Ginger

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was an impressive woman; prioress of the Benedictine convent of Disibodenberg, founder of the community of cloistered sisters in nearby Rupertsberg, the composer of twenty-seven symphonic compositions, author of works on stones, fish, reptiles, metals, plants, and medical remedies, and a celebrated visionary “who imagined the presence of divinity… [to be] accessible in the earth’s plant matter.” Whether or not Saint Hildegard (she was canonized in 2012) perceived divinity in ginger is unknown but one thing is certain. She was hesitant to recommend its ingestion.[1] Ginger, she warned, “is an injurious food for a healthy or fat person. It makes him ignorant, languid, and lewd.”[2] These warnings having been stated, she nonetheless went on to recommend ginger as an effective purgative. Others also believed the spicy rhizome to be healthful, however, they maintained that its benefits lay elsewhere. The Benedictine monk, physician, and translator of a treatise on sexual intercourse, Constantine the African (died before 1098/99) touted ginger, as well as cloves and cinnamon, as an aphrodisiac, its spiciness viewed as a stimulus that fueled burning desire and enflamed heated passion.[3]

Hermann Adolph Köhler (1834-1879), Medizinal Pflanzen zenzero, 1887 

Such aphrodisiacal value aside, the medicinal benefit of ginger had been noted in the west for almost a thousand years before Hildegard von Bingen and Constantine the African were born. Citing as his authoritative source the first century text De materia medica, Galen (129-217), who has been called the Father of Medicine, recognized ginger’s “warming” and digestive property, stating that it “softens moderately the belly, being good for the stomach.”[4] The influential philosopher-physician Avicenna (980-1037) concurred, noting further that it improves memory by ridding the head of excess fluid. Papal account books indicate that medical theory was put into practice. In 1340, a “whopping thirty-two pounds of ginger” were consumed by Pope Clement VI (Papacy 1334-1352), who was suffering stomach aches.[5] The quantity is impressive and while few were able to get their hands on such a large amount, it was to be had, and not only in a single variety. La pratica della mercatura, a commercial handbook compiled shortly before 1340 by a Florentine banker with experience in the Eastern spice trade, lists three kinds among 288 itemized spices.[6]

Cookbooks are far less specific when it comes to variety (aswathy vs. karthika vs. maran vs. himgiri, etc.) but they do record a widespread use. Johannes Bockenheim, a German ecclesiastic, cook and probable author of Registrum Coquine, circa 1430-1435, put ginger in “Hare with Black Peppery Sauce”, “Chicken or Pigeon Pastillum”, and it is most likely that ginger was one of the “sweet spices” he added to “Pork Liver for Pimps”.[7] In this respect, Bockenheim’s Registrum Coquine follows De re coquinaria (On the Matter of Cooking), a book of recipes attributed to the first-century Roman gastronome Apicius but one that was likely written at the close of the fourth century or the beginning years of the fifth. De re coquinaria includes ginger in some twenty dishes.[8] By the seventeenth century, the sweetness of ginger was exploited. Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies to Adorne their Persons, tables, closets, and Distillatories, with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters, 1630, includes a recipe for ginger candy. “Take a quarter of a pound of the best refined sugar… powder it: put thereto two spoonfuls of Rosewater: dip therein your Nutmegs, Ginger roots &c.” These days, confectioners have taken Mr. Plat’s recipe a step further, dipping candied ginger in dark chocolate.

Whatever the health benefits of ginger may or may not be – and here it is worth noting that today researchers in Ohio assert that ginger is more effective against seasickness than Dramamine, Japanese scientists say it works as a cough suppressant, researchers in India argue that it lowers cholesterol, and so on – in medieval times two things were uncontested. 1) Ginger was not cheap and 2) it adds zip to cocktails. Concerning the price of ginger, a pound of ginger root cost roughly three-and-a-half times a carpenter’s earnings per day in the Kingdom of Navarre in the early fifteenth century, or roughly the price of a sheep in England.[9] The high cost can be explained by the distance ginger traveled from Asian fields to European markets. Indeed, and as Marco Polo (1254-1324) noted, ginger was neither rare nor costly in Fu-chau (Fuzhou, China). Here, said Polo, “ginger and galingale are superabundant… for a Venetian groat you could buy a quantity of fresh ginger equivalent to 80 lb.”[10]

Tractatus de Herbis, 1559. (earliest surviving version, circa 1330)

As for the second point, any beer drinker knew full well that ginger enriched the taste of ale. Wine makers also recognized ginger’s palate-pleasing quality. In his recipe for Gascoigne wine in The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets, and may be called The Huswiues Closet, of health-full prouision…, 1573, John Partridge included “gynger” among the ingredients.[11] In truth, spices such as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, coriander, and anis had been added to bitter wine as a sweetener since antiquity. Ginger continues to be used in alcoholic concoctions not so much for the sweetness it contributes but for the zing it adds. In The Drunken Botanist, 2013, Amy Stewart adds ginger liqueur to a Sake Cocktail. Ginger beer, which is traditionally a mixture of water, sugar, lemon, ginger, and yeast, is essential to her Moscow Mule.[12]

Today some 43% of the ginger that is available around the world comes from India. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that many of us are familiar with its taste through Indian cuisine. Nor is it surprising that Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published just three years after the governance of India was transferred to the British Crown from the East India Company in 1858, included a recipe for “Indian Chetney Sauce” [sic], a combination of sour apples, tomatoes, sugar, cayenne pepper, shallots and ginger. I buy my chutney or, if I am lucky, have some made from local produce by my brother and sister-in-law. I do, however, make my own Lahori chicken curry, which calls for a medley of “sweet spices”: cinnamon, mustard seed, cloves, cardamon, pepper, and, of course, ginger.[13] The combination is wonderful.

• & CHEERS….. & thanks for reading my musings. It has been fun.

John Partridge, Recipe for Gascoigne wine in The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets, and may be called The Huswiues Closet, of health-full prouision…, 1573.

The Receipt. Take a Gallon of good Gascoyne Wyne: then take Gynger, Gallyngale, Camamyll, Cynamon, Nutmegs, Grains Cloues, Mace, Annys seedes, Fenel seedes, Carawayes seedes: of euery of them a dram. Then take Sage, Myntes, Redroses, Time Pelittory of the Wall, Wylde Margeru, Rosemarie, Peny moutayne: otherwise called Wilde Time, Camamyll, Lauender and Auens, of eueri of them one handful: Then beate ye Spices small, and bruse the Herbs, & put al into the Wine: and let it stand. xii. howres: styrringe it diuers times: Then stil it in a Limbeck, and keep the fyrst pint of the water, for it is the best: then wil come a second water, which is not so good as ye fyrst.

---

[1]  Sara Ritchey, “The sacrificial herb: Gathering prayers in medieval pharmacy,” Postmedieval, vol.  9 (2018), page 434.

[2] Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica, tans. Priscilla Throop (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998), pages 17-19.

[3] Paul Freedman, Out of the East. Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008), pages 72-73.

[4] Alain Torwaide and Emanuela Appetiti, “Herbs in History: Ginger.”  https://www.ahpa.org/herbs_in_history_ginger

For Galen on ginger, see Hygiene, book VI. 15.

