Like all other aspects of culture, taste is a product of history and changes with time and location. In culinary matters, as in other human activities, the choices, exclusions, and preferences that distinguish individuals, populations, and regions of the world have changed over the centuries. How do we know this? How can we presume to reconstruct the food preferences of people who lived and died in times long past?
This problem presents itself on two different levels. The first concerns taste as flavor, an individually felt sensation of the tongue and the palate, an experience that is by definition subjective, fleeting, and incommunicable. In this sense, the historical experience of food is irrevocably lost to us. But taste also involves knowledge, the ability to determine what is good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant. This ability comes from the mind and not the tongue (and in fact the organ of gastronomic pleasure is also the mind and not the tongue), because someone has to have taught us how to recognize and classify flavors as good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. From this perspective taste is not a subjective, incommunicable reality but one shared at the collective level. It is a cultural experience, the fruit of a tradition or system of aesthetic values (cooking as the art of eating) that the society we inhabit transmits to us from birth. This dimension, which is not the same as individual taste but conditions it to a large degree, can be examined historically by studying recipe collections and other kinds of texts. Taste is part of who we are. It can be discerned in every circumstance where previous generations have left a trace of their experiences, plans, and desires. But when we wish to discuss models of taste and how these are shaped and modified over time, we must first ask another basic question: with whose taste are we concerned here? We ask this since it is quite clear that the world is divided into at least two parts, and to say that the rich are rich and the poor are poor is to assert something that is all too obvious. Yet it is simply a fact that abundance and hunger are unlikely to lead to the same choices, and if everyone has the right to transform the need for daily sustenance into pleasure, the ways in which this is manifest are very varied indeed.
The anthropologist Marvin Harris claims that food choices are always determined by a more or less conscious calculation of positive and negative outcomes. This ultimately implies that the various dietary and culinary systems—including those that permit cannibalism—are the most economical and practical solutions historically possible under the given circumstances. According to this logic, the calculation of advantages and disadvantages leads to the creation of dietary customs, and these in turn give rise to taste, which is the appraisal of certain foods as good and others as bad.1 But if this argument holds up, it does so only when discussing the poor and the hunger experienced by the poor. Clearly, the customs of the poor are determined by the availability of food, its adaptability to preservation and cooking, and its capacity to fill the stomach. This is how we explain the taste of the masses for starchy foods: grains, root vegetables, and chestnuts. It is also how we explain their “taste” for salt (to be discussed below), which not only provides flavor but, more important, can be used in food preservation.
In the first place, habits do not necessarily correspond to taste. As Flandrin has pointed out, it is one thing to eat a particular food but another to enjoy it. In many cases, it is the element of necessity that explains the failure of these two experiences to coincide with each other.2 To be sure, peasants who had eaten dark rye bread, spelt soups, flatbread made of barley, and polenta made of millet down through the centuries became physically accustomed to such foods (at one point, physicians expounded this in theoretical terms, thus supporting the inevitability of social privilege in the name of science).3 Yet this does not contradict the fact that people have always preferred white bread made of wheat flour, which was for a long time unavailable to all but the upper classes and urban residents. Nonetheless, with a kind of historical irony the privileged classes eventually began to imagine that they recognized in these poor foods of the past a long-lost treasure of inestimable culinary worth and transformed them, according to the image and values of the marketplace, into objects of desire and symbols of a happy, innocent, rural way of life that peasants have never experienced. In reality, these objects became desirable when (and to the extent that) they seemed to be dying out, in other words, when they started to become rare.
If we reverse the terms of social reference and focus on the rich rather than the poor, we find rarity, not abundance, at the root of the taste-forming mechanism. Here the object of desire is not food that is easily and abundantly available but the rare, precious variety. It is certainly not the type of food that fills the stomach and dispels the pangs of hunger but the kind that stimulates the appetite for more. This explains the craze for spices in the kitchens of the upper classes in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as their fall from favor as soon as they became plentiful in the marketplace.4 It also explains the advice offered by some hedonists (immediately condemned by the moralists) to eat salads halfway through a meal, with the aim of rekindling the appetite.5 “These foods are suitable when one no longer feels hungry,” wrote Costanzo Felici, a sixteenth-century botanist and food expert.6 The uneconomical aspect of certain foods seems to have been an important factor in the formation of taste among the upper classes for the simple reason that “everything that is plentiful is lowly,” as Isidore of Seville observed in the seventh century, in reference to beans.7
There were nonetheless significant points of connection between elite cuisine and the cooking of the poor, both with respect to the foods consumed and the condiments used to flavor them, for the simple reason that the poor tend to imitate the rich whenever possible. And the rich in turn readily adopt “poor” foods and flavors when they desire to do so (as we see in the current success of coarse grains, a phenomenon not without precedent in the history of cooking). For this reason, it will be useful to our discussion to look carefully at the tastes of the upper classes, about which we can learn a great deal, given the availability of documentary evidence.
It seems quite obvious that our concept of cuisine, the system of flavors that we “naturally” prefer, is very different from what people looked for and considered good in foods for a long period of time (which lasted until a couple of centuries ago). Although there are many differences in the details, these disparities can be linked to a few basic notions that we no longer hold today. Contemporary Italian or European food has a predominantly analytical character, which means that it tends to distinguish between flavors (sweet, salty, tart, sour, or spicy), reserving a separate place for each, both in individual dishes and in the order of courses served at a meal. Linked to this practice is the notion that the cook should respect as much as possible the natural flavor of each food: a flavor that is distinct and different and should be kept separate from other flavors. But these simple rules do not amount to a universal archetype of cooking that has existed unchanged since the beginning of time. Rather, they are the outcome of a minor revolution that occurred in France around the turn of the eighteenth century.
“Cabbage soup should taste of cabbages, leeks of leeks, turnips of turnips” was the advice given in a “letter to household stewards” written by Nicolas de Bonnefons in the middle of the seventeenth century.8 This apparently innocent declaration ran counter to a very different way of thinking that had consolidated over the centuries. Renaissance cuisine, like that of the Middle Ages or—to go back further—the cuisine of ancient Rome, had developed a model of cooking based mainly on the concept of artifice and the mixture of flavors. Here the preparation of individual dishes and their presentation at various points throughout the meal disclose a synthetic rather than an analytical logic: in other words, the tendency to keep things together rather than to separate them. This was also in keeping with the dictates of the dietary knowledge of the era, which considered food balanced if it contained all nutritional qualities, which were manifest in turn in the different flavors. A perfect dish was thought to be one in which all flavors were simultaneously present. The cook was expected to perform an intervention on “natural” products by altering their traits, sometimes in a radical way. Cooking was perceived as an art of combination that aimed at modifying and transforming the “natural” taste of foods into something different, or “artificial.” This explains the mixing of flavors and by extension the systematic use of colorants (which made the art of the cook rather like that of the painter), as well as the quest for special shapes and textures through the clever use of cooking methods and technical manipulation. To gain a deeper understanding of the significance of these choices in the history of food and taste we must now step back and start from the beginning.
The cuisine of the Roman Empire—initially documented in several literary texts and then, belatedly but in a more organic way, in the recipe collection attributed to Apicius, composed around 400 CE—seems at first glance very distant from us. The distance shrinks, however, when we realize that many of the basic characteristics of medieval and Renaissance cooking were derived from this cuisine, and they survived until the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The combination of sweet and sour, for example, and more generally the practice of mixing different flavors had been passed down through the ages in a continuous fashion, while undergoing some important modifications, adjustments, and variations along the way. The same can be said about the use of spices and the mixing of strong, sharp flavors with sweet, salty, and bitter ones. This too was a distinctive trait of medieval and Renaissance cooking—whose origins we can easily trace to ancient Rome—and it was enriched over time with new experiences and influences. Although Germanic culture played a primary role in transforming medieval preferences in the area of food products and resources (by accentuating interest in game and in meats in general, as we have mentioned), it did not present any significant novelty on the level of taste. Here, as elsewhere, it was the Roman tradition that prevailed, conquering the conquerors.
In Roman times, “sour” generally meant vinegar, and “sweet” meant honey. Many recipes in Apicius call for the simultaneous use of both products, either as condiments or as a base for cooking. Similarly, sweet and salty flavors were mixed together, and individual preparations were flavored with doses of honey and garum, the famous sauce made from the inner organs of fish macerated in oil and herbs, which Apicius includes in several recipes with the specific goal of achieving a salty flavor. Raw “rustic herbs” are dressed with oil, vinegar, and garum,9 and it is generally understood that “if a dish tastes too bland, add garum; and if it is salty, add some honey.”10
Among strong flavors, Roman cooks had a special preference for laser, a type of resin harvested from silphium root that had a strong stench and tasted similar to garlic. After this plant mysteriously died out in the first century of the Common Era, it was replaced with asafetida, which is still used today in Asian cooking.11 In addition, Romans used nard, sumac, costmary, and myrtle berry (products that were rather exotic) to flavor their food.12 The use of pepper, a genuine gastronomic novelty, also became widespread in the first century. Pliny marvels in his Natural History at the acclaim pepper had begun to command. Its success was indeed extraordinary, since almost all the recipes of Apicius, including desserts and wines, call for its use. Other spices were also known at the time, but they were used almost exclusively for medicinal purposes or in the creation of perfumes.
The picture becomes even more complex in the “Excerpta,” an appendix attached to the collection of Apicius. These excerpts are supposedly culled from the main text, though they were in fact composed a century later (at the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century) by a writer named Vinidarius, probably an Ostrogoth living in northern Italy. Here, along with pepper, new spices are suggested for culinary use. Notably, we find ginger and saffron. Saffron has the specific function of adding color to food, which would later become a characteristic aspect of medieval cooking (propter colore).13 Cloves are also mentioned in the list of products added to Apicius’s recipes in one of the codices that have come down to us from medieval times.
There are significant traces of the Roman model of cooking in De observatione ciborum, a long letter written by the Greek physician Anthimus, who traveled to Italy to visit Theoderic, king of the Goths, at his court in Ravenna. This was the first treatise on diet and gastronomy produced in Europe in the Middle Ages.14 The lingering presence of aromatic plants like nard15 and sumac,16 the custom of cooking food in vinegar and honey,17 the repeated appearance of sauces that are typically Roman, such as oxymel (made from a base of honey and vinegar) and eno-garum (based on wine and garum),18 and the use of honey as an additive to wine and water19 are signs of a culture that, far from dead and buried, continued to survive in a vibrant way in the customs of everyday life. This culture would last for many hundreds of years more. In the eighth century, garum was sold along the banks of the Po by merchants from Comacchio, and Lombard rulers would request a payment of garum at the river port of Parma. In the ninth century, inventories taken at the monastery in Bobbio (in the Apennines near Piacenza) record the purchase of two congi of garum at the market in Genoa for the monks’ dietary provisions.20 This was probably an important product: Comacchio and Genoa evoke the image of harbors, maritime activity, and commerce. Establishments for the production of garum were also scattered around the Adriatic shore, in Istria (as we learn in a letter written by Cassiodorus in the sixth century), and as far away as Byzantium. It was in fact also thanks to ongoing commercial contact with Byzantium, the immediate heir of the Roman Empire and its culture, that an appreciable link with the Roman culinary tradition continued to be maintained.
