A History of Food in 100 Recipes

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Pasta (#ulink_b3864315-4d33-5807-b12f-ca5717036cde)

1154

AUTHOR: Muhammad al-Idrisi, FROM: Tabula Rogeriana (The Book of Roger)

In Sicily there is a town called Trabia, an enchanting place blessed with water year-round and mills. In this town they make a food from flour in the form of strings. Enough is produced to supply, as well as the towns of Calabria, those in Muslim and Christian regions, too.

Had pasta been knocking around much before 1154? Most likely, yes. There is, for example, an Etruscan relief about forty miles north of Rome at Caere. Painted in the fourth century, it shows what looks very much like pasta-making equipment. But 1154 stands out very clearly as the date when pasta got its first decent write-up. The wording is clear-cut, straightforward, honest and there is no reason to doubt its accuracy.

The reference to it comes from a remarkable book written by one Muhammad al-Idrisi, whose full name was Abu Abd Allah Abdullah, Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Ash Sharif al-Idrisi. Born in Morocco in 1099, he started to travel the globe at the age of sixteen, visiting Asia Minor, southern France, Spain and north Africa, which must have felt pretty much like the whole world at the time. He was a poet and writer of Arabic prose whose considerable talent came to the attention of royalty, in the shape of King Roger II of Sicily.

King Roger, who had inherited the throne from his father, also Roger – a conquering Norman adventurer – was a Renaissance man before his time who liked the idea of a court of all the talents. He therefore used his reign and position to surround himself with learned individuals – geographers, mathematicians, philosophers, doctors and the like. So when he heard of al-Idrisi, he invited him to join his gang. Under Roger’s patronage, al-Idrisi proceeded to map and chart the known world from 1138, working on it for fifteen years. So accurate was the map he made that it was used for the ensuing three centuries.

The map, with its accompanying commentaries, goes by the splendid name of The Book of Roger – or Tabula Rogeriana, as it’s more usually known – and is decently subtitled ‘Pleasure Excursion of One Eager to Traverse the World’s Regions’. In matter-of-fact language, al-Idrisi records his knowledge of the land he has both seen and heard about. Some of it sounds mildly derogatory. He describes Britain, for instance, as having ‘dreary weather’. Paris, meanwhile, is a town ‘of mediocre size surrounded by vineyards and forests on an island in the Seine’. But he also makes sensible comments such as ‘the earth is round as a sphere’, not to mention his seminal reference to pasta, which gives rise to plenty of food for thought.

Clearly at the time al-Idrisi was writing, pasta-making was already quite well established. And it was being made in sufficient quantities for export, which suggests it was being stored, but, more importantly, dried. For the key part in the development of pasta is not that the Arabs brought durum wheat to Sicily (around the late seventh century) or that it was later made into strings – not to mention butterflies or little worms – but that it was dried.

That pasta could be dried and stored gives it all the importance of rice as a staple foodstuff. And although there are mentions of what sound like pasta in references to ancient Greece and Arabia, the Italians, quite understandably, claim it as their own.

Anyone wishing to counter their claim should visit the National Pasta Museum in Rome – just opposite the Travi Fountain. It is, the museum states, ‘the Italian invention that the world envies’, adding how its ‘eleven exhibition halls disclose eight centuries of the history of the first course’ (just in case any ignorant foreigner should think it was a main-course dish). Sicily was fortuitous as a starting place for pasta as it was well placed to trade internationally and it had a stunning effect on civilisation. As Mary Snodgrass writes in her Encyclopedia of Kitchen History:

Pasta was a momentous addition to world civilization for several reasons. It stored well, thus allowing the warehousing of foodstuffs against famine and fueling monetary speculation during peacetime and war based on predictions of price and demand. More important to the global economy, the formation of hardtack and pasta from durum wheat permitted galley kitchens to feed ships’ crews over long ocean journeys of the type that introduced Europe to the Western Hemisphere.’

Thus Italy took pasta to its heart. The great Roger II must have eaten it, no doubt to help sustain that vast intellect. ‘The extent of his learning cannot be described,’ al-Idrisi said of his patron, while one contemporary historian wrote how ‘he accomplished more asleep than other sovereigns did awake’. The Book of Roger was published in 1154 and Roger II died three weeks later. The flag of pasta had been planted on the soil of Sicily – and Italians have been thanking him ever since.

The Art Archive: Marc Charmet

Drawn by al-Idrisi for Roger II of Sicily in 1154–1157 and included in the Tabula Rogeriana, this map shows Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean Sea.

