The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book (California Studies in Food and Culture) Review
`The Art of Cooking' was written by the fifteenth century Italian Renaissance chef identified as `The Eminent Maestro Martino of Como'. This is a truly impressive and fascinating piece of culinary scholarship published in the `California Studies in Food and Culture' by the University of California Press. For serious foodies, this book documents several trends which dozens of food writers often repeat with no historical support. The book contains four major sections by three different scholars.
The text from Maestro Martino himself is translated by Jeremy Parzen, a food historian and musician (I will wager that his musical speciality is the Renaissance). Fifty modern versions of Maestro Martino's recipes are interpreted by Stefania Barzini, a Roman food historian and journalist for Italy's National Food Channel (Shades of Molto Mario). The Introduction, endnotes, and textual editing are done by Luigi Ballerini, a poet, translator, scholar, and instructor of medieval and modern Italian at the University of California.
By far the most engaging part of this volume is the introduction that chronicles Maestro Martino's career and his times in Renaissance Italy. Allowing for the rather dryly scholarly presentation, this often reads like a pitch for a cinematic costume drama starring Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn, with the evil cardinal played by Orson Wells or Sydney Greenstreet. All this steps right out of the pages of Machiavelli's `The Prince'. So much so that Machiavelli even shows up as a character in the story of Martino's career. As a journeyman scholar, I can attest to the fact that the story is thoroughly documented so that anyone wishing to pick up where these authors left off will find plenty of material to establish a starting point.
From a culinary point of view, the most interesting facts spelled out by the introduction show that modern trends in decorative plating are a faint shadow of the kinds of extravagances created by chefs to the princes of the Italian city states and the cardinals, the princes of the church, who were often as wealthy as their secular brethren. The most important contribution of Maestro Martino appears to be the introduction of vegetables from the peasants' cuisine into the meat laden dining of the nobility. This confirms all the talk from experts of contemporary Italian cuisine that this is based heavily on the food of poverty, but it does not refute the very important observation by Paula Wolfert that one of the requirements for the rise of a great cuisine is a nobility and the corps of chefs enlisted to serve them. A secondary contribution of Maestro Martino is the extent to which he standardized culinary terminology in Italy. This was an era in which no dialect on the Italian peninsula was dominant. It was hardly a few hundred years after the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy and Boccaccio's Decameron and the invention of moveable type. And, the unification of Italy was still almost 400 years off. The editor's citing this as an accomplishment reaffirms my concerns when I find culinary writers using the wrong term to describe certain cooking actions. This only reassures me that if words are not valued, the result is Babble.
By far the most interesting experience I have in reading the recipes is in the similarities I see in these Renaissance dishes to the Medieval fare described in `The Medieval Kitchen', written originally in French by Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi. Both books document the love the 13th to 15th century nobility had for the `cookie spices', nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar. These ingredients literally show up in virtually every dish. No wonder there was such an interest in finding a way to get these little darlings more cheaply. One can almost hear the echos when we read of Sicilian cooks and recipes which like to add nutmeg to their greens. This practice is not only hundreds of years old, it is `home grown' and not as much an influence from the Saracens as one may think. And, Maestro Martino's introducing local vegetables may have been one of the things which changed tastes away from Asian spices, although I suspect their rarity and the arrival of New World ingredients had a lot to do with this trend as well.
As a source of no more than fifty recipes written so that a modern cook can follow them, this book will not be a very good practical cookbook, especially since the dishes will tend to be either too sweet or too tart for modern tastes. The modernized recipes really are best taken as a means of understanding the connection between Renaissance dishes and their modern equivalents. The only thing I would suggest to the scholars who gave us this really fascinating volume is that pairing the original recipe texts with the modern interpretation would have done much to show us what the original author said versus the modern interpretation of his recipe. I also missed a good recipe or explanation for `verjuice' which the Larousse Gastronomique describes as a sour extraction from grapes; very similar to the wine vinegars we use today.
This book and some of the others I have read recently really fuel my interest in reading a good history of gastronomy. And, if I can't find one, this book is a totally welcome treatment of food of the nobility in Renaissance Italy.
Highly recommended for anyone with scholarly interests.
The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book (California Studies in Food and Culture) Overview
Maestro Martino of Como has been called the first celebrity chef, and his extraordinary treatise on Renaissance cookery, The Art of Cooking, is the first known culinary guide to specify ingredients, cooking times and techniques, utensils, and amounts. This vibrant document is also essential to understanding the forms of conviviality developed in Central Italy during the Renaissance, as well as their sociopolitical implications. In addition to the original text, this first complete English translation of the work includes a historical essay by Luigi Ballerini and fifty modernized recipes by acclaimed Italian chef Stefania Barzini. The Art of Cooking, unlike the culinary manuals of the time, is a true gastronomic lexicon, surprisingly like a modern cookbook in identifying the quantity and kinds of ingredients in each dish, the proper procedure for cooking them, and the time required, as well as including many of the secrets of a culinary expert. In his lively introduction, Luigi Ballerini places Maestro Martino in the complicated context of his time and place and guides the reader through the complexities of Italian and papal politics. Stefania Barzini's modernized recipes that follow the text bring the tastes of the original dishes into line with modern tastes. Her knowledgeable explanations of how she has adapted the recipes to the contemporary palate are models of their kind and will inspire readers to recreate these classic dishes in their own kitchens. Jeremy Parzen's translation is the first to gather the entire corpus of Martino's legacy. Illustrations: 1 b/w photograph
Available at Amazon Check Price Now!
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Sep 26, 2010 17:00:48
Post a Comment