“In the Greek tradition alone, there are over thirty extant illustrated copies of Dioscorides’ treatise, De materia medica. The oldest illustrated copy …contains over 300 illustrations of plants…” Sarah R. Kyle, Medicine and Humanism in late medieval Italy. The “Carrara Herbal” in Padua (New York: Routledge, 2017), page 32.

[5] Jack Turner, Spice: The History of Temptation (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), page 126.

[6] Freedman, Out of the East, page 11.

[7] Marco Gavio de Rubeis, Early Italian Recipes. Vegetables Fruit, Herbs, and Flowers (Historical Italian Cooking/I Doni delle Muse, 2022), page 56. Anonimo Toscano, Libro de la Cocina, ed. and trans. Marco Gavio De Rubeis (Historical Italian Cooking/I Doni delle Muse, 2022), page 229. For two examples 

(Hare with black pepper sauce and Chicken or Pigeon Pastillum, see Johannes Bockenheim, Registrum Coquine [circa 1430-1435], A Medieval Cookbook,intro. and trans. Marco Gavio de Rubeis (Historical Italian Cooking/I Doni delle Muse, 2021), pages 106-107; 119-120.

[8] Torwaide and Appetiti, “Herbs in History: Ginger.” https://www.ahpa.org/herbs_in_history_ginger

[9] Turner, Spice: The History of Temptation, page 46; Freedman, Out of the East, page 127-128.

[10]  Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham(London: Penguin Books, 1958), page 231.

[11] John Partridge, The Treasurie of commodious Conceits, & hidden Secrets, and may be called The Huswiues Closet, of health-full prouision. Mete and necessarie for the profitable vse of all estates both men and women: And also pleasaunt for recreation, With a necessary Table of all things herein contayned, Gathered out of sundrye Experiments lately practised by men of great knowledge. By I. Par. Imprinted at London by Richard Iones. 1573.  https://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/treasurie.pdf

[12] Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist. The plants that create the world’s great drinks (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pages 166-167.

[13] For several recipes, see Suvir Saran and Sephanie Lyness, Indian Home Cooking (New York: Clarkson Potter/ Publishers, 2004), pages 111-114.

Honey, melons & mellifying

“And the fresh honey, Tom – I’ve always said it was the best nourishment.” – Thomas Mann, Bruddenbooks: The Decline of a Family, translated by John E. Woods (New York, 1994, page 4000… with thanks to Beatrice)

 

Living in England and recalling the milder climes of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, the well-traveled and then exiled Giacomo Castelvetro (1546-1616) enthusiastically celebrated the abbondanza of his homeland in a small book dedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford. In addition to describing the profusion of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that filled Italian gardens and graced its tables, Castelvetro offered his readers a mélange of memories, an assortment of recipes, and some gardening advice. Concerning the latter, for example, he informs his reader that although honey has “many exceptional qualities… the most amazing [is] perhaps… its capacity… to preserve grafts or cuttings, especially from wild fruit trees.”[1]

I appreciate Castelvetro’s equivocation on this matter. Indeed, I would argue that inserting the qualifying term “perhaps” is critical when considering honey’s “many exceptional qualities.” I choose a different quality to put in first place. Honey, it turns out, is an impressive preservative. Castelvetro acknowledged this as fact with what is surely a fiction.

“The Secret of how to preserve melons”

“Melons can be preserved for a long time, by taking them from their mothers while still young and putting them in a jar of honey….  This was discovered by chance in the city of Modena….

A prosperous grocer had his shop very close to the part of the marketplace where these fruits were sold, and it often happened that gentlemen who liked to pick and choose melons for themselves, would find that their servants were not at hand to carry them, and would leave the bags in the grocer’s shop… [until] they remembered to send for them. One day a large number of melons was deposited there, and the apprentices piled them all up on a bench, under which were some jars or vats of honey. The bench collapsed from the weight, and one of the melons fell unnoticed into one of the honey pots….” Unfortunately, an errand boy was accused of pilfering the melon. It took many months before the boy’s innocence was proved. A full year after the melon tumbled into the golden murkiness of a vat of honey it was found, “wiped clean and restored to its owner as fresh and good as the day it was first picked.”[2]

Astounding! But not as astounding as a recipe (of sorts) that can be found among the 1,892 entries on medicinal uses of plants and animals in the Compenium Materia Medica, 1597. Compiled by the Ming dynasty physician, herbalist, and pharmacologist Li Shih-chen (1518-1593), the Materia Medica lauds the preservative capacity of honey but offers an unsettling illustrative example. While Castelvetro was to speak of melons, Li Shih-chen wrote of “mellifying” man.

“In Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes in and partakes of honey.” When death overtakes the honey-loving subject, his companions “place him in a stone coffin full of honey where he macerates.” The body safely submerged, the coffin is sealed shut and inscribed with the date. “After one hundred years, the seals are removed. A [medicinal] confection is formed for the treatment of broken and wounded limbs.”

While this “confection” of mellified man was generally prescribed for topical application, the compendium’s author tacks on a rather startling addendum. “A small amount [of mellified man] taken internally will immediately cure the complaint.”[3]

I realize this discussion has taken a decidedly odd turn yet honey’s medicinal value, which has received a lot of press over the centuries, deserves a few words. Long before the publication of Li Shih-Chen’s Materia Medica the abbess, visionary, botanist, author, and composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) offered a honey-based recipe for a concoction to treat “a person who has black turbulent eyes.” Combine 2 parts honey with 1 of rue then mix both in good cheer wine together with a “crumb of wheat bread.” Other remedies using honey include one useful in treating scrofula, a tuberculosis-like condition affecting the lymph nodes. The abbess advises that a bandage consisting of honey smeared on a lettuce leaf be applied to the affected area. Additionally, she notes that skin ruptures do well when spread with mugwort and honey that is then covered with egg white (presumably uncooked).[4]

Beehives, Theatrum Sanitatis, late 14^th century Lombard Manuscript (Rome: Casanatense #4182)

In truth, there is no end of praise for the versatility of honey as a curative. The Tacuinum Sanitates, which relies heavily on an 11th-century Arab medical treatise, celebrated its capacity to “cleanse the chest and stomach; purge the abdomen; it keeps the humours of the flesh and mouth from decaying. It heats the blood and is suited to those with cold, moist temperaments.”[5] There are few ills, it seems, that cannot be assuaged by honey.

An appreciation of honey – and the industrious bees that make it – has been around for a very long time. Biblical citations are numerous. In Exodus 3:17 God charges Moses with leading his people “out of your affliction in Egypt, into the land of the Canaanites… – a land flowing with milk and honey.”

A similar description occurs in Deuteronomy 8: 7-8.

“For the Lord your God is bringing you/ Into a good land, A land of streams,/ Of springs and underground waters flowing/ Out in valley and hills,/ A land of wheat and barley, of vine/ And fig trees and pomegranates,/ A land of olive trees and honey.”

An Egyptian official who fled to the safety of Asia during the reign of Senusert I (ca. 1971-1926 B.C.E.) concurred. Canaan, he said, has an abundance of figs and olives and a “plentitude of honey.” Canaan was also heralded as a land in which there was “more wine than water.[6] Albeit with a bit of concocting license, one ends up with a glass of honey wine, or mead. In its earliest form, mead was pretty basic. After “honeycomb was drained of most of its honey,” it was soaked in water to extract all that remained. “This honey water would have fermented naturally in the presence of wild yeast.” Voilà!

