a lenten spinach pie
torta d’herbe da quaresima
boiled cauliflower with oil
cavolfiore all’olio
ricotta and cream cake
torta bianca alla bolognese
In 1989 the Victoria and Albert Museum held a special event called ‘Una Notte in Italia’ and, as part of this, I gave a cookery demonstration. Because of the historical overtones of the venue I decided to show how to prepare a Renaissance dinner. My dinner was, of course, conceived as a twentieth-century meal and not as a proper Renaissance meal, when each course would have contained many different dishes, all placed on the table at the same time.
The recipe for the torta d’herbe da quaresima comes from one of the first culinary books to appear in print, the Libro Novo by Cristoforo di Messisbugo. The torta is a typical example of the cooking of the sixteenth century, when sweet and savoury ingredients were combined to form a perfect harmony. Sweet ingredients were included in Renaissance, and Roman, recipes in order to enhance the flavour of the food, which sugar does, rather than to sweeten it. Buy Italian spinach, the kind that is in bunches, or very young leaf spinach. The large beet spinach is not suitable.
My choice for the second course is a fish dish, from two recipes by the great Bartolomeo Scappi, who flourished between 1540 and 1570 and was chef to Pope Pius V. The fish Scappi suggests is pike, carp or eel, all great favourites at the time. At my demonstration I used lovely chunks of eel, but I’ve also made this recipe with hake or halibut steaks, and it works well. I expect it would also be quite good with salmon steak. Most salmon is farmed nowadays and I find its taste not good enough for it to be simply steamed or grilled.
Next in this dinner I would serve a simple salad of boiled cauliflower taken from the Brieve racconto di tutte le radici di tutte l’erbe e di tutti i frutti by Giacomo Castelvetro. Castelvetro was born in Modena in 1546 but wrote this booklet in England, where he took refuge after he was banned from Italy, having incurred the wrath of the Inquisition through his leanings towards Protestantism. He dedicated his Brieve racconto to his patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford. The book, which has now been translated into English by Gillian Riley, is not a cookery book but a eulogy of the fruits and vegetables of his native country. There is in Castelvetro’s writing all the nostalgia and passion for something once enjoyed, now lost. When I first came across this book in 1975 in the Biblioteca Comunale in Milan I was taken back to the time when I first arrived in England in the early 1950s and the only vegetables were cabbages and lettuces in the summer plus, of course, potatoes and carrots. Nothing has changed, I thought, in 400 years!
Most of the vegetables are cooked in the simplest ways, such as the cauliflower in this recipe. ‘We have in this season,’ Castelvetro wrote, ‘cauliflowers, which take pride of place for goodness and beauty among all the other species of the cabbage family. First cooked in lightly salted water, they are dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper.’
If you want to add a little ‘body’ to this course, serve some boiled new potatoes, even if they could not have figured in a Renaissance menu. Potatoes, which of course came originally from the New World, were hardly eaten in Italy until the nineteenth century.
The sweet, a very delicate soft cake, in effect a cross between a cake and a pudding, is derived from a recipe by Bartolomeo Stefani. Stefani was chef to the Marquis Ottavio Gonzaga of Mantua during the seventeenth century. His fascinating book, L’Arte di Ben Cucinare, was published in Mantua in 1662 and has now been reprinted in a facsimile edition by Arnaldo Forni. As well as recipes it contains instructions and advice, information and menus, ending with the menu of an extraordinary banquet served by his patron to Queen Christina of Sweden when she stayed in Mantua on her way to Rome.
The description of the room and table décor make fascinating reading. In the middle of the table there stood a sugar sculpture of Mount Olympus, with the altar of faith, on top of which were two putti holding a royal crown over the Queen’s coat of arms. At each end of the table there were four orange trees, with fruit and leaves made of jelly. Between the trees stood two colonnades made of sugar, designed by an architect, one with 12 Corinthian columns and the other with 12 Doric columns. Between the column of one row there stood sugar statues of early warriors, while between the others there were statues of ‘the most virtuous men who have ever lived’.
The dinner began with strawberries and marzipan sweetmeats shaped like birds. Fruit was always served first during the Renaissance, because it was supposed to help the digestion. After 400 years this belief is gaining favour again; many dieticians advise eating fruit half an hour before the beginning of a meal. Plus ça change . . .