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Rummaniyya (#ulink_c97baa50-ecbf-5b31-98d1-0a057da8aba7)

(Meatballs in pomegranate sauce) (#ulink_c97baa50-ecbf-5b31-98d1-0a057da8aba7)

1250

AUTHOR: Unknown,

FROM: Kanz al-fawa’id fi tanwi al-mawa’id (The Treasure of Useful Advice for the Composition of a Varied Table)

Cut the meat into pieces, put in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil while removing the fetid scum. Next add small meatballs the size of a hazelnut. The quantity of broth must be reduced so that when the cooking is done only a residue of light and velvety juice remains. In the meantime, take some sour pomegranate juice, sweeten it with rose water syrup, add some mint and pistachios crushed in the mortar to thicken it, colour it with a little saffron and season with all [the ingredients] of atraf tib [a mixture of spices including black pepper, cloves and ginger]. Sprinkle with rose water and diluted saffron and serve.

Hungry young mouths across thirteenth-century Egypt must have been growing tired of being filled with meatballs. These were pretty much a staple food. So a book circulating in 1250 called Kanz al-fawa’id fi tanwi al-mawa’id (or ‘The Treasure of Useful Advice for the Composition of a Varied Table’) – written at the time when the Mamluk warriors, who were descended from slaves, ruled Egypt – must have felt like the first specks of rain after a long, dry desert of a summer.

Its recipes reflect the influences brought about by immigration caused by conflict around the Middle East. New eating habits and dishes came from far and wide, from Greece (turnips, Greek style), for example, Baghdad (a condensed yoghurt called qanbaris) and the Frankish region of Germany (a salsa for fish). The Crusades in Syria and Palestine, the Mogul invasion of Iraq, not to mention other conflicts, saw armies and their entourages importing and exporting food as they came and went. Returning to Europe, the battle-weary men didn’t just bring tales of extraordinary adventures in far-flung places, they had a taste of them in their luggage.

The exotic ingredients they brought back with them, such as rose water and pomegranate, then influenced European cookery for generations to come. Indeed rose water became almost ubiquitous in dishes served at English banquets. Sweet was continually mixed with savoury, to the extent that it then took many centuries for sweet dishes to get a final course of their own.

Rummaniyya (which translates as ‘dish with pomegranate’) is a classic example of this: meatballs with the addition of tangy pomegranate juice. The inclusion of exotic ingredients to enliven humdrum foodstuffs would have wowed medieval banqueters back in England at the time Kanz was circulating. Other dishes include carrot jam (a sort of a chutney), quince cordial and a recipe for hummus incorporating pickled lemons, cinnamon, ginger, parsley, mint and rue – although as rue is almost toxic, substituting it with rosemary would be a safer bet.

The book also includes plenty of references to the health benefits of particular foods, derived from contemporary or earlier dietetic texts. Cookbooks in Europe followed suit for the next few hundred years, listing recipes because they were thought to be medicinal rather than because they tasted good. Although many of the ingredients they included, pomegranate among them, remain renowned for their health properties to this day.

But this dish would have needed a little care in the preparation as there is a distinct lack of oil and neither is there salt. It might have been medicinal, but it didn’t need to taste like medicine. So the trick for the cook would have been to successfully balance the sour and sweet flavours. Which someone must have been doing in Europe as this style of cooking caught on. The likes of lamb stew served with fresh apricots, beef cooked with pistachios, chicken with walnuts or the vegetarian dish of fava beans in a sour sauce with hazelnuts, were seen as rich and exotic and soon mixing sweet and sour became the signature combination of the medieval meal.

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Pear of pies (#ulink_dad03ff6-2bbf-59eb-a426-e926e151908e)

1379

AUTHOR: Guillaume Tirel, aka Taillevent,

FROM: Le Viandier (The Food Provider)

Put upright in paste and fill the hollow with sugar; for three big pears about a quarter of a pound of sugar, well covered and glazed with eggs and saffron then cook them.

As the centuries march by, one needs to rely less on glimpses of cave paintings, random asides in poems, dinner-party recollections or fourteenth-century Swedish surnames to analyse the evolution of cooking. Yet when you do land on a seminal recipe, one that transforms things and pushes you forward to a new enlightened era, it’s not all plain sailing.

While Taillevent’s recipes are coherent, he makes considerable assumptions about the culinary abilities of his readers as he gives few quantities and no cooking times. But this didn’t dent his popularity. Although published in the latter part of the fourteenth century, his Le Viandier remained in print – going through fourteen editions – for almost 300 years. The recipe for pear pie that it contains is one of the earliest written recipes for pastry and is extremely sophisticated because not only does the pie hold fruit, it’s sweet and you can eat the crust.