Beekeeping in ancient Egypt, tomb relief, Pabasa’s Tomb

But wait! As Oscar Wilde said, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” Fermented honey water was all fine and good but just didn’t do it for the Greeks. They mixed their mead with beer and wine, referring to the resultant concoction as kykeon, meaning mixture. No wonder the sorceress Circe was able to transform Odysseus’s sotted sailors into pigs.[7]

Should you want to ferment a bit of your own, try Columella’s recipe in De re rustica, ca. 60 C.E.

“Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water (about ½ liter) with a [Roman] pound of honey (or approximately 1/3 kilogram). For a weaker mead, mix a sextarius of water with nine ounces of honey. The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rainwater, then boil spring water.”[8]

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Beekeepers and Birdnesters, ca. 1568

As noted in A hundredth good pointes of husbandrie, 1557, mead is particularly appropriate for the revelries of the winter holiday season.

“At Christmas take hede, if their hiues be to light:

Take honey and water, together well dight.”[9]

And before Christmas brightened long, December nights there was Saturnalia to illumine Roman spirits during the month’s shorter hours of daylight!

Writing during the reign of Domitian, the Roman poet Statius described the public feast at the Colosseum during the celebration honoring the god Saturn that was held annually during the month of December. Dawn was just beginning to shed light on the masses crowded into the great amphitheater when sweetmeats suspended from a line stretched over the vast space began raining down, together with “whatsoever was famous from Pontic nut groves,/ Or falls from the fertile slopes of Idume;/ That which devout Damascus grows upon its branches/ Or thirsty Caunus ripens.”

More than sweetmeats and nuts fell “freely in ample plunder.”  So, too,  did dates and “soft cakes and honey cheese fritters.” (Silvae I. 6)

Such delectable comestibles were accompanied by spectacle: “female gladiators and dwarves, buxom Lydian girls, and dancers from Cadiz.”[10]

The festivities of Imperial Rome during the reign of Domitian had nothing over those of the Papacy during the pontificate of Pope Clement VI (1342-1352). A Frenchman by birth and rearing, Clement VI returned to France following his election to St. Peter’s throne and purchased Avignon for 80,000 florins from Queen Joan I of Naples.” The display of wealth at his dinner parties matched that of his land purchases. His tables were covered with cloths woven of Flanders linen and Italian silk. Tableware was gold and emblazoned with the pope’s coat-of-arms. Menus were rich, courses many (up to 30), and the pourings of wine – Châteauneuf-du-pape – liberal.[11]

Although not picturing a papal feast, the “January” page from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1410s, undoubtedly reflects the luxuriousness of Clement VI’s court

——————————————————————————————

In their wonderful book Buon Appetito, Your Holiness, Mariangela Rinaldi and Mariangela Vicini suggest the following recipe for a dish worthy of the papal table.

Old-Style Pecorino and Walnut Pie*

3 eggs

¾ cup sugar

½ cup strawberry honey

8 oz. very fresh Pienza pecorino cheese, sieved

1 cup sheep’s milk ricotta

¾ cup potato flour

2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

1 ½ shelled walnuts, finely chopped, and 12 shelled whole

12 egg whites, whipped stiff

Shortcrust pastry for one pie

½ cup powdered sugar

Whisk together the eggs, sugar and honey. Little by little, add the pecorino cheese, ricotta, potato flour, all-purpose flour and chopped walnuts. Blend together and then amalgamate the 12 egg whites, to add volume and density to the mixture. Turn out this dough into a buttered pie dish lined with the shortcrust pastry, even out and bake at 325° F for 45 minutes. Serve the pie sprinkled with powdered sugar and decorated with whole shelled walnuts.

[*Rinaldi and Vicini, pp. 152-153].

————————————————————————————

Honey continues to hold an important place in holiday fare, binding together dried fruits, exotic spices, and nuts in wondrous cakes and cookies including buccellati.

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/buccellati-recipe

Pulcinella wishes all a honeyed holiday season. Grab a glass of mead and a slice of buccellato di natale, and toast the coming year.

 

 

 

[1] Giacomo Castelvetro, The Fruits, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy (1614), translated by Gillian Riley (Blackawton, Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2012), pp. 71-72.

[2] Castelvetro, The Fruits, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy, pp. 71-72; and Gillian Riley, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp.250-51.

[3] Rachel Roach, Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), page 222.

[4] Hildegard of Bingen, Physica, translated by Priscilla Throop (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998), respectively, pp. 38, 49, and 56.

[5] Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995) p. 52. Like so many other comestibles, the value of miele depended wholly on the patient’s balance of humors. Honey, according to Baldassare Pisanelli’s Trattato della natura de’cibi et del bere, 1611, was bad for those who were choleric. Do not, therefore, put honey in the tea of someone who is characterized by a fiery temperament, but do not hesitate to sweeten a senior’s cup of tea with the amber colored stuff.

[6] Joan Goodnick Westenholz, ed. Sacred Bounty, Sacred Land. The Seven Species of the Land of Israel (Israel: Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, 1998), p. 15. Also see, https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-02/what-we-can-learn-ancient-egyptian-practice-beekeeping

[7] Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist. The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 116-17.

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead#cite_note-26

[9] http://www.larsdatter.com/beehives.htm

[10] John F. Donahue, The Roman Community at Table During the Principate (Ann Arbor,MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 17-18. Sweet and the color of gold, honey was recognized as a perfect holiday gift.

“In ancient times Romans gave friends a glass jar full of dates and dried figs in honey, along with a bay leaf branch so the coming year would be as sweet and full of good fortune as the gifts.” Carol Field, Celebrating Italy. The Tastes and Traditions of Italy Revealed through its Feasts, Festivals and Sumptuous Foods (NY: William Morrow & Company, 1990), p. 289.

[11] Mariangela Rinaldi and Mariangela Vicini, Buon Appetito, Your Holiness. The Secrets of the Papal Table (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000), pp. 111-113.

FUNGHI

Delicate chanterelles, ruddy bright-capped russula, saffron milk cap lactarius deliciosus, and of course the wonderfully earthy boletus edulis, known to the French as cèpe, to the Germans as the Steinpliz, and to the Italians as funghi porcini. Mushrooms come in all sorts of shapes and colors – little white button caps, white-speckled red bulbs, orange-beige ruffled ribbons, blue and violet parasols… it’s amazing! There are about 750 species of genus russula, roughly 450 lactarius, and too many subspecies of the morchella genus to even count (in part because mycologists can’t agree on which funghi should be classed as such). Herein lies a problem. If mycologists are unsure about what counts as which type of fungus then what is the unlearned fungaiolo, or mushroom hunter, to do? This is not an idle question. [1] As tales of fungus intrigue make clear, eating mushrooms can be a risky business.

