THE HISTORY OF food has a powerful social meaning, which sources reveal with relative clarity. To recognize the differences and dynamics of class in the structure of production, the modality and contrasts of distribution, the typology of daily consumption, and the symbolic values attributed to foods and to eating habits is fairly easy for the most part because all this emerges from the documentation. However, this topic is more difficult to define on more strictly technical grounds—that is, to take into account the way cooking was practiced. The relation between poor food and rich food and the separation between popular culture and elite culture in modes of preparation and in tastes are subjects that would seem to be inaccessible to anyone concerned with the Middle Ages (or any historic period). Because the written culture of those centuries was produced for the upper classes and oral sources are denied to the historian who is not dealing with contemporary matters, only the cuisine of the well-to-do has been documented, albeit in a discontinuous manner, and passed down from archival and literary sources, whereas we are forced to remain silent on the cuisine of the poor or, at best, to propose indirect hypotheses, interpolating texts and working from fantasy.
True? In theory, yes. But a more detailed reading of the sources has convinced me of the contrary. Indeed, written texts never express the culture of the lower classes, and yet they demonstrate it, with greater fidelity than we might have thought. I have reached this conclusion by analyzing cookbooks that began to appear in Italy as of the fourteenth century. As we have already seen,1 there are two principal families of cookbooks: one of southern origin that has its progenitor in the Liber de coquina, from the Angevine court of Naples (presumably based on a Sicilian archetype from the thirteenth century), and that was subsequently copied with additions and variants in various parts of central and northern Italy; the other of Tuscan origin, probably Sienese, which also spread to many regions, with adaptations that also included linguistic ones. When poring over these gastronomic-philological matters in a book written jointly with Alberto Capatti,2 I extended my interest in such texts to the beginning of the modern era, delving into the rich fifteenth-century cookbook of Maestro Martino and then, going forward and back, into the Renaissance cookbooks by Cristoforo Messisbugo and Bartolomeo Scappi. The latter cookbook was a monument to the Italian art of cooking, a summa of gastronomic knowledge gathered by the author over decades of association with the cooking and cultures of different regions, from Milan to Venice, and from Bologna to Rome, the city in which he ended his career at the court of Pope Pius V, to whom he dedicated in 1570 his Opera, a modest title for a work of magisterial substance.
There is an abyss between the technical and linguistic expertise of this Opera and the first, timid expressions of fourteenth-century texts, at times exasperating in their concision (probably explained by the professional audience to which they were addressed, an audience that needed few directions to understand the basics of its own work). And yet there is a link, in my view, as the Renaissance is no more than the conclusion and perfection of the Middle Ages; despite the opposition invented long after (in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—in other words, by the Renaissance itself 3), this is still commonly accepted, even by specialists. The link is in the approach to the practice of cooking, which evolved without the solution of continuity; the link is in the permanence of flavors and tastes, in the continuous interchange between court cooking—in the Middle Ages, the cooking of the urban upper class as well—and “popular” culture, in the excessively but inescapably vague meaning that a term like this can suggest.
The fact is that the aristocratic mentality of the late Middle Ages and early modern era, although raising insurmountable barriers of social behavior—beginning with food—between the ruling classes and those ruled, did not at all exclude the daily convergence of tastes and customs. The rigidity of symbolic constructs that dramatically separate peasant life from that of the nobility (or city dwellers, in a variant typically Italian) could peacefully cohabit with “peasant” products and flavors in the kitchens of the elite. These constructs could even incorporate it: models of opposition and exclusion representing the utopia of the ruling classes, as organic and coherent as they were, were rejected in practice—in both directions. Social, economic, and juridical constrictions might have determined what was eaten, and thereby might have oriented the diet of peasants away from that of the upper classes (for example, it was possible to deny rural communities access to the forest and to hunting and thereby eliminate game from the peasant table4), but to transform constriction into ideology must have been difficult. The peasants did not give up certain foods just because intellectuals considered them ideal for the table of courtiers and urbanites (I have in mind tree fruits and feathered game, which agronomic and dietetic texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, echoing suggestions of naturalistic thinking from previous centuries, proposed as the exclusive foods of the upper classes5). The class war, which literature tried to exorcize (one need only turn to the novella by Sabadino degli Arienti in which a peasant in the Bolognese countryside, rebelling against the orders of his master, is captured and brutally punished for having dared to steal, and eat, a prized peach, reserved in principle for the landowner6), was doubtless a daily event—and often a successful one. A myriad of chinks, uncontrolled segments of the processes of production, revealed themselves to the ingenuity of the peasant.