Satisfied consumers (engravings by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli).
Source: Le ventiquattr’hore dell’humana felicità (Bologna, 1675).
The Arabs: Innovation and Continuity
The encounter with the gastronomic culture of the Arabs certainly accelerated the emergence of a new yet simultaneously ancient taste during the High Middle Ages. It was both new and ancient because it reformulated some basic traits of Roman cooking (the mixing of flavors and the taste for spices) by introducing new products and presenting older elements in a more delicate and refined manner. What the Arabs brought to this aspect of medieval civilization was completely analogous to what occurred in other areas of culture and science: the appropriation, transformation, and dissemination of basic elements from ancient Greek, Roman, and even Mesopotamian and Persian civilizations. As the most important assimilators and exporters of these cultures, the Arabs guaranteed their conservation and transmission to Europe in the Middle Ages. It was also thanks to the Arabs, rather than to an uninterrupted process of internal development, that some elements of the cuisine of antiquity survived through the centuries in revised and revitalized forms.
In the High Middle Ages the Arabs brought to the West two products that were crucial to the conservation and transformation of ancient taste. These were citrus fruit and cane sugar, which gradually took the place of vinegar and honey in cooking customs (after a period in which they were used side by side), softening the contrast between tastes and “lightening” the flavor. In areas such as Sicily and Andalusia, which experienced Arab domination directly, these changes were particularly rapid and precocious. But products tend to circulate, and in the High Middle Ages Italy already had a profusion of maritime cities and traders. In addition, for a few hundred years the Arabs, far from being disruptive to the political unity of the Mediterranean, provided a crucial point of commercial contact between Europe and the Orient through the spice markets. It was only at a later moment—beginning in the eleventh century with the launching of the Crusades—that traders, mainly from Venice and Genoa, established direct routes and ports of call in the eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the importance of the Arab contribution to the use of spices that became a characteristic of European cooking traditions by the Middle Ages remains controversial. Some scholars, such as Maxine Rodinson,21 have claimed that it was a decisive factor, while others, such as Bernard Rosenberger,22 tend to reassess its influence. The fact remains, however, that during the Middle Ages, between the seventh and eighth century, the taste for spices began to develop a profile that was clearer and more varied than that found in the Roman tradition.
De contemptu mundi, the invective against the follies of the world issued by Pope Innocent III at the beginning of the thirteenth century, did not fail to condemn the sin of greed and the kinds of gluttony recently invented by the insane passions of humankind. The pontiff observed that it was no longer enough to harvest the good things that come from the trees, the earth, the sea, and the sky. Instead, “spices are demanded, fragrances acquired,” and the strategies of the cook are engaged in the creation of every dish.
We have already noted that this was hardly a novelty in the true sense of the word. The interest in spices, already foreshadowed in late Roman cooking, had not completely disappeared during the High Middle Ages. At the beginning of the twelfth century, in praising the splendor with which Boniface of Canossa had celebrated his marriage to Beatrice of Lorraine, Donizone wrote that during the nuptial feast, which lasted three months, “spices were no longer pounded with mortar and pestle but were ground in the mill like grains of spelt.”23 Thus when the expeditions and sieges that accompanied the Crusades brought the West more directly in contact with the Orient, the spice trade exploded, responding to a demand that already strongly favored strong aromas and flavors. Italy played an important role in this turn of events, since its markets were particularly prominent in supplying spices to the West, which inevitably left a mark on local cuisine. The availability of pepper, ginger, and nutmeg (“peiver, zenzavro e moscao”) was a source of great pride for an anonymous Genoese poet of the eighth century who sang the praises of his native city in a fictional dialogue with a Lombard.24 Over time, however, Venice, not Genoa, became the dominant player in the trade of these precious ingredients.
The commercial manual complied by Francesco Balducci Pergolotti—active in Florence between 1315 and 1340—provides a list of products handled by contemporary importers. The range of spices featured here is much more extensive than in previous centuries and includes various types of pepper (black, white, and long pepper, a sweet, pungent variety highly prized in Roman times), six different kinds of ginger, cinnamon and cinnamon flowers, carnation leaves and stems, cloves, nutmeg, mace (the fibrous covering of dried nutmeg), cardamom, goat’s rue, galingale (an aromatic rhizome of Chinese origin, reminiscent of ginger but without its lemony aftertaste), and saffron. Also included are aniseed, turmeric, cassia, caraway, “paradise grains” (Guinea pepper), zedoary, cubeb, cumin, aloe, and nard. Finally, sugar appears in its various shapes and guises: powdered, in loaves, candied, refined, and tinted with violets or roses.25
The cookbooks of the fourteenth century were the earliest documents to codify these products. To understand the success of spices,26 we must remember that the dietary culture of the era placed a very high value on their role in the digestive process. Medieval science claimed that the “heat” radiating from spices allowed food to be absorbed faster and more efficiently by the digestive system by helping it to “cook” in the stomach. Spices were thus sprinkled liberally on cooked dishes and were also distributed as sugar-coated confections at the end of a meal, along with spiced wine. There was an additional, social value attached to this custom. Because of their prohibitive cost, spices were highly appreciated by the upper classes and became a status symbol in the gastronomy of the rich. Ultimately, they were associated with the magical aura of the Orient from whence they came. It was even said that spices grew on trees in the Garden of Eden (which many thought to be located in the Far East). Their exotic character thus acquired an even more compelling aspect, evoking visions of Edenic happiness and lost eternity. All these factors readily explain the superabundance of spices in the cuisine of the upper classes. The imaginary—then as now—played a major role in shaping food customs, and it was all the better if science could lend its support. In any case, the belief that spices were used to mask the poor quality of foods or to conceal the true nature of fish and meats that were spoiled, contaminated, or badly preserved is certainly false. Yet even though scholars have long shown this view to be inconsistent with the evidence, it continues to circulate with the irrepressible vitality typical of cliché. This historical falsehood springs from modern rationalism and from the presumption that only we moderns are able to choose the flavors that are good for us. What kind of taste would those medieval bumpkins, who did not even use forks, have been capable of developing? Yet cooking with spices, developing a cuisine characterized by strong, contrasting flavors, constituted a taste preference that had much to do with the scientific beliefs, fantasies, and fashions of the time. Necessity does not enter into the equation. It is enough to point out that the poor—who might well have had to eat decaying food—did not belong to the social environment where spices were consumed. These were reserved for the elite who could afford to pay exorbitant prices to acquire them in the market. This very limited group of consumers was certainly not burdened with the problem of spoiled or imperfectly preserved foods. Medieval custom considered only very fresh meats suitable for cooking—game on the day it was killed or meats expressly butchered at the point of purchase—at least among the social classes that could afford such items. This practice lasted for a long period of time, as we have already seen.27 The recipe collections show moreover that spices were added to foods at the last minute: “as late as possible” is the advice of one fourteenth-century writer. There were other, more efficient, and widely practiced methods of preserving foods, particularly the custom of salting. Ultimately, it is clear that spices were used in many different ways, with the purpose of creating the taste desired.
Of all Italian cookbooks written in the fourteenth century, the Venetian collection provides the most precise information on the gastronomic uses of these products, which is hardly an accident, given the primacy of Venice in the spice trade. It distinguishes three basic recipes, with three different mixtures of powdered spices: a more delicate preparation for light dishes (such as fish), a heavier one for strong dishes (roasts and so forth), and a mixture of moderate flavor suitable for almost any dish. The “universal” mixture (“fine spices for everything”) includes an ounce of pepper, an ounce of cinnamon, an ounce of ginger, half a quarter ounce of cloves, and a quarter ounce of saffron. The “sweet” mixture (“sweet spices for many fine, good things”) is composed of a quarter ounce of cloves, one ounce of ginger, one ounce of cinnamon flowers, and a “folio” (which probably indicates a bay leaf).28 The “strong” mixture (“strong black spices for intense flavor”) is composed of half a quarter ounce of cloves, two ounces of black pepper, some long pepper, and two nutmegs.29
In other recipe collections the uses for which the spices are intended are not explicitly indicated, but they are no less evident on this account. It is also clear that some spices enjoyed special status: pepper, perhaps because of its venerable tradition as the only spice already in use for more than a thousand years, is often cited on its own, independently from other flavors. The same occurs with saffron, but for a different reason. Since dishes of a yellow hue were often deemed desirable, it was used for coloring rather than for flavoring food. “Color with saffron,” is the advice given in the Liber de coquina, “and add other spices, if you wish.”30 The systematic distinction made in this book between saffron and other spices might lead the reader to suspect that it was a local product, and in fact we have textual evidence that saffron was cultivated in Sicily in Roman times. It was revived there in the eleventh century and spread to other regions, such as Tuscany and—as we know from Bonvesin da la Riva—Lombardy.31 The special role played by saffron proved to be long lasting. It is indeed possible that the terms crucum (crocus) and safranum (saffron), which the Liber de coquina uses over fifty times, are intended to designate two different things: the “local crocus,” mentioned by the physicians of the Salerno school, and saffron from the Orient.32 In the fifteenth century Maestro Martino uses saffron in several recipes to give dishes a yellow color.33 This chromatic variation is by far the most common. It is also the most frequently recommended, not only by Martino but by all cooks of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yellow projects the image of gold, happiness, and immortality. In a certain sense, saffron constitutes the culinary alternative to the gold emblazoned on the painted tables of the era.
The use of spices continued to signify social prestige at least until the sixteenth century, as we see in Cristoforo Messisbugo’s suggestion that the cost of a feast could be reduced in relation to the social status of the host: “One should know that when a gentleman of modest rank hosts a banquet, he may economize by using one-third of the quantities of sugars and spices, or one-half.”34 But tastes are changing. Although Bartolomeo Scappi continues to call for “Venetian spices” in a manner reminiscent of the culinary habits of two centuries earlier,35 his basic mixture contains mostly cinnamon (four and a half ounces), an ingredient that was absent in the fourteenth-century text, along with two ounces of cloves, one ounce of nutmeg, and half an ounce of “paradise grains” (Guinea pepper). He adds to these five items half an ounce of saffron and one ounce of sugar36—ingredients often mentioned separately in other recipes. Sugar in particular sometimes appears as an alternative to other spices,37 even if it is often simply added to a dish. What we see here is a trend toward greater delicacy or “sweetness.” The preeminence of cinnamon among traditional spices seems to have similar significance; at this juncture, the combination of sugar and cinnamon tends to prevail over all others.