Writing in the first century Pliny the Elder duly noted that “among the things which it is rash to eat I would include mushrooms. Although they make for choice eating they have been brought into disrepute by a glaring instance of murder!”[2] Pliny, the first century cataloger of all natural thing who died in the miasmic air of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, was referring to the death of the Roman Emperor Claudius in October (prime mushroom hunting season) twenty-five years earlier. As Pliny – as well as Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, and Josephus – tell the story, Claudius’s third wife, Agrippina the Younger, knew her mushrooms well. More to the point, she did not hesitate to use that knowledge to achieve a much-desired end. Like any doting mother, Agrippina wanted the best for her son, Nero (sired by Gn. Ahenobarbus). But that meant getting Claudius off the throne and putting Nero on it. Agrippina’s plan was simple and effective. One day between the sixth and seventh hour, Agrippina joined Claudius to enjoy the antics of a troupe of comic actors. As they watched, the imperial couple munched on mushrooms. With a show of affection and taking care with each selection, Agrippina alternately popped a delicate field mushroom first into the mouth of the portly Claudius and then into her own. Within hours, the Emperor was dead, Nero assumed the throne, and rumors went wild. Was the mushroom itself poisonous or simply the vehicle for the delivery of some other toxin? In either case, it is worth keeping in mind Pliny’s advice to those who feel compelled to indulge then do so only when snakes hibernate. Apparently, the delicacy of mushrooms makes them particularly susceptible to absorbing whatever is wafting in the air and this includes the poisonous “breath” of any serpent slithering past.[3]

buying mushrooms in Barcelona

The ill effects of ingesting the wrong sort of mushroom is by no means limited to antiquity.  According to Voltaire, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI suffered Claudius’s fate in October 1740.[4] Emperors were not alone in being fed toxic funghi. On multiple occasions the Madonna dell’ Arco, whose shrine is on the outskirts of Naples, was credited with saving the life of someone who mistakenly ate the wrong sort of mushroom. Take the case of “Giovanni Andrea and Rebecca di Martino, both having eaten poisonous mushrooms, were near death” when they prayed to the Madonna, who beneficently restored them to good health.[5] The many accounts of poisoning-by-mushroom may very well explain Alessandro Petronio’s denunciation of the mushroom as the “excrement” of the earth! In a chapter devoted to “fonghi” in Del viver delli Romani et di conserver la sanità, Petronio, who was the pope’s private physician, claimed mushrooms “suffocate” the breath, cause stupor, and trigger apoplexia, which, claimed Voltaire, is what felled Charles VI![6]

Buying mushrooms in Richmond, Virginia

With all of these dangers in mind, cooks and botanist composed lists of “safe” mushrooms and prescribed methods of preparation to ensure safety.[7] The eminent maestro Martino of Como instructed the readers of his cookbook, circa 1465, to first clean mushrooms then boil them in water seasoned with garlic and bread before frying![8] Bartolomeo Scappi offered more recipes in The Art and Craft of the Master Cook, 1570. To prepare a thick soup of salted mushrooms, soak the mushrooms for at least eight hours, changing the water repeatedly. Once the saltiness is gone, chop the mushrooms and sauté in olive oil flavored with spring onion, pepper, cinnamon, and saffron.[9] To be honest, it would be a lot easier to simply pair mushrooms with a hearty serving of pears. For well over a millennium, pears were considered a natural antidote to fungus toxins. Hence, “Pyra sunt theriaca fungorum!”[10]

But historical assessments of mushrooms are not all couched in warnings and disparagements. Aztec prostitutes reportedly kept mushrooms on hand for their clients.[11] An explanation for this practice may be found in a directive King George IV (1762-1830) issued to his ministers in foreign courts. It concerns the most prized of funghi, the truffle. George’s ministers in Turin, Naples, and Florence were “instructed to forward by state messenger to the Royal kitchen any of those funghi that might be found superior in size, delicacy or flavor… it being a positive aphrodisiac which disposes men to be exacting and women complying.”[12]

Given this wondrous – and decidedly checkered history – it is not at all surprising that Alice stumbled upon mushrooms in Wonderland. Having grown quite small – a mere three inches in height, Alice encounters the Caterpillar lounging atop a mushroom. As he puffs his hookah he quizzes her. “What size do you want to be?” asks the Caterpillar. A bit bigger would be nice, Alice responds. And with that “the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.’ ‘One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?’ thought Alice. ‘Of the mushroom said the Caterpillar… and in another moment it was out of sight.”[13]

 

… and here’s a lovely recipe from Angie’s Southern Kitchen:

Wild Mushroom Tart

Pie Crust click here for pie crust recipe

Filling

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter ~ additional to butter pans
2 medium shallots finely chopped
1 garlic clove minced
1/2 pound Cremini mushroom thinly sliced
1 pound assorted wild mushrooms thinly sliced ~ I used shiitake, oyster + more creminis
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 teaspoon salt
fresh ground pepper
1/4 cup mascarpone cheese at room temperature
1/4 cup whole milk
2 large eggs
1/2 cup grated fontina cheese
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 375. I made my crust and put it in the tart shell pans with removable bottoms. The size shown is a 6 inch tart pan and it made 4 of them. I buttered them really well. After I had the pie crust in the shell, I placed all on a baking sheet. Then made the filling. I saute my shallots in the oil and butter until tender. Then added the garlic for just a second then mushrooms and thyme. I saute mushrooms until almost all moisture was gone. I let the mushrooms cool and then added them to a bowl. Then add the remaining ingredients to the bowl the salt, pepper, mascarpone cheese, milk, eggs, fontina and parmesan cheeses. Once this is mixed well add it to the prepared pie shells. Do not over fill. I baked mine for 20 minutes and they came out nice and golden brown and the crust was wonderful nice and crunchy on the bottom. We all love it! Great recipe….I just love it when I find a good one!! Thanks Smitten Kitchen!

http://www.angiessouthernkitchen.com/2013/01/wild-mushroom-tart/

And for good measure: my lobster raviolo topped with truffle

 

[1] Of course, one can always turn to A.M.I.N.T. (Associazione Micologica Italiana Naturalistica Telematica), which catalogues about 1,200 types of mushrooms.   http://www.amint.it/ You will need to register and pay a nominal fee.

[2] Pliny, Natural History, book 22, chapter 46, 92-93. Also see V.J. Marmion, “The Death of Claudius,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (May 2002),, vol. 9 (5), 260-261.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1279685/

[3] Pliny, Natural History, book 22, chapter 48, 100.

[4] “Charles the Sixth died, in the month of October, 1740, of an indigestion, occasioned by eating champignons, which brought on an apoplexy, and this plate of champignons changed the destiny of Europe.” Voltaire, Memoirs of the Life of Voltaire (London: G. Robinson, 1784), pages 48–49.

[5] Michele Miele, Le origini della Madonna dell’ Arco. Il “Compendio dell’historia, miracoli e gratie” di Arcangelo Domenici (1608) (Naples-Bari: Editrice Domenicana Italiana, 1995), page 175, miracle no. #126.

[6] Alessandro Petronio, Del viver delli Romani et di conserver la sanità [1581], trans. M. Basilio Paravicino (Rome: Domenico Basa, 1592), 136. Apoplexy is difficult to define during that period but seems related to stroke.

[7] In his treatise The Fruit, Herbs, and Vegetables of Italy, Giacomo Castelvetro (1546-1616) names 8 types off edible mushrooms but also references “a huge variety… whose names do not come immediately to mind.”
Among the named, are: Field mushrooms –“ small, very white and “not a bit harmful”; Ovali – egg-shaped. “Although considered some of the best, and quite good, it is better all the same to be on the safe side, and boil them” before consuming a bowl full; Parasol mushrooms – eat only those that have “a ring in the middle of the stalk,” a true sign that they are safe for human consumption; Boletus or porcini – “They are highly esteemed, whether eaten fresh or salted”; Polmoneschi- in addition to eating them, “we use them [when dried] in Italy to light the fire on winter nights.”