But the inverse also held true. If the peasants were not stopped by ideological barriers that they found intolerable or, more simply, that they ignored, the landowners in turn did not find unappetizing the foods described in literature as “typically peasant” and seen as such in the collective imagination, or at least in the imagination of the upper classes. About this contrast between ideology and reality, and the practical ruses to overcome it, the cookbooks of the early Middle Ages provide formidable and misunderstood evidence.
The oldest cookbook of the peninsula, the Liber de coquina, begins with vegetables and does so deliberately: “Wishing to discuss herein cooking and various foods, we shall begin first of all with easy things, that is, with vegetables.”7 There follow ten different recipes for cabbage before going on to spinach, fennel, and “instant leaves” and then to preparations based on legumes: chickpeas, peas, lentils, and beans—all foods that in literature, and in the culinary ideology of the Middle Ages, belong to the peasant world. Is this, then, a book of “popular” cuisine? Certainly not. The cuisine of the Liber is expressly intended for people of rank: “prepare delicate cabbage for the gentry,” we read, or “the fragrant little leaves can be given to the lord.”
The discrepancy between “intellectual” food writing and “real” practices is obvious. The contrast is powerful and requires equally powerful signs to escape from ambiguity, to reenter the sphere of “ideologically correct” images. The first sign is that of side dishes and modes of use that clarify the social destination of the food item. A humble product is ennobled by making it part of a different gastronomic or symbolic system, such as making it merely one ingredient—not the main one—of a prestigious dish. As we read in Sabadino degli Arienti, garlic “is always a rustic food” but “at times is artificially made elegant if placed in the cavity of a roasted duck.” From the moment that garlic is stuffed in a roasted duck, its peasant nature is “artificially” modified. Therefore, agliata, a sauce made of garlic crushed in a mortar and pestle, typical of peasant cooking, can also appear in cookbooks for the upper classes: a Venetian cookbook of the fourteenth century proposes that it accompany “all meats.” Similarly, the recipe for “delicate cabbage for the gentry” in the Liber de coquina makes sure to specify its use as an accompaniment to all meats: “cum omnibus carnibus.”
The second sign of ennoblement, aside from the matter of accompaniment, is the enrichment of a humble product with costly ingredients, such as spices. Take, for example, this recipe from a Tuscan volume of the fourteenth century: “Take small turnips, thoroughly cooked in water, and sauté them with oil, onion, and salt; when they are cooked and ready to serve, add spices and put them into bowls.”
Take note of the logic of the argument: once spiced, any food is worthy of a lordly table. This implies a shared basis of gastronomic culture, the common use across social classes—beyond symbolic opposition—of alimentary methods and customs, the intermixing of “precious things” and “ordinary” ones. The possibility of choosing the one or the other was deliberately foreseen by the already mentioned Tuscan cookbook, which leaves every choice to the taste of the lord: “In each sauce, savory or broth, one can put precious things, such as gold, precious stones, choice spices, or cardamom, fragrant or ordinary herbs, onions, leeks, as you like.” This view was not shared by all. At the end of the fourteenth century a northern version of the Liber de coquina completely eliminated the section on vegetables. But the general tendency was decidedly the former, as shown by the major cookbooks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which revived and amplified the totally peasant tradition of using vegetables in cooking: cabbage, turnips, fennel, mushrooms, pumpkin, lettuce, parsley, and every kind of herb, as well as legumes such as beans and peas, are the base of so many of the preparations (soups, pies, fritters) listed in the fifteenth-century cookbook by Maestro Martino.
If the centrality of vegetables is one of the dominant characteristics of popular cooking—this is why it is so important to verify their presence in the cookbooks of the courts—poor foods, par excellence, are the polentas and gruels made of inferior grains such as legumes and chestnuts, key elements in a cuisine marked by the need to fill the belly so as to assure daily survival. And yet even this poor cuisine left important traces in recipes intended for the upper classes.8 “Crushed broad beans” are none other than a polenta of broad beans, like the one that occasionally goes by the name of macco, as a vast literature of peasant cooking confirms. This recipe is utterly simple and poor in its first version (a second one, richer, adds spices and sugar): “Take broad beans that have been crushed and carefully selected and when you have boiled them and poured off the water, wash them carefully and put them back into the same pot with a small amount of tepid water and salt, seeing to it that they are covered by the water, and stir often with a spoon; once they are cooked, remove them from the fire and smash them hard with a spoon, then let them rest for a while and when you put them in a bowl add honey or oil in which onions have been sautéed, and eat.” Equally noteworthy is the paniccia col latte (a gruel of foxtail millet and milk) that appears in the Tuscan cookbook: a simple “legume” (as it is defined in the text, perhaps assimilating millet into legumes), carefully washed and crushed, boiled and mixed with milk and lard. Truly a peasant dish, but for the fact that instead of serving it as the main dish of the meal—as was the case for the poor inhabitants of Lucca, who, in the eighth century, received from charity a pulmentario of broad beans and panìco (foxtail millet)—our paniccia was a side dish for something more substantial: “this dish can be eaten with roasted goat.”
