Renaissance cookery

[telophase]

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.

Comments

[yhlee]

Reminds me weirdly of Paul Dickson's Chow, a history of American military food, which has sample recipes that serve 50. Because of course they do. (I have never been tempted to make one, even scaled down for five...)

[telophase]

Heh, yup. I'm a bit surprised at the sizes of the recipes here because the intro talked about how the author, unlike most contemporary authors of his day, did recipes for 1 or 2 persons and I'm like WHERE? WHERE ARE THESE RECIPES?