Sweet, Sour, and Sweet-and-Sour
We have already seen that the combination of sweet and sour was a consistent element in the history of taste for a substantial period from Roman times onward. It was reinforced on the dietary level by the logic of the “temperament of opposites” and the mixing of flavors. In mapping out this history, however, we can distinguish different phases, culturally and territorially quite distinct. In some areas, particularly Italy, we note the increasing prevalence of one flavor (sweetness) over another, while in other areas (like France), the scale always seems to tilt in the opposite direction. In addition, from the Middle Ages onward, the range of products used to create sweet and sour was articulated in a more complex manner than was customary in the cuisine of ancient Rome, where it was centered on just two flavors, honey and vinegar.
As time passed new products were added, including verjuice (obtained from unripe grapes), citrus fruits (all of which were bitter, as their Italian name “agrumi” suggests, for in fact the sweet orange was not introduced into Italy until the fifteenth century), and the juice of other fruits that were bittersweet by nature. For many centuries sweetness was obtained from honey, dates, and raisins, as had occurred in Roman times. The discovery of cane sugar, imported to Sicily by the Arabs and embraced by Frederick II in the thirteenth century,38 marked an important shift and was accompanied by the diffusion of almonds and hazelnuts, used as both sweeteners and thickeners.
The view that Italian contact with Arabic culture had an influence on the revival (or simply the conservation) of the taste for sweet and sour seems substantiated by some of the recipes found in fourteenth-century cookbooks. These dishes—either known to be or thought to be of Arabic derivation—include limonia and romaia, both of which are characterized by the use of almonds, citrus fruits, and specifically the juice of oranges described as “bitter and sweet.”39 Also indicative is a recipe for “saracen broth,” used to tenderize meat with “good wine and bitter juices,” along with dates, seedless raisins, and almonds. This recipe is especially interesting for the fact that it is the only one, among the many broth preparations found in Liber de coquina, which has a sweet-and-sour flavor.40
In most other cases, the sweet-and-sour combination is presented as an option rather than assumed to be the most obvious choice. “If you wish to make it sweet and sour, add the juice of bitter oranges and sugar” is the final comment in a recipe for fish soup in the Liber.41 The same occurs in a recipe for scapece, a dish of fried fish preserved in vinegar, which provides a very interesting example of the growing taste for sweetness in the course of the Middle Ages. Here, after the fish is fried in a generous amount of oil, it is allowed to cool. In the meantime, the remaining oil is used to fry some sliced onions along with sultanas, jujubes, and plums. Spices and almonds are then mixed with wine and a small quantity of vinegar, “used in moderation, so that it will not be too sour.” The cook then places the fish in a dish and pours the wine mixture on top. Given the presence of both fresh and dried fruit, the recipe already seems quite sweet. Yet this is not enough. Clearly anticipating the possibility of objections, the anonymous compiler adds, “If you wish to make this a sweet-and-sour dish, add the required amount of must or sugar.”42 If we compare this recipe to that of Apicius (reduced to a single line: “In order to preserve fried fish at length, cover it with vinegar as soon as it is taken off the heat”),43 we notice that the biggest change is the emphasis on sweetness, not mentioned in the Roman model. One could say that the preference for sour preceded the preference for sweet flavors,44 which gradually developed alongside it. We can already see this in Roman times and again, in a more systematic way, in the Middle Ages, especially in areas where the influence of the Arabs had consolidated and relaunched the Roman tradition.
This was not, however, an omnipresent, homogenizing choice: the cooking customs of the fourteenth century carefully differentiated one dish from another, accentuating this or that flavor according to the occasion. The preferred condiment for roast crane, for example, could be a sauce made from liver, marjoram, saffron, and other “good spices, blended together in wine and vinegar along with two egg yolks and cooked must,” thus creating a sweet-and-sour flavor. The sauce used for peacock could be based on the same ingredients, “with the exception of cooked must,” a detail indicating that the desired flavor is sour.45 On the other hand, a recipe might be completely sour, like the preparation for duckling in verjuice, vinegar, and the juice of oranges, lemons, or limes. Such a recipe, however, could be accompanied by a variant calling for the addition of sweet flavors: “Add the juice of bitter orange and sugar, which will be sweet and sour.”46 Bitter sauces are recommended primarily for roast meats,47 but a full range of possible gradations unfolds before us, with the single objective of pleasing the diner’s palate. In a recipe for “peverada” we find the following instruction: “Prepare it sweet or acidic, as you wish.”48 When dealing with spices, sugar, and vinegar, the issue was never to conceal a taste (as many still maintain), but rather to invent one.49 “Regarding the questions discussed above, the wise cook will be informed on all matters, depending on the different customs of the realm, and will be able to vary and give color to foods in accordance with his best judgment.”50
We must make an important point at this juncture: although the taste for sour flavors can be found in the cuisine of all social levels, sweetness was perceived as a symbol of social privilege. While citrus fruits, which were imported from southern Italy or from the Riviera, were not widely available to all, no peasant was without access to vinegar (and this must have been the “natural” destination of many weak or badly preserved wines). As for verjuice, we know that the peasants were expected to contribute quantities of unripe grapes to their landlords.51 Sugar (though not honey, which was beginning to go out of fashion) by contrast was available only to a few and would remain so, thus becoming like many other things a sign of class difference. In the words of the writer Gentile Sermini, who lived from the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century, “Make sure that the peasant does not taste sweetness but only sour things. Rustic he is; rustic he will remain.”52
It could happen, however, that a “peasant” might pretend to eat like a lord by serving up a pan “of rice with sugar.” He would nonetheless be incapable of appreciating the refinement of such a dish and would treat it like a vulgar cabbage soup, topping it up with huge chunks of bread and turning it upside down “as people commonly do in the countryside.” Such, at least, is the behavior of a peasant featured in a short story by Sermini,53 and a clear ideological message emerges from this image: each person eats in the manner prescribed by his social class. At the same time, Sermini’s tale begrudgingly acknowledges that some sharing, exchange, and borrowing of food customs took place between “rich” and “poor” cuisine.
Between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, the Neapolitan Liber de coquina still called for an abundant use of honey in cooking. Yet it is already clear that there was a tendency to replace it with sugar, which appears with increasing frequency in a wide range of uses. While honey is added to food, much in the same way as a sauce,54 or is used as a dip for fritters,55 sugar becomes part of the basic composition of the dish,56 as well as providing a replacement for honey in its traditional uses.57 In some cases, the choice is left to the discretion of the cook, showing that this is a moment of transition, characterized by the superimposition of one custom on another. Broad bean soup is flavored with pepper, saffron, and “honey or sugar.”58 And pancakes are sprinkled “with sugar or honey” once they are cooked.59
The Tuscan recipe collection from the end of the fourteenth century, directly derived from the Liber de coquina, confirms this transitional moment, though it emphasizes the preference for sugar,60 attributing a more marginal role to honey by limiting it essentially to fritters and some desserts. The really important shift occurs in a group of northern recipe collections from the geographical area that reaches across Italy from Siena to Venice. Here honey appears even less often,61 while sugar, which is increasingly characteristic, can be found in more than 28 percent of the 135 recipes, more than doubling the percentage represented in the Liber de coquina.62 A recipe for “bozolati da monege” (small, ring-shaped cakes) establishes a sort of equivalence between the two products. “If you want [to use] honey, for every ten [that you wish to make] you need a good spoonful of honey; and if you want sugar, for every ten you need an ounce of sugar.”63 But the winner is already quite evident. Sugar is by now widely used in cooking, and it can also be added in powdered form to enhance a cooked dish: “When you are serving the food, pour some sugar into the bowl, and it will taste very good.”64
Sugar also becomes a major feature in sauces. While the Neapolitan Liber de coquina and its Tuscan imitation suggested a tart sauce “with every roast,” as we have already noted, the Venetian recipe collection firmly proclaims that a sweet-and-sour sauce based on spices, sugar, and vinegar is the “perfect reinforced sauce” and is “a good flavoring for every kind of roast.”65
The triumph of sugar may be regarded as a distinguishing trait of Italian cooking, for, if we look beyond the Alps, we see that bitter flavors still prevailed in France, and Germans continued to use honey in the traditional way.66 This was the beginning of a more delicate cuisine, explicitly acknowledged as such by those who first practiced it. The Venetian recipe collection of the fourteenth century suggests adding sugar to honey in preparing confectionery, “if you want to make it more delicate,”67 and substituting sugar for other spices in preparing food for the sick. For example, in the recipe for cotognata, a quince-based confection normally made with honey and fine spices, we find the comment: “If you want to prepare this for the sick, boil it first with a little sugar instead of spices.”68 There is the general assumption that once a dish is cooked “sugar will do it no harm.69 This foreshadows the attitude of Maestro Martino, who mentions honey on only one occasion and makes generous use of sugar in many of his recipes. Martino’s friend Platina offers the following pronouncement in a recipe for biancomangiare: “It would not be a bad thing to add a little sugar. Indeed no dish would refuse sugar, as they say.”70
“As they say” (ut aiunt): by the middle of the fifteenth century the excellence of this sweet white powder had almost become a commonplace, a universal preference that was solidly supported by medieval thinking, since the Tacuinum sanitatis had already proclaimed that hot, moist sugar “is good for the blood” and that it possesses the special, almost unique trait of being “suited to every temperament, age, season, and place.”71 In the sixteenth century—as we see in a comment of Costanzo Felici—the reputation of sugar had already become proverbial: “Sugar is an excellent accompaniment to everything, or one could make it such. As the saying goes, ‘sugar never spoils a soup.’ [It] makes eating more refined and, very frequently, drinking also, by rendering both experiences sweet and flavorful, [for] we can truly say that this is a precious food…and human nature finds great pleasure and delight in its sweet flavor.”72
Renaissance cooking became a triumph of sugar, to the great benefit of Venetian traders. Though Genoese merchants also imported sugar from Portugal, it was Venice that held primacy in its transportation, refinement, and development, a dominance that had already been in place for five hundred years. The Venetians themselves cultivated special expertise in confectionery and pastry making, while cooks in the courts and cities of Italy poured sugar into all kinds of preparations. There is hardly a recipe in Scappi’s collection that does not call for its use. In fact, there is already a rather archaic ring to Messisbugo’s pronouncement—regarding the preparation of a “sweet and strong green sauce”—that “if you want to sweeten it you can add honey or sugar.”73 Moreover, Messisbugo makes it quite clear that sugar, not honey, had become a symbol of social refinement, suggesting that only gentlemen of modest means, who needed to economize, should substitute honey for sugar in various preparations but not in the case of “white foods, Turkish rice dishes, white torte, white sauces, or other similar things that would change color with the use of honey.” His final word of advice here is: “Those wishing to cut back on expenditure might use honey…but they should add some sugar on top.”74
The Italian craze for sweetness has also been linked to the sweetness of local wines, which over the course of time would have accustomed the taste of the population to sweet flavors. Jean-Louis Flandrin has developed such a view, whereas he associates the contrasting preference of the French for bitter flavors to their habitual consumption of wines with a sharper taste, the inevitable result of the fact that the wines come from a different climate, where the vines were cultivated on a different soil.75
Certainly, Montaigne had a similar perception. During a brief stay in Florence he describes the wines served to him as possessing “a sickly sweetness, unbearable in this season.” Feeling slightly dazed at the end of a meal, he attributes his state to “the sweet white wines,” whose feebleness “does not quench the thirst” and thus induces one to drink too much.76
This was nothing new. In the thirteenth century Salimbene of Parma lists the ten qualities the French believed wine must possess in order to deserve full praise: it should be good, beautiful, white, strong, proud, fine, bold, cool, lively, and bracing. Sweetness is not among these requirements, though it is the primary characteristic of good wine according to a Maestro Morando “who taught grammar in Padua and expressed his praise for wine in these words: ‘Glorious sweet wine / makes [a man] plump and fleshy / and lightens his heart.’”77 This view is also reflected in the Regimen sanitatis of the Salerno school: “The best wines are white and sweet.”78 To describe wine as the “sweetest nectar,” as Donizone does in his account of the wedding feast of Boniface of Canossa and Beatrice of Lorraine, is thus not merely a rhetorical flourish or classical allusion.79
The Humanists, Antiquity, and “Modernity”
Did the field of gastronomy experience a rediscovery of antiquity comparable to the quest pursued by writers and scholars in the humanistic and scientific fields? The answer to this question—in the negative, as we shall soon see—is an important indication of the specificity of culinary history and the need to articulate it using special criteria, independent of those suited to other histories.