Roman mushrooms, which the local population refers to as ‘fongaruola,’ are “buried in a terracotta pot filled with the best garden soil and watered every morning.” The yield is impressive. A single pot “will produce 15 or 20 mushrooms by the next morning.” In Rome “many fine lords and cardinals have pots of them on their windowsills.” See Giacomo Castelvetro, The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy (1614), trans. Gillian Riley (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2012), pages 99-103.

[8] Martino of Como, The Art of Cooking. The First Modern Cookery Book, ed. Luigi Ballarini, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), page 68.

[9] Terence Scully, trans., The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570). L’arte et prudenza d’un maestro cuoco (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), page 362, recipe no. #235.

[10] Ken Alba, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), page 254 and 259. The quote Pyra sunt theriaca fungorum comes from Prosper Calanius, Traicté pour l’entrenement de santé, 1533.

[11] . Jan G. R. Elferink, “Aphrodisiac Use in Pre-Columbian Aztec and Inca Cultures,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 9 (2002), 1-2.

[12] John Davenport, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs, circa 1869, as quoted inMiriam Hospodar, “Aphrodisiac Foods: Bringing Heaven to Earth,” Gastronomica, vol. 4 (2004), page 90.

[13] Excerpt from the 5^th chapter, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, 1865.

Butter… & curd

 

Let’s start with the basics. It’s a matter of language… butter versus curd.

“In simple terms butter is an edible fatty solid made from cream and milk by the process of churning.” In fact, it’s quite fatty, containing at least 80% butterfat by current industry standards. By contrast, “curd is a soft, white substance formed when milk coagulates” either because it has soured or been treated with enzymes. This coagulated milk is “used as the basis for cheese.”[i] Just for the record, and with the following rhyme in mind,

Little Miss Muffet

Sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey…,

whey is the liquid that’s left after milk has curdled and been strained in the cheese-making process.[ii]

So much for the basics!

Butter and curd are decidedly not the same thing. And certainly no self-respecting cook or host would substitute one for the other at table! But as obvious as the distinction might seem, the difference between butter and curd is not clear… at least if you read the Bible. In fact, one edition of the Bible uses the word butter while another uses the term curd.

I’m not sure how I started down this path but it began in earnest when I consulted a Concordance, an index of principal terms found in the Bible. My Concordance, a wonderful leather-bound volume that I found years ago at a yard sale, was published in 1845. In it butter has a comparatively impressive presence with no less than ten Old Testament passages cited. With these citations in hand, I began leafing through different editions of this incredible text. It took only moments to discover that I was confronting a challenge. I couldn’t find any of the cited references to “butter” in either the Revised Standard Version of the Catholic Holy Bible or in the Holy Scriptures published by The Jewish Publication Society of America in 1966. In its stead was the word “curd.” Curious and undaunted by this language substitution, I next turned to The Authorized King James Version of the Bible published by Oxford University Press in 1944. In this edition of Holy Scripture the word “butter” did, in fact, appear. Moreover, it did so precisely as my Concordance of 1845 had noted. What’s this all about? An attempt at an explanation is, I think, required.

——– butter churns & firkins used for storage

 

Before considering this and several of the passages in question, it is, I think, worth mentioning that my Concordance indexed “curd” only once. The passage itself, Job 10:10, doesn’t use the noun curd but rather the verb “curdled.” Notably, all three of the editions of the Bible that I consulted – the Catholic Holy Bible, the Holy Scriptures published by The Jewish Publication Society and the King James Bible – used the same word: “curd”. Here, there are no butter substitutions!

Remember that Thou hast made me of clay [says Job];

And wilt Thou not turn me to dust again?

Didst Thou not [also] pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?[iii]

——- History of Job, manuscript illumination, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Department                        des manuscripts, Latin 15675, folio 5v.

There are two possible ways to read this. One takes into consideration the idiomatic meaning of “to curdle,” as in ‘it made my blood curdle with fear and terror.’ Let’s face it, the “sore boils” that blistered Job’s body from head to toe can be understood as disfigurements that resembled lumps of soured milk that would cause anyone’s blood to curdle with horror!

The second possibility is far more palatable but it also calls for thinking creatively. On the one hand, it requires that we visualize in our mind’s eye what curd looks like. (Think cottage cheese!!!) On the other, it asks us to imagine what butter looks like after it has been shaped and molded in wondrous ways.

For centuries, butter has been a medium for sculpture. Bartolomeo Scappi, for example, made note in 1571 of several butter sculptures featured at a banquet, including “an elephant with a castle on its back” (a personal favorite) and “a unicorn that has its horn in the mouth of a serpent.”[iv]

In more recent history, Caroline Shaw Brooks (1840-1913), the enterprising wife of an Arkansas farmer, produced the greatly celebrated butter sculpture Dreaming Iolanthe, 1873.[v] With that in mind, consider the single biblical reference to curd. To me, it can be read as anticipating the later use of butter as a medium of sculpture. In Job 10:10, God is characterized as a sculptor. Not only is He the creator of Adam and Eve, having modeled both of clay (Genesis 2: 27), He is also cast as a sculptor (if you will) for here he gives shape to poor Job’s face and body by “curdling” it with soured milk!

As for Caroline Brooks, she was by no means the first sculptor to use butter as a material suited to the art of modeling. Horatio Greenough (1805-1852), the artist responsible for the marble statue of a toga-clad and very oratorical George Washington (1832), was said to have displayed his craft of butter sculpting before a coterie of ladies enjoying tea with his mother. Antonio Canova (1757-1822), the master famed for, among other works, a recumbent and suggestively [un]covered statue of Pauline Borghese (1805-08), also was said to have sculpted butter. Working as a lowly scullery boy, he molded a lion that won him some serious financial backing.[vi]

—– Minnesota State Capitol modeled of butter

The stories about Greenough and Canova may belong to the world of myth and conceit but Brooks was the real deal. Instead of wielding a hammer and chisel she shaped and etched figures with butter paddles, cedar sticks, broom straws, and a camel’s hair pencil! Clearly, she was in the vanguard. More than two decades after Brooks’ Dreaming Iolanthe garnered critical acclaim, butter sculpture began to come into its own in the arena of the fair, if not in the world of art. Among the featured exhibits at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901, was a rendering in butter of Minnesota’s State Capitol. Measuring over eleven feet in length and five feet in height, the work had kept John K. Daniels and his brother Hacon Daniels busy for at least fifteen hours a day, every day for more than five weeks. A fitting, albeit ephemeral, tribute to the “bread & butter state,” Minnesota, which sponsored the Exposition project![vii]

But back to butter versus curd.

I will settle the issue of terminology with Pliny the Elder’s first century, encyclopedic compendium concerning “the nature of things,” The Natural History. Butter, or butyrum in Latin and βούτυρον in Greek, means quite simply “cow cheese.” Let’s now face facts. “Cow cheese” is precisely the stuff of curd and butter so let’s go with butter as the catch-all term.

