that got Platina thinking about food. Perhaps while he dreamed of the dishes he had enjoyed as a free man and recalled his friendship with Martino, he vowed to commit his passion for food to publishing a book about it. Immediately after his second release, he set about translating Martino’s work from Italian to Latin, organising the recipes into fast-day and feast-day dishes and adding the extra chapters and the Apicius recipes.

The book was a quick success, although Platina was not without his detractors. One contemporary writer, Giovanni Antonio Campano, commented how his ‘mouth was full of leeks and his breath reeked of onions’. At least it shows Platina took his food seriously.

Born into a poor family in 1421 in the humid Padanian plains of Italy, he had worked his way up to the higher echelons of Italian society. Without his work the world could have been bereft of the recipes of Maestro Martino, be it his exquisite veal cutlets which ‘should not be overcooked’ or his macaroni or ravioli dishes. The latter delicious, especially if you’re mindful not to cook the pasta any longer than a couple of Our Fathers. Platina might have pinched his food mentor’s recipes, but isn’t that what every good cook does?

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For to bake quinces (#ulink_fca11ec3-ac7b-5cd4-b62a-926880308658)

1500

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: This Boke of Cokery

To bake quinces take iii or iiii quinces and payre them pyke out their cores and fill them full of good syrup made of clarry or of wast pouders and sugre then lette them in coffins and hyle them and back them and serve them.

Now you might well think that one Boke of Kokery must be much like another Boke of Cokery. But there are fundamental differences and not just that a period of sixty years saw the progression of the letter ‘K’ being replaced by a ‘C’. While the former was a handwritten manuscript, This Boke of Cokery was printed. In fact, it is the earliest-known cookbook printed in English. There could well have been others and that they were lost suggests that not a great deal of value was placed on them at the time. These would have been regarded as fairly insignificant works – mere records of banquets, seasonal eating and recipes. More value would have been placed on the printer Richard Pynson’s other books – law statutes and suchlike.

As if conscious of this, the title page of the book is humble and modest. ‘This is the boke of cokery’ it states. A longer introduction follows on the next page. This is rather fuller of itself: ‘Here begynneth a noble boke of festes ryalle and cokery a boke for a princes household or any other estates and the makynge therof according as ye shall find more playnely with this boke.’

I turned the ancient pages of this volume, my hands clad in white gloves, as it rested on a pillow in the chilled map room of the Longleat archives in Wiltshire. The book had resided for a couple of hundred years in the Green Library of the house, one of seven libraries, having come into the family collection by marriage. It had rested on a shelf next to titles like Don Quixote, Wars of England, The Arabian Nights and works by Sir Thomas More. Today it is carefully preserved in a secure air-conditioned unit in the house’s converted stable blocks.

This is not a book for the kitchen and it never was. The pages are as clean as a bible’s. It was written as a record and also as an aide-memoire for the cook. As ever, there are no cooking times and quantities are scarce – save for the quince recipe given above, which at least tells you how many to use.

The author, most likely a senior cook in the royal household, records some memorable banquets from the past – a feast for ‘King Harry the fourth’, who reigned from 1399 to 1413, and a list of the dishes that were served at the coronation of Henry V in 1413. Guess what: the guests were served pottage, boiled pike, gurnard, trout and so on. After the list of banquets there’s a dense, dull, list of seasonal cooking: capon stewed, trout boiled, bream in sauce … ad infinitum. It’s with some relief that the author then announces: ‘Here endeth the calendar of the boke of cokery and here beginneth the making.’

And a little light detective work – a re-read of the Boke of Kokery – suggests that these are not original ideas. Like the worst type of plagiarist, the author lifts a number of recipes and then just rewrites them slightly. His recipe for mussels being almost identical to the one that appears in the 1440 book. Except the new version is not quite as good as the old one and lacks the vital detail of the importance of serving the dish on a warmed plate.

But we can forgive this. This work after all was the first printed English cookbook and – as established in the case of Platina, with his pilfering and passing off as his own the work of Martino de Rossi – the wider dissemination of good cooking is what helps food and society develop. The techniques are enlightening too, revealing much about people’s tastes at the time. Vinegar is tossed onto food as we today would drizzle over olive oil. So either contemporary palates favoured tangy flavours, or the vinegar was sweetened. The likelihood is that palates acclimatise to what is available. If olive and butter are scarce but vinegar is not and that’s what everyone’s tossing on their freshly boiled crab, then that’s what you use.

Speaking of crab, there is a recipe ‘For to dight [prepare] crabe or lobster’. The author instructs one to ‘to stop the crabe or lobster at the vent with one of his litel claues and boyle them’. Since the vent is the Middle English culinary term for a creature’s bottom, this is an interesting proposition. Is the suggestion that shoving a crab’s little claw up its arse will arrest it for a short time, enabling you to grab it and fling it into a boiling pot? Meanwhile, after cooking the crabs/lobsters in either boiling water or baked in an oven, one should again ‘serve them with vinegar’.

When it comes to fish there is equally little mercy, it seems: ‘Take your tench and scald hym and splat hym and cast him into the pan.’ Does that suggest the tench is pan-fried alive (after the scalding and splatting) and with its guts? The recipe adds that the fish should be served with ‘blanched almonds’, which adds a rather more luxurious note.

There are then numerous recipes for roasting every bird imaginable. Partridge, quail, crane, heron, egret and goose are among many. As Dr Kate Harris, archivist at Longleat, comments: ‘People at the time had a strange interest in cooking and consuming vast quantities of wild fowl. It makes books like this read more like ornithological texts than recipe books.’

In fact not long after the publication of This Boke of Cokery the first law to conserve birds was enacted. although it was more to protect birds so they could be served at the table rather than to actually save species. But aside from the lists of birds to be netted by princes and noble folk to sate their appetites, there are some recipes more palatable and practical to our modern tastes. Not to mention less offensive.