Appearances would seem to suggest the contrary. Apicius is often cited by Platina and his friends in the Roman Academy, which was under the direction of Pomponio Leto. Leto’s concept of living “in the ancient style” by adopting the habits and customs of antiquity, including dietary practices, inevitably invoked the manuscript of Apicius as an ideal point of reference. This document had been brought back to Italy in 1455 by Enoch of Ascoli, following the kind of painstaking research in libraries across Europe that had unearthed many other manuscripts during the same period.80 It is hardly surprising that the pope denounced Pomponio and his colleagues not only for conspiring against him but also for immoral conduct. The pontiff accused these men of gluttony in particular, that is, of having pursued the pleasure of eating up to the point of consuming meat during Lent, thus violating liturgical obligations in order to live and cook in the style of the pagans.81 In fact, Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine is full of suggestions of this kind. There are allusions to “Roman” meals, and “Roman” names are repeatedly assigned to dishes and diners appearing throughout the book. But is this merely an antiquarian gesture (of the type that became highly fashionable in the years that followed)82 that was not reflected on the practical level? When the Sicilian humanist Antonio Beccadelli asks Giovanni Aurispa to show him the text of Apicius, he is told that he shall receive it but should not harbor false expectations, for his own cook is greater than Apicius.83 Even in Platina’s work, the real or assumed imitation of antiquity is mostly a formality. What prevails is pride in “modernity,” a modernity that is nonetheless completely medieval, invented sometime between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, to which conscious reference is made as an extremely innovative phase in the history of taste.
Although Platina’s language sometimes mimics that of Apicius, the content is quite different, as it is derived directly from Maestro Martino’s Libro. Broth thus becomes jus, soups and torte become minutal and patina, white flour products leucophagium, and compressed fish roe ova tarycha.84 With surprising anachronistic virtuosity, pasta, which was unknown to the Romans, becomes esicium, while Apicius’s term liquamen—which had by now disappeared from the repertoire of fish sauces—is used to designate pork fat. The dietary values attributed to foods are also completely infused with medieval beliefs. When Platina writes that “meat is the food that nourishes best, and does so in the healthiest manner, and has greatest substance,”85 he is expressing a view that is very far from the world of ancient Rome, where a claim of this type would assign primacy to bread.86 But his most explicit declaration of love for “modernity” is expressed in relation to biancomangiare, a food that Platina proposes not only as a dish in itself, in accordance with the custom reflected in fourteenth-century recipe collections, but also as an “accompaniment to meat.” Platina writes: “This is a condiment I have always preferred to those suggested by Apicius. There is really no reason that the tastes of our ancestors should be esteemed above our own, because, although [our forebears] surpassed us in almost all pursuits, we are unsurpassable in matters of taste.” “Our taverns” are real, authentic gymnasia, “where there are heated debates on the manner of flavoring dishes.”87 Platina’s model here is uniquely and exclusively Martino: “O immortal gods, what cook can be compared to my Martino, from whom I have learned most of the things about which I now write?”
Even in the sixteenth century the development of the art of cooking shows substantial continuity with medieval custom. Though conscious of practicing a cuisine that was new in many respects and certainly in the vanguard when compared to the rest of Europe, Italian cooks of the Renaissance do not show any intention of challenging their predecessors (as often occurs during phases of nouvelle cuisine). On the contrary, they “prefer to adopt their precepts and assimilate their techniques, even at the cost of having to carry out corrections in order to surpass them.”88
If sweetness denotes the cuisine of the elite (as it did for a long time), the food of the poor has a predominantly salty flavor. Cured and preserved foods, which are long-lasting and guarantee a minimum of nutritional insurance throughout the year, are still part of a system of exchange that supplies delicacies to the tables of the rich. Their principal use, however, is as the basis of “ordinary” eating customs, of the production and consumption of food in the home. The rich eat fresh food, and the poor do not: from the end of the Middle Ages onward this was one of the main points of contrast between the image of rich cuisine and the food of the poor. Meats, fish, cheese, and vegetables are served on peasants’ tables, where they are flavored, monotonously, with salt. The great thirst provoked by salt certainly helps to explain the excessive consumption of wine (at least to our way of thinking) or of beer in other countries, which accompanied the consumption of food for many centuries.
Nutritional treatises, beginning with the work of Anthimus in the sixth century, advise those who are in a position to choose their own dietary regimens to avoid salted meats: “they should not be eaten, unless they really must be, since salt causes the fat to drain from the meats, making them dry and difficult to digest.”89 This advice also applies to fish.90 Naturally, everyone knows that “no food is ever cooked without salt” (as we read in Platina),91 and the physicians readily celebrate the virtues of a product that “delights the palate and gives taste to food.”92 But it is one thing to consume products preserved with salt and quite another to give flavor to fresh products by integrating salt into a symphony of flavors that come together in the cooking of dishes. Moreover, in the recipe collections intended for an aristocratic environment, salt almost never appears, except as a flavoring for salad or in the recommendation “to add salt sparingly.”93 “I will not speak of salt, because its use is arbitrary,” is Scappi’s abrupt comment on the matter.94 On the other hand, instructions are given on how to desalt preserved foods. “One need not disdain the desalting of foods preserved in salt, as this is frequently practiced, especially in the kitchens of the great.”95 The flavor of salt was thus willingly left to the peasants.
The rich cuisine of ancient Rome, which is documented in the recipe collection of Apicius, used oil more than any other type of fat; its dishes were in effect literally oozing with oil.96 This prestigious fat, a true symbol of Roman agriculture along with bread and wine, was juxtaposed with butter and lard, which were in turn symbols of the nomadic and pastoral civilization of the “Barbarians.”97 Lard also appeared in Roman cooking, but only in that of the poorer classes, of inferior cultural status. Among the agronomists of Roman antiquity, only Cato records a few recipes—for sweets—made with clarified animal fat (unguen or adeps),98 perhaps drawing on the traditions of the countryside.
Romans did not by any means despise pork; the Po valley, culturally rooted in an ancient Celtic occupation, was the center of pig farming, and it supplied pork even to the market in Rome.99 Still, it was not until the third or fourth century that pork meats appeared among the ingredients that the emperors generously distributed to the masses living in the capital.100 In the High Middle Ages the valorization of the economy of the forest as a result of the spread of Germanic culture also led to the acceptance of lard as one of the strong values of the dietary system.101 Anthimus, the first medieval writer to concern himself with dietary science, dedicates a disproportionately long portion of his treatise to lard,102 despite his own cultural background (born a Greek, he grew up at the court of Byzantium and traveled to Ravenna, then under the rule of the Goths). He suggests in fact that it may be used for vegetables and all other foods, particularly “if oil is not available.” This specification (ubi oleum non fuerit) shows that the cultural preference for oil typical of the Romans persisted even in the sixth century. But the overall context had changed in the meantime, since the political and social advancement of the Germanic people had launched a genuine campaign to promote animal fat and animal products in general. Lard also became the preferred fat used in aristocratic cuisine. Though governed by strict rules regarding the consumption of meat, even the monastic diet conformed to the habits of the population at large by adopting pork fat for cooking green vegetables and legumes.103 An exception was made, however, for Lent and other times of fast and abstinence, during which all animal products were completely forbidden.
The restrictions imposed by the liturgical calendar, which required all Christians, and not only members of religious orders, to abstain from animal products on several days of the year,104 are an important element in the history of alimentary fats. On such occasions the faithful were obliged to replace lard with vegetable oil, a fact that accounts at least in part for the emergence of the unprecedented practice of alternating lard and oil in the dietary culture of the Middle Ages. This custom did not reflect different social and ideological contexts and cultures but was integrated into the very system of consumption, which was basically the same for all members of society. The encounter between Roman and Germanic culture—with the decisive mediation of Christianity—had thus produced a new system of values that somehow included both of them. When in the year 765 a priest named Rissolfo called for a free meal to be served three times a week to the poor of Lucca, he was careful to specify that the gruel (made of grains and legumes) should be flavored abundantly with either lard or oil (de uncto aut de oleo), alternatives most probably determined by the liturgical calendar.105
Transcending differences of taste and of social, cultural, and regional provenance, a system had already evolved within which each fat had its own place. Oil belonged to lean cooking, while lard belonged to fat. This system also functioned on the economic level: the same guild often oversaw the trade and sale of all kinds of fat. Oil was included among the specialties of the “lard traders,”106 just as fish alternated with meat at butchers’ shops.
