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Renaissance cookery
Reading a translated book by a Renaissance master cook—The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570). And getting tripped up by the use of all sorts of meats and the completely different flavor profiles favored at the time.
By which I mean you’ll be reading along and hit a recipe for truffles and chicks. AUGH. Or run across one for melon sautéed in butter or chicken fat then boiled with meat broth and gooseberries and thickened with eggs and grated cheese.
Other things are quite interesting: gnocchi existed before potatoes, being made of flour and grated bread, along with a few other things. And there’s a recipe for a garlic soup that starts with FIFTY BULBS—not cloves, bulbs—of garlic. (It’s cooked in several changes of water to kill the garlic burn.) Yeah, he’s cooking for more than a couple of people (he was chief cook to several popes), but...that’s a lot of garlic.
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And the problem is ... ?
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Ah yes the famous mid 16th century Italian vampire outbreak.
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(There's yer social distancing for ya.)
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street food
(Digression: In somewhat the same way Street Food was not so much a thing as it was just food that happened to be eaten in the street, Dessert was not a thing, there wasn’t any expectation of a distinct sweet course at the end of a multi-course meal; you could have sweet foods throughout a big meal, and sweet versus savory wasn’t a typical criterion for organizing or grouping meal components. Instead, religious strictures were a factor, seasonal availability, economics and status were a factor, and ideas about health, nutrition, metabolism and digestion — humoral considerations of the foods, the diners, the season and circumstance — were a big factor in deciding what foods were to be eaten, by whom, and in what order. It always gives me a bit of an eye roll when I read some supposedly real-historical, not fantasy/magic, description of premodern eating that features foods from wildly different seasons or regions in the same meal as unremarkable, or a meat-and-3-veg+dessert meal. Because those are so characteristically modern that relying on them misses most of the interesting features what differentiate premodern from modern foodways. I don’t eyeroll if it’s a historically inspired fantasy setting because it’s a different reality - but I think fantasy world building is so much cooler when it does consider the underlying factors and come to its own unique, internally consistent take. Like maybe in a world with institutionalized magic, they don’t have humoral theory Medieval European style, but they do have a lot of theory about how different foods, preparations, dietary habits interact with magics of various kinds.)
Another way of thinking about ‘street food’ historically is as food that is meant for traveling. Then you look at what sorts of foods, or preparations, were typical for people who were on the road a lot (and didn’t just move their entire at-home experience as the very wealthy did): soldiers on campaign, itinerant merchants, pilgrims... What did they bring with them to eat? What did they buy (or pick, gather, hunt) along the way? Quartermasters and merchants kept accounts, occasionally a literate middle-class pilgrim kept a journal or correspondence, so we can get a little idea.
(It’s gotten past my bedtime, so further nattering will have to wait til morning. Possibly recipes.)
Re: street food
Best part of the Scappi book in the original post is that he mentions what season a foodstuff is available in, so I've been keeping that in mind. XD
I know that what we consider "street food" isn't really the same thing as then, but it's a shortcut for "something this character would buy and eat on the street of this city between errands/odd jobs/reasons they're out because they rent a room where the proprieter doesn't cook for them," and as one of my betas is a foodie, I am now in the position of having to figure what that eaten thing (multiple things....) is, what the difference would be between things poorer and more well-off people are buying and eating, etc. (Given they're on the coast, a large proportion of that is going to involve fish, of course.) And how it's eaten--
Although restaurants as we know them, other than stalls or shopfronts run by guilds who prepared the meat/baked good/etc their guild had the right to prepare, are technically about 100-150 years in the future from the rough time this story is set, I have come across accounts of private groups dedicated to feasts who would rent out a hall and book a chef for a private feast several times a year, so I've, uh, extrapolated that to something like a private club where the group dedicated to feasting pays the rent on a building and retains a chef/kitchen staff and if you are part of the group you can just show up so it's in pretty much every respect like a restaurant but not a restaurant.
And the readers are going to think "That's a restaurant!" because it would be tedious to explain all that (other than dropping that it's invitation-only into the conversation), but I needed a privacy for a particular conversation to take place without it being obvious that the participants are
plotting. :)Re: street food
Anywhere crop cultivation is possible, there will nearly always be something based on the local grains, plus if they have enough abundance of any other produce so that it's cheap, that'll show up too. I'd bet on grilled/charbroiled and fried-in-oil as common on-the-spot preparations, served on a stick or straight into the customer's hands, shirttail, apron, etc.
Shortly before the time of Scappi, in the late 1400s, Bartolomeo Sacchi called Platina had published De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudinae, "On right pleasure and good health," which is sadly not available online, but there's an excellent translation in print by Mary Ella Milham, Pegasus Press, 1999, which gives some commentary and context beyond the translation. Recipes I recall include a salad of mixed wild and cultivated herbs, including fennel, dressed with oil and vinegar; a squash soup (using vegetable marrow, which we don't tend to see in the US, but it's sort of like the bastard child of a zucchini and a winter squash) flavored with wine and parmesan and almond milk and spices; a squash pie (again with the vegetable marrow, I guess they had a lot of them) along vaguely the same lines as a modern pumpkin pie: cooked squash flesh mixed with spiced custard, baked in a pie shell; a vaguely quiche-like pie of herbs/greens cooked with soft cheese, beaten eggs, and sweet spice in a pie shell; various fritters and omelets, various preparations of meats, poultry, and seafood that I don't recall.
I think all but the soup would make plausible street food.
Around the same time, an anonymous Venetian cookbook was published, with some overlap in recipes with Platina. There's a decent hobbyist translation online: http://helewyse.medievalcookery.com/libro.html