Pliny did more than supply us with a working definition of butter. He addressed the issue of its consumption. Butter, he informs us, is “held as the most delicate of food among barbarous nations, and one which distinguishes the wealthy from the multitude at large.”[viii] Writing several decades before Pliny, Strabo put a different spin on butter-eaters. Mysians, who dwelled in ancient northwest Asia Minor, or Anatolia (present day Turkey), abstained from eating meat, preferring to live on honey, milk and cheese. Perhaps because they shunned slaughter, they lived, according to Strabo, “a peaceable life, and for this reason are called… god-fearing.”[ix] Here, Strabo implies that there is something righteous about milk-products, including cow-cheese or curd or butter. So, too, do many of the biblical references noted in my Concordance.

In Genesis 18: 8, for example, butter is one of the comestibles that the God-fearing, devout, and virtuous Abraham set before the angelic strangers who visited him just before the destruction of the sin-ridden city of Sodom. The significance of the meal offered by Abraham is explained in, among other places, Deuteronomy 32: 13-14. Here butter joins honey as well as the “finest of wheat” and “the blood of grape” (wine) as the food that God bestows upon the righteous. No wonder then that in Isaiah 7: 14-15, a passage understood as foretelling the coming of Christ, we read the following.

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.

Behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a son

and shall call him Immanuel.

He shall eat butter and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.”

I don’t want to push the equation of butter and godliness too far. Neither do I want to suggest that keeping idle – female – hands busy with the butter churn was a way to keep the fairer sex out of the proverbial playground of the devil. That’s me reading into a text! The truth is that butter, or at least the task of churning milk into butter, had its fair share of devilish overtones and undercurrents. Popular imagination saw pixies in the cream! Hence, for centuries, churners chanted charms when cream proved slow to clot. They did so with the hope of countering any and all spirits that might hinder their labor.

“Come, butter, come,

Come, butter, come;

Peter stands at the gate

Waiting for a butter cake.

Come, butter, come.”

According to Iona and Peter Opie, the editors of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, there is more than a little evidence to suggest chanting while churning was a widespread and long-lived practice. “Supernatural aid has been consistently called upon through more than 400 years of Protestantism. Thomas Ady, writing in 1656, knew an old woman who said the butter would come straight away if it [“butter, come, butter”] was repeated three times, ‘for it was taught [to] my Mother by a learned Church-man in Queen Maries days, when Churchmen had more cunning and could teach people many a trick.’”[x]

If all of this is just too unpalatable for the secular at heart, dump the milk and try the following recipe from Giovanni de Rosselli’s Epilario, or the Italian Banquet…, 1516. “To counterfeit butter,” grind 1 pound of blanched almonds with half a glass of rosewater, add a bit of sugar and, to make it yellow, some saffron. Let the mixture thicken over night and presto![xi]

Otherwise make your “cow cheese” even more delectable by following the recommendation in Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies to Adorn their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distilleries, with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters, 1603, which explains “How to make sundry sorts of most daintie Butter, having a lively taste of Sage, Cinamon [sic.], Nutmegs, Mace, etc.” Simply mix into your churned butter a few drops of oil extracted from one of the above listed herbs and spices. Delicious!

For my part, I’m going to slather some of the creamiest of butters on a slice of bread right now!

 

Ina Garten’s Recipe  for Herb Butter
Ingredients:
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced scallions (white and green parts)
1 tablespoon minced fresh dill
1 tablespoon minced fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Directions:
Combine the butter, garlic, scallions, dill, parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Beat until mixed, but do not whip.
2012, Ina Garten, All Rights Reserved

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/herb-butter-recipe.htm

Endnotes:

[i]http://www.mydairydiet.com/en/what-is-butter-and-curd/comparison-1-5-13

[ii] During the long medieval period, butter was a rarity in winter months when cattle had little to graze upon. The new shoots of spring led ultimately to the sweetest butter being churned in the month of May, as both Mikael Agricola (ca. 1510-1557) and Bartolomeo Scappi (ca. 1500-1577) observed.

[iii] Here, and throughout unless otherwise noted, I use the Holy Bible, revised version, Catholic Edition, 1952 translation for the Old Testament.

[iv] Bartolomeo Scappi, The Art and Craft of a Master Cook in Terence Scully, The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570) (Toronto University Press, 2011), page 398.

[v] Pamela M. Simpson, “Butter Cows and Butter Buildings. A History of an Unconventional Sculptural Medium,” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 41, no. 1 (2007), pages 1-20.

[vi] Simpson, “Butter Cows and Butter Buildings. A History of an Unconventional Sculptural Medium,” page 2, note 6.

[vii] Karal Ann Marling, “’She Brought Forth Butter in a Lordly Dish’: The Origins of Minnesota Butter Sculpture,” Minnesota History, vol. 50, no. 6 (1987), pages 218-228, specifically page 223.

[viii] Pliny, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock and H.T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), book 28, chapter 35.

[ix] Strabo, Geography, book 7, chapter 3. https://books.google.com/books?id=xjIzAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA454&lpg=PA454&dq=Strabo+%22capnobatae%22&source=bl&ots=h2pANDkj-W&sig=75vWElcxj-sItWzLPgHqBP25ml0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi4o-yokOPRAhWO8oMKHSFqDKQQ6AEIIzAC#v=onepage&q=Strabo%20%22capnobatae%22&f=false

Accessed January 27, 2017.

[x] Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pages 124-125, rhyme no. 85.

[xi] Giovanni de Rosselli, Epilario, or the Italian Banquet Wherein is Shewed the Maner How to Dresse and Prepare all Kind of Flesh, Foules or Fishes. As Also How to Make Sauces, Tartes, Pies. With an Addition of Many Other Profitable and Necessary Things (London: William Barley, 1598), n.p.

GARLIC

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food begins the entry on garlic with a truth. This liliaceous plant with its pungent bulb has played quite “an ambivalent role in Italian gastronomy.”[1] Perhaps that’s to be expected from something that, says Wikipedia, propagates asexually and produces hermaphrodite flowers! Propagation aside, garlic’s ambivalence is its magic. As any cook knows, it has a remarkable capacity to assume, as stated in The Oxford Companion, “many personalities – raw and crude, it has an aggressive bite which disappears when lightly cooked in oil, or simmered in stews, when it becomes sweet and mild. Crushed with salt… it gives pungency to sauces…, it can be mild and nutty when pickled,” and it is lively in a salad! But that’s only a part of the magic.

The “many personalities” garlic assumes in kitchen pots and on dining tables is more than matched by a long and often ambivalent history in which it is celebrated for its curative powers and condemned as injurious, the source for all sorts of ills.

The magic – and magical potency – of garlic was recognized, it seems, from the moment of its emergence into European culture. In his encyclopedic Natural History (XIX. 101), Pliny the Elder (died 79 CE) noted that “whenever they take an oath, the Egyptians swear by garlic and onions as though they were gods.” Why garlic and onions were granted this honor rather than, say, saffron, is not disclosed. In any event, the ancient Egyptians seem to have held garlic in high repute, for it made its way into Tutankhamen’s tomb. Garlic, fit for a pharaoh, was also valued as a food especially appropriate for galley slaves, soldiers, and those performing heavy labor.[2] It was a marvel. In fact, Pliny devotes an entire chapter (book 29, chapter 34) to garlic. Among it’s more amazing feats is the job it does in crop fields, protecting newly sown seeds “from the remorseless ravages of the birds.” All you need to do is boil the garlic and scatter it about. Birds will be become “stupefied” by it and drop to the ground like a stone… but only momentarily so. Industrious farmers will have just enough time to gather and remove these dazed birds before they come round! Could this ability to ward off threats have inspired Bram Stoker to choose garlic as an effective vampire-repellant in Dracula, 1897? Perhaps. It certainly seems to speak to a belief in its ability to keep the unwanted away. Between a top-floor apartment I once rented  in Rome and the ground floor was an obstacle of an impressive pile of garlic and onions. The old woman who created this smelly mélange believed it kept the black cats that roamed the neighborhood away from her door! I think it did. I never saw a cat within a block of the building!