The rule requiring the alternation of oil and lard is reflected in the recipes of the fourteenth century. For example, the Liber de coquina describes a chickpea soup flavored with “with lard or oil, as the day requires” (sicut dies exigit). A pasticcio of cabbage “is made with oil on fast days [and with fish instead of meat] and with lard on other occasions.” A pasticcio of trout can be flavored with lard rather than oil when eaten tempore carnis (on days that allow meat).107 Clearly, there were many local variations. Lard appears in 25 percent of the recipes in the Liber de coquina, which was written in southern Italy, in 36 percent of the recipes in its Tuscan adaptation, and in 42 percent of those in the Venetian version.108 The alternation of fats imposed by the liturgical calendar is nonetheless the main factor determining the choice of lard or oil.
The process of integration was uneven, however, since only lard belonged to the everyday world of the common people. Olive oil was still a product of the elite and was often costly outside the regions where olives were cultivated (even though during the Middle Ages, partially as the result of an unusually mild climate, olive trees managed to grow as far north as central Emilia and the lake districts of Lombardy and the Veneto). How then could the people solve the problem of Lenten abstinence? Above all, with the help of the market, which sold olive oil of various provenance. The Venetians sold oil from the Adriatic regions (especially Apulia and the Marches), and the Genoese sold the oil from the Tyrrhenian regions (Liguria, Tuscany, Latium, and Campania). Another solution for lean days was to use oil extracted from other vegetable products, such as walnut oil, which the ancient Romans had found disgusting109 and which nonetheless enjoyed unexpected acclaim during the Middle Ages. Finally, however, in the later centuries of the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical authorities allowed the use of butter as an alternative to oil on lean days, sporadically at first and then in a general manner; this dispensation applied initially only to the regions of northern Europe, where butter was traditionally consumed (even if only by the lower classes and the peasants),110 and it was later extended to the countries of the south, including Italy.
According to Flandrin, the choice of butter in the north of Europe was determined not by taste but by distaste. The sharp flavor of olive oil, highly appreciated in the cuisines of the Mediterranean tradition,111 was unacceptable to the consumers of continental Europe, perhaps in part because Italian (and Spanish) merchants did not hesitate to profit as much as possible from the Lenten rules by dispatching oil of the worst quality to northern Europe (the English expression “as brown as oil” gives some inkling of what must have occurred). For this reason, the northern populations chose butter as an alternative fat, despite the “poor” image associated with it from the social perspective. In the course of these developments the status of butter changed, and it became a fashionable product. On the strength of its new image, it ultimately found its way even into the culinary practices of regions that were culturally linked to olive oil. The decisive shift seems to have occurred in the fifteenth century, and its effects were felt even in Italy. According to Flandrin, this was almost tantamount to a second invasion by northern cuisines of the culinary territories of the Mediterranean, following the initial invasion in the High Middle Ages that had brought about the triumph of lard in the dietary habits of Europe as a whole through the diffusion of Germanic customs.112
Man sniffing a cured sausage (engraving).
Source: Antonio Frizzi, La salameide: Poemetto giocoso con le note (Venice: Zerletti, 1772).
These two events developed, however, in very different ways and with different connotations. While the first invasion had come about—to continue the metaphor—with great deployments of troops and resources, in the form of a food culture that imposed itself through power and social dominance, the arrival of butter in the kitchens of the south by contrast happened without fanfare—indeed almost without a sound. At least at the beginning, butter was presented as a substitute for oil and thus took on the “weak” connotations of Lent and of “humble” cuisine. This is how it seems, for example, in Il registro di cucina (The cooking register), which was written in the 1430s by Johannes Bockenheym, the cook of Pope Martin V.113 Here, in the section dedicated to Lent, we find a recipe for broad bean soup that includes the instruction to add olive oil or butter for flavoring. In a recipe for pan-cooked carp, Bockenheym notes that the dish should be prepared with wine, parsley, and oil or butter.114 He also suggests butter for a torta of greens, a cheese torta, and fried eggs.115 Meat dishes by contrast are always flavored with lard or clarified fat.
Butter also makes an appearance in the cookbook of Maestro Martino, who suggests its use for flavoring pasta, by adding it to grated cheese, which had been the most widely used condiment for pasta dishes for many centuries. This innovation was adopted and repeated in subsequent recipe collections.
Even in the fifteenth century there was the persistent belief that “butter should be used mostly by those who live in western and northern regions, where oil is unavailable,” as Platina wrote, emphasizing the excellence and prestige of olive oil. But there is no longer an attitude of superiority toward the fat consumed by the “Barbarians.” Citing both ancient and contemporary views on the subject, Platina concedes that butter may be used “instead of fat or oil to cook any dish.”116 By contrast, other writers—including Michele Savonarola of Padua, the author of an important treatise on nutrition that also appeared in the fifteenth century—continue to fight a losing battle against butter, deeming it unfit to appear on the tables of the nobility: “Though many use it instead of oil, butter harms the stomach and loosens the intestines, and those unaccustomed to eating it will find that it upsets their stomachs.”117
This was not the position that prevailed in the long run, and by the sixteenth century the cuisine of the nobility regularly used butter. Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera too reflects a moment of adjustment or accommodation in relation to this issue, as it distinguishes three different levels in the use of fats: lard and clarified fat are used for fat days, butter for lean days (Fridays and Saturdays), and oil (olive and almond) for the vigils of holy days and during Lent. Though butter could if necessary replace all other fats, it has in fact also carved out a space of its own, which is clear and well defined.
In the course of the seventeenth century butter finally prevailed in all areas of cooking, even in the realm of meat, thus definitively shedding its Lenten associations. The cuisines of northern and southern Italy participated equally in this shift. Both Antonio Latini’s Neapolitan recipe collection and Bartolomeo Stefani’s, written in Mantua, frequently specify the use of butter instead of lard or clarified fat. This development also affected the preparation of sauces. Fatty sauces based on butter (or oil) now came into existence and were destined to replace the sour and spicy sauces favored by medieval and Renaissance cuisine.118
In this context, lard suffered a loss in prestige, as it no longer maintained the primacy it had enjoyed in the dietary culture and cooking practices of the Middle Ages. Even Vincenzo Tanara, a Bolognese agronomist who had a visceral attachment to the culture of pork (we have already mentioned his work on “the 101 ways” of cooking it), was perfectly aware of the uses of butter, though he does not treat it with the kind of attention he lavished on lard and clarified fat. Tanara writes: “Butter helps to create a certain consistency in the foods that are made with it and especially in dough, creating a faint crustiness or hardness on the surface, which is very pleasurable to bite into with one’s teeth…. [It also] is used in the preparation of pastas, in a thousand sauces, instead of oil, or on the spit, or for crostini, as already mentioned, and in other ways.119 Around the turn of nineteenth century butter attained even greater importance, and in 1840 a man named Carlotti from Verona, the owner of olive groves near Lake Garda, complained that “butter has replaced oil in many cooking preparations.”120
At the end of the nineteenth century, reflecting on the diverse range of traditions in the various parts of the peninsula, Pellegrino Artusi delineated a geography of cooking fats without making any reference to the liturgical calendar. He wrote: “For frying, people will use the best type of fat produced in their locality. In Tuscany there is a preference for oil, in Lombardy butter, and in Emilia lard.”121 Attentive as Artusi was to placing the different regional traditions within what seemed like the national framework of Italian cuisine, he still had to maintain the utmost flexibility and openness when suggesting the use of this or that fat: “[Use] the kind of fat that you find most agreeable.” “[Fry foods] according to the taste of the place where you happen to be or from where you have come.” “[For fat, use oil], wherever the oil is good.” “Choose between lard or butter according to local custom, which generally favors one or the other of these condiments.” Artusi’s well-meaning tolerance—his thoughtful invitation to his readers to respect the diversity of individual and collective tastes—may have attributed too much importance to territory (or place) in the definition of differences. In fact, other variables, of a social and cultural rather than an economic nature—liturgical obligations, the dietary imagination, the mechanisms of fashion—also contribute over time to building up complex layers of use value. Oil, which is characteristic of ancient times, lard, of the Middle Ages, and butter, of modernity, intersect with each other in cooking practices in a dynamic pattern that is not at all fixed or immutable.
During the twentieth century butter gained new ground, finally shaking off its elitist connotations and claiming a larger number of consumers. But the process was not yet complete, since at this point olive oil scored a new triumph over animal fats, thanks to the discovery (or perhaps more accurately the invention) of the “Mediterranean diet” by American doctors and journalists. The story is not yet over.
The Italian Model and the French “Revolution”
Many clichés have circulated on the splendor of Italian cuisine in the sixteenth century, of which Scappi’s Opera represents the most complete and mature testimony. These myths are neither devoid of truth nor entirely untainted by farfetched fantasy. Above all there is the widespread belief that Italy gave birth to the knowledge that enabled French cooks to invent a “new cuisine” beginning in the seventeenth century. This cuisine was in time to achieve cultural hegemony, parallel to the influence exerted by the court of France on every area of civil and intellectual life in Europe. There is even a line of historiographical thinking that confidently identifies the protagonists of this development as the cooks employed by Catherine de’ Medici, who in 1533 married the duke of Orléans, Henri de Valois, crowned Henry II, king of France, in 1547. It was purportedly thanks to this couple that Italian cuisine made its way to the Parisian court.