Medieval cookbooks also include gruels made with oats, barley, and millet—at times proposed as food “for the sick,” unadulterated, without added spices, and suitable for that reason—and close to the model of peasant consumption. Spelt, millet, and legumes appear in the recipes of Maestro Martino, and many porridges of inferior grains (barley, millet, and foxtail millet) are found in the pages of Bartolomeo Scappi, always enriched with spices, sugar, and prestigious meats but nevertheless traceable to a cuisine that bears the mark of the peasantry. The author seems perfectly aware of this, as, for example, when he points out, in the recipe for a soup of dried beans, that “this dish is called Macco in Lombardy.”
Like macco, and having the same etymology (from maccare, ammaccare, meaning to grind into flour and knead), maccheroni—or gnocchi, in the oldest meaning of the term9—was a dish much favored by peasant cooking, and cookbooks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provide the first recipes, ones of the greatest simplicity: flour, or bread crumbs, mixed with cheese, or egg yolks, so as to obtain balls of dough that can be cooked in boiling water. Not even the great court cooks, like Cristoforo Messisbugo and Bartolomeo Scappi, neglect this particular type of “maccheroni, called gnocchi” (other maccheroni, those of today, will in the meantime have disappeared): “made with refined flour, the crumb of bread, and hot water, on the gratacascio [cheese grater], cooked in water, covered with agliata,” they appear among far more elegant and sumptuous dishes. And in Scappi’s Opera, there is a gruel of formentone grosso, or corn, a product that even peasants had difficulty accepting on their own table.10
The torta or pastello—an ingenious creation, which we owe to the Middle Ages—is a shell of dough, placed in the oven or between red-hot slabs of stone or earthenware, with the dual purpose of containing or cooking a filling and eventually transporting it. It is an edible object that seems made expressly to cross all social lines.11 Extremely practical, easy to make and keep, apparently within the ability of everyone, and therefore capable of designating a gastronomic civilization in its entirety, it became diversified immediately in its uses. The filling can be more or less complex, more or less prestigious and costly, without ceasing to be recognizable as an element that identifies it as part of a common culture, both urban and rural, both lordly and popular.
In Scappi’s pages, even the preparation of fish seems to be one of those magical points of contact between the professional, cosmopolitan cook and the practices of the common people, the culture of the terroir. More than once Scappi refers the reader to the simple recipes of the fishermen, to which he would add nothing. Gudgeon [or goby, a small freshwater fish] “has to be cooked fresh, otherwise it goes bad quickly.” The fishermen of Chiozza and Venice cook it on embers and also use it in an ingenious fish soup made with malvasia [a sweet white fortified wine that the English call malmsey], water, a little vinegar, and Venetian spices, or fry it in oil like other fish, and serve it hot with orange sauce on top.12 Similarly, “the fishermen of the Po make soups of barbel [a European freshwater fish], or fry it, or cook it on the grate.” And after giving the recipe for turbot in pottaggio (fish soup), the source says, “during the time I was in Venice and Ravenna I learned from the fishermen of Chiozza and Venice, who make the best pottaggi on all the shores of the sea, that there was no better way to make it than the way I said above.” However, he adds, “I think that they make it better than cooks do because they cook [the fish] as soon as they catch it.” This is an admission that does not seem inspired by popular thinking. It is rather a question of time: the fish of the fishermen is better than that of “cooks” because it is fresher.
A typical product of poor cooking, which both medieval and ancient cultures associated, above all, with the world of peasants and shepherds, is cheese. In this case as well, it is apparent that in the Middle Ages a process of “ennoblement” occurred, related either to questions of taste or to the image of cheese as a food for fasting, a substitute for meat on days of abstinence on weekdays and the eve of holidays and later, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, also during Lent. If, on the one hand, all this confirmed the status of cheese as a “poor” food that replaces another—meat—regarded as more prestigious and desirable, on the other hand, it also necessarily bestowed an important role in the alimentary system,13 similar to the one held by fish for the same reasons.14
Less significant, perhaps, are the contributions of popular culture to meats, a preeminent symbol of social prestige. But let us at least note that the taste for offal—often regarded as typical of popular taste in that it is what butchers discard (which may justify its curious appellation of “fifth quarter”)—crossed all social classes during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as demonstrated by cookbooks intended for the upper classes.