But back to garlic’s medicinal history.

Garlic made it into the most renowned medieval texts devoted to women’s health. It is referenced in the Physica of Hildegard of Bingen, who was Abbess of Rupertsberg, (1098-1179) and the Trotula, a 12^th century collection of three books.  The latter reflects the practices advocated by a group of physicians in southern Italy who knew the practices advocated in classical texts and were also fluent with the progressive ideas of Arabic medicine. Hildegard recommended eating garlic raw but in moderation “lest a person’s blood becomes too hot.”[3] Trotula, described as a “wise woman from Salerno” in a letter dated 1059, includes garlic in list of “hot” foods that can help women suffering from a “paucity of menses.” And, again because of its heat, she considers it bad for wet nurses. A variation on the theme of garlic’s heat and consequential benefits is found in a passing remark by the Sephardic Jewish scholar Maimonides (1135-1204). In deciding which ordinances of Abraham Ibn Ezra to include in the Mishnah, he opted to omit one cited in the Babylonia Talmud (BT 82a). Although eating garlic on Sabbath eve had been a “custom” because it “aided” the production of semen, he apparently felt it necessary to prescribe the practice.[4]

More generally, Trotula prescribed garlic as a component in a recipe for benedicta, “so-called because of all the things from which it is comprised [including wild garlic], it is blessed.” In this concoction of spikenard, roses, ginger, saffron, poppy, pepper, and other things, garlic is something of a miracle ingredient, good against gout and for problems with the kidneys.[5]

These uses continued in the centuries to come as still others were added. In the 16^th century, Pietro Mattioli of Siena prescribed garlic for digestive disorders and, interestingly, as helpful to women enduring difficulty in childbirth. In Dyets Dry Dinner (London, 1599) Henry Buttes acknowledged “Garlicke” to be “of most special use for Sea-faring men: a most excellent preservative against infection proceeding from the nasty savor of pump or sinck, and of tainted meates which Mariners are faine to eate for fault of better.”[6] Baldassare Pisanelli had made a similar observation three years earlier in Trattato della natura de’ cibi e del bere (Rome, 1583).

But what was prescribed for sailors was proscribed for landlubbers suffering from gout, or so suggested Christophorus Ballista in his poem “The Overthrow of the Gout,” which is known only through a 1577 edition in the British Library. The relevant passage reads as follows:

“All Salt and slimy meats, and flesh

that long doth powdered lye,

And fish in Salt preserved: all such

I warn thee to flee.

Both Garlick, Rue and Onions sour

expel them far from thee,

Although the fond Egyptians do

suppose them Gods to be.”[7]

The list of health benefits derived from garlic has continued to grow. According to a study published in the British Medical Journal on August 17, 1991, it has positive effects on “coagulation, platelet aggregation, and serum lipid concentrations.”

But garlic has not always been the magical cure all. Attitudes have been ambivalent. The Summoner in Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1343-1400) Canterbury Tales makes the point.

Described in the book’s “General Prologue” as physically repulsive and morally reprehensible, the red-faced, heavy-lidded, and pustule-covered Summoner is a lover of “garleek,” onions, leeks, and red wine. At least one commentator has linked the Summoner’s appearance and tastes to the Bible, specifically Numbers 11:5.[8] It is here that the Hebrews complain about having only manna to eat and lament the absence of cucumbers, leeks, onions, and garlic from their diet. Since the time of St. Gregory (circa 540-604), commentators have read the Old Testament passage allegorically. Our experience of the world, including its delights, cause us to cry. The Liber de Mortalitatibus was less poetic and far more harsh. Garlic was equated with the stench of evil, blamed for ulcerating the body, said to weaken the vision, and disparaged for the general frenzy it caused. No wonder Samuel Johnson defined a “Garlickeater” as “a mean fellow”!

And so to the end… although Shakespeare in A midsummer night’s dream (act iv, scene iii) has ‘Bottom’ advise his acting troupe to “eat no onions or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath” and thus be applauded for a sweet comedy, I say bring it on and to this delectable end I give you an Epicurious recipe for garlic soup.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/roasted-garlic-soup-with-parmesan-cheese-100669

ROASTED GARLIC SOUP

Ingredients:

• 26 garlic cloves (unpeeled)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

 

• 2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
• 2 1/4 cups sliced onions
• 1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme
• 18 garlic cloves, peeled
• 3 1/2 cups chicken stock or canned low-salt chicken broth
• 1/2 cup whipping cream

 

• 1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese (about 2 ounces)
• 4 lemon wedges

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Place 26 garlic cloves in small glass baking dish. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper; toss to coat. Cover baking dish tightly with foil and bake until garlic is golden brown and tender, about 45 minutes. Cool. Squeeze garlic between fingertips to release cloves. Transfer cloves to small bowl.
2. Melt butter in heavy large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add onions and thyme and cook until onions are translucent, about 6 minutes. Add roasted garlic and 18 raw garlic cloves and cook 3 minutes. Add chicken stock; cover and simmer until garlic is very tender, about 20 minutes. Working in batches, purée soup in blender until smooth. Return soup to saucepan; add cream and bring to simmer. Season with salt and pepper. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover and refrigerate. Rewarm over medium heat, stirring occasionally.)
3. Divide grated cheese among 4 bowls and ladle soup over. Squeeze juice of 1 lemon wedge into each bowl and serve.

 

 

** In the spirit of Renaissance cuisine, I add the following just because!!

In The Art and Craft of a Master Cook, 1570, Bartolomeo Scappi, who many consider to be the most renown Italian chef of the period, used garlic in his recipe for braising a suckling calf’s head (“with its hair off and the head clean”) cleaved in half! First parboil the garlic then add it to the following: cinnamon, pepper, cloves, saffron, diced prosciutto, and muscatel raisins. Braise! Scappi also added garlic to a recipe for fricassee of a breast of suckling veal, crushing it with sweet fennel, salt, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon. As for the eminent Maestro Martino of Como, in Libro de Arte Coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), ca. 1465, he advises its “generous” use in the roasting of kid.

Go for it!

 

 

[1] Gillian Riley, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (OPxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pages 226-27.

[2] Patrick Faas, Around the Roman Table. Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), page 216. This might be related to its medicinal value. Of the 800 herbal remedies in the Codex Ebers, an Egyptian medical papyrus of around 1550 BCE, twenty-two contain garlic.

[3] Hildegard von Bingen’s PHYSICA, The Complete English Translation of her Classic Work on Health and Healing, trans. Priscilla Throop (Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998), page 45 (chapter LXXIX is devoted to Garlic). If garlic causes stomach pain, she suggests parsley as an antidote.

[4] The reference to the ordinance is in Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishna, Nedarim 8:4. See, Maimonides, Herbert Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), page 224, note 152.

[5] The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2001), page 126.

[6] Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), page 203.