But first a word on Taillevent, the pen-name of Frenchman Guillaume Tirel. His story is a classic culinary tale of someone starting at the bottom and rising to the top of the food tree. Many a great chef today started peeling veg and rose to run an empire, but while Taillevent didn’t run his own empire, he did cook for a king.

His first job, aged fourteen, was turning the great roasting spit in the kitchen of Jeanne de Bourbon, Queen of France and consort to King Charles V. The work would have been tough beyond belief for anyone, let along a young boy: hours of heaving the heavy metal handle while standing just feet away from a roaring fire. He would have finished the day stinking of smoke and meat fat. but it didn’t put him off. Instead, he rose through the ranks, gaining literacy as he went, and as he became more and more skilled, he caught the eye, as well as the taste buds, of the French king.

Charles V, known as Charles the Wise for his sound pragmatism, good governance and learning – one key legacy was the vast library he built – appointed Taillevent as his master cook. This was an important role, especially as the king suffered from gout and had an abscess on his left arm that might have resulted from poisoning. So skilled did Taillevent prove to be as a cook, however, that the king encouraged him to write down a collection of recipes – no doubt both his own and those he had collected from others.

The first known French cookbook, it includes numerous recipes for soups, ragouts, roasts – from piglets to cormorants (you cook them, he says, like heron, which in turn you cook like swan or peacock, which you should prepare like stork – yes, it’s one of those books). There are dishes for invalids, fish dishes, sauces, tips and ideas for cooking with wine, as well as a chapter on ‘desserts and other things’, the former including a very tasty milk tart, the latter, hedgehog.

Yet among all these dishes it’s the pear tart that stands out because it was so ahead of its time. The earliest example of a recipe for pastry in England didn’t emerge until 1545 when A Proper New Booke on Cokery came out in London. And even this is more of an aide-memoire to the cook than a fully fledged recipe book, as it lacks any helpful detail.

No doubt medieval cooks had been preparing pies for some time before Taillevent wrote this recipe, but his was a considerable development. His pear pie has a crust which you eat. Once cooked you cut through it, the pears and their juices oozing out onto the plate. You then mop up the sweet saffron juice with the pastry. But what’s so revolutionary about this, you may be wondering. One always eats the pastry from a pie – it’s often the best bit. Back in those days, however, this was not the case. Pie crust was not intended to be eaten; it was there to cook the contents in.

And pretty well everything was cooked in this way. As pie historian Jane Clarkson is keen on telling people: ‘Once upon a time everything baked in an oven that was not bread was pie.’ Even bread wasn’t always baked in an oven, but would have been cooked on a hearthstone or grill, and meat roasted on a spit. An oven, or kiln, was originally just used for firing pottery until it then occurred to someone that maybe the kiln could be used to cook food in. It’s a bit like how the Aga was originally just used for drying clothes and for dogs to sleep next to, then someone experimented by putting something in one of the ovens.

As for using the kiln to cook meat, these were days before roasting tins and chicken bricks. Some wrapped their food in leaves, others used a clay pot. Then a bright spark tried wrapping dough around the meat, which not only kept the juices in, but also worked as a container to both transport the meat and preserve it for a short time. It’s strange to think that the crust of a pie – the eye-catching casing – was never supposed to be edible. A bit like arriving at a hotel, unpacking and then trying to wear your suitcase – you weren’t supposed to do it. But someone did (eat the pie crust, that is, not try on the suitcase) and over time, dough, with the judicious addition of fat, became pastry.

Medieval recipes refer to pastry as a ‘coffin’ – that is, a box – as in the opening lines of this recipe from sixteenth-century Italy: ‘Make the coffin of a great pie or pastry, in the bottom make a hole as big as your fist …’ The title of the recipe, incidentally, is ‘To Make Pies That the Birds May Be Alive in Them and Fly Out When It is Cut Up’.

Taillevent’s pear pie doesn’t have four-and-twenty, or indeed any, live birds in it – Charles V doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would have appreciated that sort of entertainment. But the ingredients were expensive. Saffron was rare, as was sugar, so this was possibly a dish for a banquet. It might have made a nice pudding after the hedgehog, which, if you’re interested, Taillevent chops up finely and mixes with raisins, cheese and herbs and then stuffs into a lamb’s stomach and secures with a wooden skewer before cooking. He doesn’t say how, of course, but I’d suggest over hot coals.

Private collection

Taillevent’s Le Viandier remained in print for nearly 300 years and an engraving of his tomb is depicted in the 1892 edition of the book.

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