There is no documentary proof for this claim. In any case, it is hardly necessary to invoke Catherine de’ Medici to show that “Italian” culture was present on French soil. In the sixteenth century, as in the Middle Ages, there was a wide circulation of culinary techniques and knowledge among European countries in the guise of a cosmopolitan culture that knew no borders. The reciprocity of influences or rather “the circulation of ideas and types of knowledge”122 between Italy and France is clearly reflected in the recipe books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Liber de coquina proposes a recipe for meats “ad usum Francie,” for a pea soup (with Brie cheese) “ad modum gallicorum,” and a “brodium gallicanum.”123 Conversely, Italian specialties are mentioned in books written on the other side of the Alps, showing a special and rather predictable interest in “Lombard” dishes, since Lombardy was relatively close to France from the territorial and cultural point of view. Jean-Louis Flandrin notes in the French cookbooks of the time a “leche lumbard” and a “tourte lombarde,” a “crustade lumbard” and a “rys lumbard,” as well as “potage de Lumbars” and a “Bruet de Lombardye.”124 This Italian influence increased in France in the 1400s, when Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (and indirectly the work by Maestro Martino that provides its inspiration) became known throughout Europe, thanks to the fact that Platina wrote in Latin, an international language. Platina’s treatise was subsequently translated into several Italian versions and later, beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, into French, English, and German. European culture’s substantial debt to the Italian art of cooking and style of living can be ascribed to this work more than to any other source. Scappi’s magisterial Opera by contrast was never translated into French, although it was plagiarized extensively by German and French writers.125
In the same period, the adjective “French” was used to describe Giovanni de’ Rosselli on the frontispiece of the cookbook of which he was the presumed author but which in reality was entirely copied from Maestro Martino. This tells us that, even during the era in which Italy’s elite cooking enjoyed greatest esteem, “Frenchness” was already part of the image projected by this cuisine. We must remember too that German cooks were also greatly admired, a fact that is underestimated today. In the fifteenth century Germans worked in most of the important kitchens of Italy, from the Bentivoglio household of Bologna to the court of Pope Martin V, whose chef, Johannes Bockenheym, wrote a treatise on cooking between 1431 and 1435.126 There were also several German innkeepers in Italian territory. In the opinion of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, these were “the people who practice the art of innkeeping in almost all the cities of Italy,”127 and in one short story we find a German cook preparing lasagne at the monastery of San Procolo in Bologna.128 The professional pride of the “Lanzi” (as Germans were often called in the sixteenth century) is also the subject of a comic poem by Antonio Grazzini (otherwise known as “Il Lasca”), who makes his German characters speak in comically incorrect Italian.129 Even the French admired German cuisine. When Montaigne traveled through Germany on his way to Italy, he marveled at the excellent quality of the food served in German inns and regretted that he had not brought along “a cook to instruct in their ways so that some day the cook could try them at home.”130 In short, contacts between the cuisines of Italy and France (as well as Germany and other European countries) existed from medieval times onward, before, during, and after the Medici affair. Praising the ability of French and German cooks in preparing food, condiments, and sauces, the steward Giovan Battista Rossetti wrote in 1584 that, while much of the skill these men possessed was learned “from our Italian cooks,” they had developed it to a degree of “utmost perfection” by adding “a new level of refinement.”131
But how does this concern the French culinary “revolution”? Italian cooks might well have been masters in Europe, but what they taught (the profusion of spices and sugar, the mixing of sweet and sour) was still profoundly linked to the medieval culture of artifice, which reached its highest point of perfection on the Italian tables of the Renaissance. The technical skill of a cook of Scappi’s caliber is beyond question, but the culinary reformation that occurred in France in the seventeenth century was based on radically different principles, as we discussed at the beginning of this chapter. These principles were the rejection of artifice and of the combination of sweet and sour, a drastic change in the use of spices, the invention of sauces based on fats rather than acids, and the increased value attributed to “natural” flavors. The Italian recipe collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the cooks who wrote and used them, cannot be considered as providing the model for a cuisine that developed from very different, even diametrically opposed, theories and practices.
Italy nonetheless made a genuine contribution to the French model, though on a different level. In reality, many scholars agree that Italian influence was more marked with regard to food products than with regard to flavors. One of the novelties of seventeenth-century French cooking was the high value placed on vegetables and garden herbs, in contrast to the emphasis on meat that had prevailed in medieval times.132 And it was above all the Italian culinary tradition that had developed and transmitted over the centuries the preference for cooking with vegetables, as we have already seen. Fresh peas cooked in the pod, which were all the rage—the very latest in culinary fashion—at the court of the Sun King in the seventeenth century,133 can already be found in Maestro Martino’s fifteenth-century recipe collection, where they are fried along with salted meat—“Take peas as they are, in the pod, and cook them”134—and in Scappi’s Opera, where peas are stewed or served with vinegar and pepper: “tender peas boiled in the pod.”135
Besides, the seriousness with which Italian cooks approached their craft was long considered by the French as a strange eccentricity. In a well-known passage, Michel de Montaigne describes a conversation he had with a steward who had once worked for the now deceased Cardinal Carafa. Here the writer evokes the image of a man well capable of articulating his views on cooking as an art and as a science:
[I asked him about his job,] and he replied with a discourse on the science of guzzling, delivered with magisterial gravity and demeanor as if he had been expounding some great point of theology. He spelled out to me the difference in appetites: the one we have before eating, the one we have after the second and third course; the means, now of simply gratifying it, now of arousing it and stimulating it; the organization of his sauces, first in general, and then in particularizing the quality of the ingredients and their effects; the differences in salads according to the season, which one should be warmed up and which served cold, the way of adorning and embellishing them to make them also pleasant to the sight. After that he entered upon the order of serving, full of beautiful and important considerations. And all this swollen with rich and magnificent words, and the way we use to talk about the government of an empire.136
A man like this, says Stephen Mennell, is truly a “pioneer of gastronomy,” foreshadowing the theories of “good taste” that were elaborated in modern France in opposition to medieval culture.137 Mennell’s claim could be countered, however, by pointing out that the arguments made by Montaigne’s character are rooted in the dietary and culinary culture of the Middle Ages, and the reader of Platina’s work and the writings of his fourteenth-century predecessors could find ready evidence of this. In fact, even Petrarch was already lamenting in his day that men spoke of nothing other than food and that they neglected literary matters, “making cooks undergo examinations but not copyists.”138
The fact remains, however—and this was correctly emphasized by Mennell—that Montaigne’s account features in an essay entitled “The Vanity of Words” as an example of useless eloquence. Paradoxically, it was along the lines of this pejorative assessment that the (negative) myth of the cooks of Catherine de’ Medici came into being, a myth that Italians adopted in a positive sense. Even if a man of Marin’s prominence could acknowledge, on the strength of the well-known cliché, that “Italians taught us [French] how to prepare food,”139 the moralistic condemnation launched by the writers of the Encyclopédie against the artifices of cuisine—the only goal of which was supposedly “to make men eat more than necessary”—was aimed primarily at Italians. Under the entry “cuisine,” Louis Jaucourt accused the cooks from the far side of the Alps of spreading the mania for food and the ways to satisfy it: “Italians were the first to inherit what was left of Roman cuisine. They brought their knowledge of culinary abundance to the French, the excesses of which many of our kings attempted to repress with edicts, but in the end it triumphed over the laws made during the reign of Henri II. Then cooks from the country across the Alps came and established themselves in France, and this is one of the things we owe to that crowd of corrupt Italians who served at the court of Catherine de’ Medici.” As we might expect, this is followed by the excerpt we have already cited from Montaigne on the vanity of words, which includes the gastro-theological disquisition by the erstwhile steward of Cardinal Carafa.140 This was in 1754. Soon afterward we find the same passage used to support the opposite side of the argument. The anonymous writer of La cuciniera piemontese, which appeared in 1771, accepts the idea that “the many cooks who followed Catherine de’ Medici were the first to bring good taste to the kitchens of France during the time of Henry II.”141 A 1772 letter by Abbott Giovanbattista Roberti on “the luxury of the eighteenth century” denounces the “arrogant fastidiousness” of certain Frenchmen who, when they come to Italy and “take their first taste of one of our dishes cooked in a style different from what is customary on the other side of the Alps, declare outright that it is detestable.” Poor men! Little do they realize that “in the time of Catherine de’ Medici our great teachers left the hearths and pantries of Italy to instruct [that illustrious nation] in the art of sumptuous and refined food, and our cooks brought the skills of the dining table there, just as our captains brought those of the battlefield. And we read in the work of Montaigne himself of how he heard a marvelous disquisition on cooking from a cook employed by Cardinal Carafa, the like of which was unknown in all of France.”142 Francesco Leonardi went as far as to claim that “the departure of Catherine was cuisine’s final farewell to Italy.”143 And so the myth was born.
“Waters, Cordials, Sorbets, and Ice Creams”
Italians were the undisputed masters in developing methods of chilling and freezing drinks. “The real way to make all kinds of waters and cordials in the Italian style” was disclosed to the French in 1692 in a chapter in Audiger’s La maison reglée. Thirty years earlier, the same Audiger tried to obtain from the French king the exclusive right to “manufacture and sell all types of cordials in the Italian style.”144 This indicates the acknowledgment of a truly Italian invention that was already at least a hundred years old. The custom of chilling drinks—by mixing snow or ice with water, wine, or any other drink—had spread throughout Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century, though against the advice of many doctors. In larger cities this custom spread among the masses, if we are to believe a comment made by a Roman physician in 1603.145
The creation of sorbet resulted from experiments in chilling drinks, and it too became a matter of myth. Supposedly, sorbet was also brought to France by Catherine de’ Medici (and who could doubt it?). There is no documentary evidence to support this hypothesis, however, and we cannot prove that the art of sorbet making was already practiced in Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century. Yet we certainly know that sorbets—already developed to a degree of remarkable sophistication—were sold in special shops a century later, most notably in Venice and Naples. When Antonio Latini, a native of the Marches, took up service at the court of Naples in 1659, he had the impression “that everyone [in the city] was born with a special skill and instinct for making sorbets.” This pursuit was not limited to experts, however, but was also practiced by “persons of little learning,” as Latini informs us in his brief “Treatise on Various Kinds of Sorbets, or Water Ices.” His short essay, included in the book on stewardship and cooking that he composed at the end of his career, between 1692 and 1694, contains the first written recipes on how to mix sugar, salt, snow, and lemon juice, strawberries, sour cherries, and other fruit, as well as chocolate, cinnamon water, and different flavorings. There is also a description of a “milk sorbet that is first cooked,” which we could regard as the birth certificate of ice cream.146
De’ sorbetti, the first book entirely dedicated to the art of making frozen confections, was published in Naples in 1775. Its author, Filippo Baldini, discusses different types of sorbets, some made with “subacidic” fruits, such as lemon, orange, and strawberry, and others made with “aromatic” ingredients, such as chocolate, cinnamon, coffee, pistachio, and pine nuts. A separate chapter deals with “milky sorbets,” meaning ice creams, whose medical properties are vigorously proclaimed.