Important harmonies (which do not exclude substantial differences) between “rich” and “poor” cuisines can be seen in the sphere of preserves, primarily based on salt, as well as vinegar, oil, and other ingredients. Peasant cooking, above all, counted on preserved products; they kept well throughout the year and constituted the prime assurance of survival in a rural economy that could not rely on a daily market or the caprices of the weather. This is one of the principal distinctions (as imaginary as real) between rich and poor, lord and serf, city dweller and peasant. The former ate fresh food; the latter generally did not.15 Meat, fish, cheese, and vegetables all arrived on the peasant table monotonously tasting of salt. But the importance of preserved foods in gastronomy is that of having been a fundamental meeting point between popular culture and elite culture. If preserved food is the first defense against hunger, the surplus of labor and culture that results in an abundance of natural products soon makes it possible to leave the ambit of need and enter that of pleasure.
All of this led to important consequences. The first is methodological: it is not true that the culture of the lower classes and the oral tradition that expressed it are irretrievably lost. Both were transmitted elsewhere, in the written texts and by the dominant culture, with formal and substantive evidence drawn from the way the procedures of preparing the dishes are described, and presumably executed. By that, I mean that poor cooking (that of the popular culture) was made more visible in the elite cookbooks of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—as implied in the examples selected—by the particular modes with which the work of a cook was performed. The prevailing mechanism was one of accumulation, which added noble products to a simple base or paired noble foods with simple ones. This suggests that the point of departure was, by definition, the one more widely shared; diverse elements were added afterward. This is emphasized also because it constitutes an important element of diversity with regard to modern culinary practices. For a number of centuries, refined cuisine—that of great families and today of great restaurants—set itself apart not only in the advanced and conclusive phases of procedure but also often in preliminary procedures. The French school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, out of which a large part of contemporary culinary techniques arose, was innovative with regard to medieval and Renaissance traditions in the introduction of precooked bases—fond brun, roux blanc, roux brun, and so on—that conferred on the dish a different character from the outset. For that, too, the cookbook of a star chef is scarcely comparable today to poor cooking. If in some way it expresses or evokes it, it is indirect and hard to decode. If instead we recognize that the point of departure closely mirrors a “common” code of cooking—as seems to me to be the case of medieval and Renaissance cooking—the reliability of upper-class cookbooks becomes decidedly greater.
The second consequence derives directly from the first. If Italian cookbooks of upper-class cooking can lend themselves, starting in the Middle Ages, to restituting an extensive panorama not only of the culture and tastes of the elite classes but also of the culture and tastes of the lower classes, that means that the evolution of a gastronomic patrimony occurred over time in a joint action of all the social components of the country. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies, in addition and above all, in the importance of the cities as the specific site of the production and development of an alimentary culture.16 The locus of economic, cultural, and social exchanges, the city—with its territory, which in some way the city comprises and represents—is the ideal site for intermixing, hybridization, and contamination. Popular culture and elite culture confront one another on a daily basis, alternately imitating and blending into one another. The cooks who work at courts or for great families, in some cases of noble but more often of popular origin, are doubtless the key figures in this mechanism, which is yet to be explored. The fact remains that cookbooks for the nobility express a socially diffused culture, an urban culture that in its turn is regional (in that the city dominates and represents a region) and national (in that the city comprises a network of its own culture through markets and the circulation of products, people, and ideas).
This, to me, holds the secret of the richness and vitality of Italian cuisine, all the more diversified and articulated—and for that reason interesting—for having developed historically as a place of encounter between different cultures, not only from a territorial point of view but also from a social point of view. It is also for this reason that we can rightfully talk of a “national” gastronomic heritage17 because the written tradition, the expression of an elite cuisine, transmitted and represented over centuries a culture in which everyone could recognize fragments of his or her own identity. If the splendor of Renaissance courts represents, still today, a source of pride for the inhabitants of innumerable cities (Mantua, for example, holds up the cuisine of the Gonzagas as the collective patrimony of the city, as does Florence that of the Medici or Rome that of the popes), this is not just to promote tourism and an instrumental use of history but also to reflect a tradition that is an important part of the collective memory and, to a greater or lesser degree, contains the cultures of the entire society. Cooking can therefore be seen as an ideal terrain for conflict but also for the encounters and exchanges between different cultures.