Literary works echo this trend. The “sorbettiera” (sorbet maker) is celebrated in a canzonetta written by Lorenzo Magalotti,147 and Parini’s young protagonist (il giovin Signore) concludes each day with the sweet, cool taste of a chocolate or coffee sorbet.148
Sorbets were produced side by side with the “flavored waters” that captivated Audiger. During his visit to Italy he wrote:
I made a vigorous effort to neglect nothing connected to confectionery and cordials and to perfect the art of making all kinds of waters, with flowers or fruits, chilled or not, sorbets, custards, barley waters, pistachio waters, and others made with pine nuts, coriander, aniseed, fennel, and every type of grain, and to give them a good flavor by emphasizing their own best qualities. I also learned how to distill all kinds of flowers, fruits, cereals, and other substances, distilling them in both cold and warm conditions, and to prepare chocolate, tea, and coffee.149
The gradual abandonment of spices is one of the most distinctive (and culturally significant) aspects of taste and was initiated in the seventeenth century by the “new cuisine” of France. This apparently paradoxical phenomenon is a good example of how the fashion of the elite is determined by cost, rarity, and the exclusiveness of the types of food consumed. Spices had indeed been the characteristic sign of rich cooking for over a thousand years, but they now began to lose favor at exactly the moment when their abundance made their use possible on an increasingly broader scale (as had already begun to occur). After all, the voyages of exploration and conquest around the globe had as one of their objectives the acquisition of spices through direct access to the site of their production. But the overabundance of aromas and flavors that flooded Europe in the sixteenth century soon generated a sense of fatigue. Now that fine spices were within the reach of many, if not all, the “truly” rich looked elsewhere for signs of distinction. The royal court of France—and by extension the nobility of the realm—rediscovered indigenous flavors. Thus chives, scallions, mushrooms, capers, and anchovies began to replace spices.150
Sweet-and-sour sauces, to which spices were added and which inevitably accompanied meat dishes in accordance with the model of medieval and Renaissance cuisine, began to disappear along with spices. Meats were now garnished with raw salads and dressed with oil and vinegar. Salads were thus transferred from the category of appetizers, to which they had belonged for centuries in keeping with a custom repeatedly reinforced by the advice of physicians and culinary experts,151 to the category of side dishes or accompaniments (contorni).152 Even sugar was abandoned, or at least marginalized, by being assigned to a specific place in the meal—the final dessert—instead of maintaining a fixed presence in every course, as Italian cooks had once recommended and still continued to do, at least to some extent.
In Italy these changes occurred very slowly, above all because the art of cooking was not really regulated by cooks, as was the case beyond the Alps, but rather by stewards and “house masters.” The question of taste had thus become secondary to such issues as supervising the formal aspects of hospitality, the staging of banquets, and the organization of the dinner table.153 The complexity or rather the complicated quality of the recipes, the excess of ornamentation, and the superimposition of culinary activities that did not always follow a linear plan were traits frequently found in Italian cuisine of the seventeenth century. They are especially evident in the recipes of Antonio Latini, which also show the influence of Spanish cuisine, similarly marked by a culture of ostentation, unappreciative of simplicity and moderation. And yet Latini dared to suggest that “the way to cook and flavor foods without using spices” was to replace them with parsley, wild thyme, and other aromatic herbs. Nevertheless, his suggestion occupies just a few lines, and he quickly shifts to a more conventional position: “Since I have taught you the way to add flavor without spices, it is time to give a recipe on how to flavor complex, constructed dishes, how to create Spanish embellishments and dishes in the Neapolitan style, with the kinds of spices that are most suitable [cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, cloves, and pepper].”154
Small signs of evolution are more readily discernible in Stefani’s “Lombard” cooking. Stefani uses spices in moderate quantities and sugar in only a few sauces (rather than adding it to all dishes, as Latini did). He also introduces the use of anchovies in sauces (a custom that lasted in Italy at least until the nineteenth century) and makes a more consistent use of fats, especially butter.155 Yet flavors and aromas are slow to change. Cinnamon and sugar are still used in soups, as they were in Scappi’s time, along with nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and, predictably, the sweet-and-sour combination. In fact, citrus fruits, or vinegar with sugar and spices, are still the decisive elements in the majority of sauces, imparting an unmistakably ancient flavor.156 Along with the lean sauces of the medieval and Renaissance tradition, we find a “butter sauce” made with a base of egg yolk and lemon juice and reminiscent of new creamy sauces, such as mayonnaise, in the “new” French cuisine.157 Yet Stefani cannot resist adding nutmeg, powdered cloves, and sugar, as well as some musk and amber (the currently fashionable aromas).158 Only in the case of “ordinary cooking,” to which he dedicates an appendix in the second edition of his recipe collection, does Stefani concede that the cook might forgo the use of spices. Here beef stew is flavored simply with garlic and rosemary: “do not add spices, for when it is cooked it will be good” (and yet he also asserts that if one wants to make the dish more dignified one must add a little pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg). The tendency toward simpler and more natural flavors thus seems ambivalent or contradictory. Still, the mental attitude that prompts Stefani to offer the following advice on the flavor of strawberries is definitely new: “Do not add anything else to this flavor, since one must be able to perceive its natural taste and smell.” Similarly, in the case of wild cherries, he writes: “this taste should not be mixed with any other ingredient, because it is very flavorful on its own.”159 Nothing is added apart from sugar.
It is clear that the climate too was changing—and perhaps to a greater degree—beyond the environment of aristocratic cuisine, which was restricted by the demands of protocol and image. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Florentine Giovanni Del Turco, a cook not by profession but “for amusement and pleasure,” already expressed reservations on Bartolomeo Scappi’s cooking practices—from which he nonetheless pillaged a great deal of information—because Scappi “makes much use of spices and sugar, which may not appeal to the taste of many people, as well ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon in particular, but this may be corrected according to the judgment of each cook.”160 He suggests that “greater prudence [should be observed] regarding the influence of noble cuisine on the alimentary practices of society…. Assuming that a superior gastronomic model exists, its pertinence outside the framework where it is naturally expressed [the cuisine of the court and the upper classes] belongs mainly to the level of representation and the imaginary [rather than taste].”161 In the end, power is not the measure of all things.
In the eighteenth century Italy’s Enlightenment philosophers argued the necessity of banishing strong flavors from the dinner table in favor of food characterized by refinement and lightness. As Pietro Verri wrote in the journal Il Caffé, “no strongly-flavored food is permitted on our table.” This choice is not merely gastronomic but also ideological in the broadly political sense, since it defies the old order, whose “showy abundance” had caused a sense of heaviness in the stomach and had led to the inability to think. “This is our meal, which we will conclude with an excellent cup of coffee. We are thus satisfied, well nourished, and not overwhelmed by heavy food, which wilts the spirit, spreading boredom through our society.”162
A “bourgeois” codification of the trend toward a greater delicacy of flavors is found in the work of Pellegrino Artusi, where it is accompanied by a thoughtful observation on the shifts in taste that occur over time. Referring to a sweet made with rice flour, Artusi writes: “The composition of this dessert makes me realize that recipes too are subject to fashion, as the taste of our senses varies according to progress and civilization. Now we appreciate a cuisine that is light, delicate, and pleasant to look at, and perhaps the day will come when many of the dishes I describe as good will be replaced by other, much better ones.”163 Only the final recipe is dedicated to “fine spices”—nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves—which must be pounded and mixed with sweet almonds in a mortar. This seems almost like a tribute to time-hallowed traditions no longer in fashion, faintly echoing the claim that “spices are stimulating, but, if used sparingly, they can help the stomach.”164
It is mainly in the kitchens of the common people—and this is hardly surprising—that the erstwhile tastes of the aristocracy now find a welcome and where they are imitated and replicated with the belated discovery of flavors that had been beyond reach for a very long time. Take, for example, the recipes that Luigi Bicchierai (also known as Pennino), an innkeeper at Ponte a Signa from 1812 to 1873, recorded in his diary along with stories and comments on events that were happening around him.165 To accompany a dish of “dressed squab,” he recommends a sweet-and-sour sauce that we might well mistake for one of the recipes found in the collections written in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance: “Take a third part of vinegar and two parts of cooked must, and if there is not enough must, two thirds of sugar, along with spices, including cloves, and finely chopped zest of lemon, pine nuts, seedless raisins, and little salt. Boil the mixture for a quarter of an hour and pour over the squab when fried.” In his recipe for a dish of fried shrimp prepared with sweet and savory flavors, Pennino notes: “Add salt, pepper and sprinkle with a touch of cinnamon. Add a hundred grams of raisins that have been macerated and then dried off, and add lemon juice also.” We can detect his explicit awareness of drawing on the tradition of high cuisine: “This is an ancient recipe that was used in aristocratic cooking. It is prepared by monastic cooks and was used whenever they needed to make a good impression on an important visitor.”166
To sprinkle sugar and spices on tortelli “like the falling snow” is an ancient practice that was carried out by the cooks of the nobility and can now be observed in the inns and farmhouses of the Alpine valleys. The sharp tang of sweet-and-sour flavors also lives on undiminished in Cremona relish and many other preparations that have come down to us thanks to a large degree to their importance in the culinary lore of peasants.
Fishmonger (“Smell How Fresh It Is!”) (photograph, Naples, 1860–1880).
Toward the Development of a National Taste
A strongly elitist model shaped the development of taste over the centuries, setting a trend for the consumption of rare ingredients and creating a preference for sophisticated combinations of flavors. This model floundered when bourgeois cuisine, which was simpler and less creative, began to assume a dominant role. In terms of the food products used, bourgeois cooking, when it first emerged, was not unlike the refined culinary model, although it showed greater concern with the cost of ingredients and the work that was necessary to transform them. There was in fact a significant level of osmosis operating between these two traditions. In moving from France to Italy, bourgeois cooking took on an air of titled nobility. We have only to remember Menon’s La cuisinière bourgeoise, which was translated into Italian under the title Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi (The Piedmontese cook trained in Paris). It was not only the presence of prized meats and vegetables that constituted the value of a dish of French origin but also an element of professional virtuosity, the clever management of heat sources, and the art of decoration, which represented a gastronomic surplus value and the ultimate mark of excellence. The quality of ingredients and the cost of labor were the two criteria around which bourgeois cuisine developed a model that was as different from the food served on the cosmopolitan tables of the aristocracy as it was from the dishes served at country feasts.
The appearance of new, cheaper, and more readily available vegetables—both fresh and preserved (in the case of potatoes and tomatoes)—on the dinner table all year long favored this revolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the tomato was the basis for a sauce used universally in restaurants both humble and grand as an accompaniment to meat and also as a sauce for pasta dishes. Its stable, moderately acidic taste and its bright red color, undiminished by the process of preservation, ensured its success, and it became an ingredient that appeared equally in the dishes of the poor, the middle class, and the aristocracy. The story of the potato was somewhat similar. Although it had a poor reputation in terms of flavor and consistency, it was nonetheless easily transported, manipulated, and combined with other foods. So the potato too became an ingredient that was used across Italy’s social spectrum, though its cultivation was still unevenly distributed in the nineteenth century. Potatoes and tomatoes also raised the issue of territorial provenance, since they were ubiquitous and easily replanted and hence constituted culinary references that were not characteristic of a single place but could be considered universal.
While the food eaten by the masses was salty, as we have noted, elite food was sweet. While the nobility dined on game, the lower classes consumed rough grains. The cuisine of the bourgeoisie by contrast favored mild or unsalted dishes, like pastas, potato, veal, and fish in white sauce, and they held these in high esteem. Bourgeois cooking showed a preference for foods that have a soft texture, a “natural” color, and flavors that were not too intense. The strongest seasonings, such as robust red wine for a marinade and a civet, and sugar for an open-faced tart, were assigned a specific, unobtrusive place and linked to a particular purpose. Preserves, and canning in particular,167 encouraged this trend toward less intense flavors, for here the ingredient guaranteeing preservation—salt or vinegar, sugar or fat—does not constitute the dominant flavor. The use of traditional pilchards, salt cod and anchovies, dried legumes, peas and beans, and pickled foods gave a popular connotation to the same ingredients that, when placed in a metallic container with oil, like sardines, or in brine, like peas, became “elegant” foods.
While simple, strong flavors were synonymous with the cooking of the poor, complex flavors, and French sauces in particular, were treated with suspicion, as they were regarded as the outcome of deliberate falsification and as hostile to the stomach. In this case, it is not the ingredient, a spoonful of concentrated broth or some sherry, a cooking base or a base of cognac, that provokes alarm but the process of combination, the alchemy that produces an unrecognizable aroma, flavor, or color. The bourgeois culinary expert uses only one weapon, the accusation of indigestibility, to discredit both extremes in the scale of sensory values, high and low. Some exceptions to the ban on mixed flavors were allowed. For the most part, these involve dishes of regional provenance—dolceforte salt cod, hare, and boar—thus simply proving the rule. Many of the dominant tastes of past centuries survive on the margins of the culinary heritage.
Even when beset with hunger pangs, a man can retain his prejudices or rather his ideological preferences. A well-to-do urbanized Italian who enrolled in the Giovine Italia movement before 1860 and became a nationalist later expressed distrust toward unfamiliar condiments and downright hostility toward those from abroad. Faced with exotic products his prejudice grew out of all proportion. If Bouvard, Flaubert’s employee, “feared spices as though they could set his body on fire,”168 Pellegrino Artusi gives repeated proof of a similar sense of repulsion. Seeing macaroni served on the streets of Naples, he laments the fact that the dish “is flavored with a great deal of pepper and sharp cheese.”169 His use of the adjective “sharp” (piccante) is telling. The sauces thus described in La scienza di cucina contain capers, from which the vinegar has been removed, a couple of chopped anchovies, and lemon.170 “Sharpness” does not require pepper, paprika, or ginger, and it can be accepted only within the limits of a culinary style that is refined, soft, and oily or characterized by flavors that do not linger on the palate, quite unlike foods such as garlic, the flavor of which returns to the mouth from the cavities of the stomach.
This does not mean that the power of salt in the cooking of the masses cannot be attenuated or diminished. Although salt cod is not “suitable for delicate stomachs” (and for this reason Artusi repeatedly states that he cannot digest it), it is presented in numerous recipes as a desirable and widely available product. This preserved food is found in a large geographical area both inside and outside Italian borders (la brandade de morue, for example, appears in the book with the title “baccalà Montebianco”), and it thus merits recognition as one of the typical values of a bourgeois code of taste. Differences between one region and another can be played down with a kind of gastronomic compromise: a complicated local recipe for macaroni alla napoletana can be juxtaposed with a simpler version if necessary. In this case, the differences serve to bring together parts of the country with different histories into a sense of national unity that confers legitimacy on them.
Nationalism is not simply a private, bourgeois sentiment that attaches to the map of Italy images of wines and other specialties, along with their marks of distinction: pictures of salt cod on Vicenza, pickled carp on the Alpine lakes, paprika and figs on Aspromonte. The state in fact presides over the nationalistic tendency with its effort to remake Italian society from below. The armed forces were among the institutions that had the greatest influence on the leveling process, especially during the four years of World War I. Until 1916 the breakfast ration for an infantryman consisted of the following items (in addition to bread, which was measured separately): “120 grams of dried figs, or 150 grams of chestnuts, almonds, walnuts, or hazelnuts (unshelled), or 40 grams of cheese, or 30 grams of olives and sardines or herrings, or 200 grams of fresh apples.” This is the hypothetical reflection of the kind of breakfast that might be eaten by peasants from different regions, as it includes traditional dried and salted preserves. Yet it was distributed to all soldiers of the same rank, including those from the cities, whose families had abandoned the countryside and dried figs centuries earlier. The items on the list are not only high in calories but also have strong flavors, with the result that breakfast tastes similar to the meals consumed later in the day. In 1917, the following year, the ration changed to include eight grams of roasted coffee and ten grams of sugar.171 The culinary unification of all the soldiers thus countered the disparity among regional diets, in keeping with the model offered by Italy’s French and English allies. The bittersweet taste of coffee, already permitted as an exception during the Crimean War in order to fight cholera and make up for the lack of wine,172 was now (and will always be) associated with waking up in the morning and resuming physical activity. Coffee was one of the “nerve foods,” along with tea and chocolate, which were officially prescribed and made available in this way during World War I with the specific objective of increasing the daily dose of stimulants.
But coffee was not the only industrial product that was provided daily to all. Dried pasta, canned meat, salt cod, cheese (Swiss, fontina, sbrinz, provolone, and ewe’s cheese) also reveal a concerted effort to unify taste. What is occurring here is the creation of a dual system of values: we observe on the one hand the valorization of tradition, memory, and a sense of roots and on the other a contemporary emphasis on industry and the military front. The barracks and the trenches thus became a school of nutritional modernization and the (temporary) suspension of local traditions, since the promotion and consumption of some foods necessarily involved the elimination of others.
The development of an Italian taste resulted from this leveling process, with the bourgeois model functioning as the “high” point of reference. The “low” point is found in the consumption of rancid foods in workers’ cafeterias, school refectories, and summer camps and in the kitchens of hospitals and other institutions financed by the state. It was not only the outbreak of war that imposed the same kind of food on both soldiers and civilians but also the social project of a centralized society, collectively supported by public and private forces alike. The persuasive power of this regime was all the more efficient for the fact that it made the foods consumed by the Italian lower-middle classes available to all, as we have seen in the case of coffee and sugar. It does not surprise us, then, to find clear traces of the sensory preferences that characterize Artusi’s work and the recipe collections of the early twentieth century in Marshal Fornari’s Il cuciniere militare (The military cook), written during the Fascist era. Here we note the scant presence of spices (pepper and cloves), a limited use of salt, and a tendency to moderate the use of fats. A hot, spicy sauce intended to accompany a dish of boiled meat for a hundred men calls for just one liter of vinegar and ten grams of pepper. Here too vinegar rather than pepper is equated with a hot, spicy taste. Lard or oil is suggested as a fat. Fornari recommends, however, that these be used sparingly, reminding his readers that “in the kitchens of the wealthy, the cooks completely remove the fat from gravies and sauces, first during preparation and again just before serving.”173
The tastes of the masses developed through imitation but were consolidated in the soldiers’ mess, through rationing restrictions (which were particularly severe between 1940 and 1946), and as a result of the higher living standards that enabled the widespread growth of the canning and preserving industry. It is hard to identify clear-cut patterns in an increasingly complex nutritional panorama, characterized not only by the contrast between the rural and urban populations but also by class differences in the cities, where internal migrations played an important role in altering the face of neighborhood markets. Yet if any dominant values can be distinguished, these are represented by industrial products. A can or a cube of meat extract could function as a unit of taste, both in the popular imagination and in prevailing culinary standards. The leading Italian food industries not only sought to standardize products, conditioning the tastes of consumers, but also conferred an added value on these products corresponding to the effort of cleaning and cutting, preparing and parboiling the ingredients. Cirio tomatoes and Arrigoni meat extract could be added to the panoply of timesaving, partially prepared foods and—according to the recipes advertised by these manufacturers—could be used in a great variety of preparations. The variable constituted by the specific cut of beef or by the time involved in cooking and in skimming or straining broths thus disappears thanks to a cube of meat extract with the same color and flavor in millions of servings. The same holds true of the ripening, selection, and boiling of San Marzano tomatoes. The elimination of such variables is hardly surprising, since the same ingredients were packed into cans and sent all over the world and the same finished products were destined for markets everywhere.
A dish created with the help of partially prepared foods, such as a packet of macaroni or a can of peeled tomatoes, would not explicitly compete with homemade products such as fresh pasta or with dishes from the repertoire of refined cuisine (such as a pasticcio di maccheroni). It too could involve variations, both at the preparatory stage—for the cook must decide how firm the pasta will be when served—and in the final flavoring. Since distinct regional traditions existed side by side in Italy throughout the twentieth century, with the single term piccante (hot or spicy) indicating two radically different levels of sensation in Calabria and in Emilia, what is involved here is not simply adding a condiment but adjusting the flavors. The principal ingredients were no longer those that conferred the dominant flavor (since this flavor was created in a factory and intended for everyone, it had to be of moderate intensity) but rather the secondary ones, which could be called the “discretionary” seasonings. One of the characteristics of the industrial production of preserved vegetables (typified by the Cirio Company, whose history spans the entire twentieth century) was to provide a range of similarly marketed products that the consumer could quickly transform and personalize with a few simple procedures in the final phase of preparation. With a packet of spaghetti, some peeled tomatoes purchased in a can, and some anchovies for the sauce—all available throughout most of Italy—the consumer could create a pasta dish whose real seasonings were parsley, garlic, pepper, peppercorns, and one or more cheeses, which in turn could be sliced or grated, highly salted or less highly salted, according to personal preference. It is the combination of spices, herbs, and milk products—the most ancient flavors—that constitutes the aromatic character of such a dish.
At least this was the case in what is now a bygone era of culinary history. In preparing pasta today, it is in fact quite possible to eliminate all local or seasonal variants by using garlic-flavored olive oil, a can of grated cheese or a package of the vacuum-wrapped variety, and frozen parsley for the final seasoning. Such developments have reduced both the time spent shopping and the work carried out in kitchen, attracting consumers to precooked foods that need only to be reheated. The most successful of these dishes are those that correspond to generic tastes and are increasingly recognizable at a national rather than a local level. The number of packaged Italian foods available in every supermarket in Europe continues to grow, and there is an especially strong demand for standardized items, such as tortellini di pasta with a hundred different fillings, giving rise to a level of uniformity in the products consumed without eliminating the existence of variants.