[7] Robert M. Schuler, ed., “Three Renaissance Scientific Poems,” Studies in Philology, vol. 75 (1978), page 90. The lines quoted are 267-270. I have altered the spelling in the original text to make it more accessible. Christophorus Ballista is the Latinized name of Christophe Arbaleste, a French monk and physician who left the Catholic Church at the beginning of the Reformation and went to live in Strasbourg. There, he became acquainted with Martin Bucer and other religious reformers. He is known to have treated the Bishop of Sion for gout.

[8] Robert Earl Kaske, Medieval Christian Literary Imagery (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Stephen Henry Rigby, Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), page 87ff for a discussion of Canterbury Tales, I. 634.

ROSES & ROSEWATER

“’What a lovely thing a rose is!’”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Naval Treaty

 

—————————————————

Montague or Capulet? Does it really matter? After all, “What’s in a name?” asks Juliet in William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) Romeo and Juliet. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

But just because it looks like a rose doesn’t mean it is one! (Just consider the ‘snow’ dusted ‘rose’ apple.)!

Certainly the culinary artifice of Shakespeare’s time – a time when banquets featured “a cunning counterfeit ham made of salmon in gelatin” and the like – reveled in serving dishes that looked like one thing but were, in fact, made of something wholly different. These stunning assemblages of foodstuffs were, in a way, the ingestible counterparts of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) ‘portraits’ of The Librarian, circa 1566, The Jurist, 1566, and The Vegetable Gardener, circa 1590, a painting that works equally well whether it is viewed upside-down or right side-up!

Roses, like other flowers, assumed a fancy-dress role in this Arcimboldo-like cuisine. This is, perhaps, not surprising since roses – whether red or white – were so often symbolic. Invariably, they stood for something else: the enraptured heart of the lover, the perfection of the bud-like lips of the beloved, the purity of the Virgin Mary, etc.

The Rose has been around a very long time, appearing in the fossil record about forty million years ago. As for the fragrant varieties with which we are familiar, they made their way to Europe from China and the Near East only in the last few thousand years! Europeans obviously recognized their aesthetic, medicinal, and culinary values. Hence, for example, the mania for tulips that gripped 17^th century Holland also embraced a passion for roses. In addition to a vase brimming with the real thing, artists Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) made a very fine living replicating their appearance in various stages of growth-bud to full blossom!

As for medicinal use, the medical handbook The English Physician, 1652, says it all. “Red roses do strengthen the Heart, the Stomach, and the Liver.” Moreover, they “mitigate the Pains that arise from Heat, assuage inflammations, procure Rest and Sleep, stay both Whites and Reds in Women, the Gonorrhea, or Running of the Reins, and Fluxes of the Belly; the Juice of them doth cleanse the Body from Choler and Phlegm.” (2)

The versatility of the rose in the sickroom was more than matched by its use in the kitchen!  In 1536, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio hosted a multi-service & many-course dinner welcoming to Rome the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Besides napkins that released flocks of song birds when unfolded and in addition to candied violets encased in puff pastry and aromatic rice, Charles enjoyed cold roasted carp dressed with sugar and rosewater. But that paled in comparison to the delights served to Queen Christina of Sweden during her visit to Rome in November-December of 1668.

“In spite of those who deny that one might be nourished by scents, the diners here grazed on the flowers… and fed on the scents; here [in a manner paralleling Arcimboldo’s up/down-side Gardener] autumn turned into spring and spring into autumn…. Fruits were in flowers but flowers were more fruitful still…. For here there were truly fruits aplenty to be found inside flowers…. And of these flowers it could have been said that… their blueness was flavorsome, their flavor was crimson, and their sweetness green; and that the carnations were sweet, the rose sugary, the violet honey-flavored…”(1)

Yet such grandiose uses of the rose were not restricted to the royal class, a fact made clear by Sir Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies, 1602. Written with the housewife of middling-means in mind, Plat’s book includes multiple recipes for candying flowers and distilling Rosewater. The artfulness of roses in cooking – their Arcimboldo effect – comes through vividly in Plat’s Delights for Ladies.

Among the first rose recipes (no. #5) is “A singular Manner of Making the Syrup of Roses.” Fill a silver basin ¾ full of rain water and “put therein a convenient proportion of rose leaves (petals).” Cover then steep in a double-boiler (“as we usually bake a custard”). After an hour remove petals, squeezing out any liquid. Repeat 7 times in order to attain the maximum intensity of flavor and richness of color. The vivid splendor of color is crucial since it not only helps retain the desired hue for Preserved Roses but can be used as paint.

To Preserve a Rose – a real rose – (recipe no. # 7), dip a Rose (one that is neither a bud nor over blown) in a syrup made of double-fine sugar and Rosewater. After dipping, carefully separate the petals with “a fine bodkin, either of bone or wood” then set out to dry “whilst the the Sun is in good height.”

As for making a counterfeit rose, the skilled housewife is given step-by-step instructions on how to feign reality like any adept artist. Indeed, like Rachel Ruysch’s canvas, her table can rival nature with a veritable bouquet of “sugared simulacra of reality.” (3) To do this Plat instructs (recipe no. 12) the woman of the house to make an almond paste that is malleable enough to be rolled into a dough, shaped by hand or pressed into a mold that can then be painted with Rosewater. (Infusions concocted from marigolds, violets, sage and other flowers broader the artful cook’s palette as well as tantalize the diner’s palate!)

 

In looking for an appropriate recipe, I came across an article titled “Flower Power.”  It focused on the excitement in 2005 of menus in which flowers did more than garnish a salad. Dishes created in conjunction with the Chelsea Flower Show made flowers, including roses, an integral ingredient in an array of amazing culinary creations. One is below….

… but first a quote. In reading for this post, I came across Moderata Fonte’s (1552-1592) defense of women, who had long been (and sadly in some quarters still are) seen as secondary, derivative.

 

“Men were created before women. … But that doesn’t prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours…. [simply consider the fact that] Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear; lovely roses blossom forth and scented narcissi.”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, 1600.

 

—————————————————————————

 

Royale of juniper and rose petals, violet consommé*

INGREDIENTS

(Serves 10)

Chicken consommé

4 chickens

2 onions

3 carrots

2 leeks

10g juniper berries

For the royale

650g milk

40g juniper berries

300g of chicken liver

50g whipping cream

6 eggs

1tbs rose blossom water

15 rose petals

15 violets (on stem)

To finish

10 dried rose petals

10 violets

METHOD

Blanch the chickens for four minutes and rinse them under cold water. Halve the onions and char the cut surfaces. Put chickens whole in a large stock pot with carrots, onions and leeks. Cover with cold water, bring to simmering point, skim. Wipe any scum from the pan edges and simmer very gently for eight hours. Drain stock through a kitchen cloth or muslin into a clean pan and put in the rose petals and juniper berries. Reduce very gently by evaporation in the oven (at 100°C) for two hours. Drain and keep for serving.

For the royale, infuse milk with juniper berries. Remove berries and blitz the chicken liver, eggs, milk, cream, salt, white pepper, rose blossom water, violet and rose petals. When liquid, pass and pour into small moulds or ramekins. Cook in a bain-marie for 20 minutes in a moderate oven (150°C).

To finish, julienne the rose petals and dry them in a warm oven (70°C) for one hour. Put the hot royale in middle of a soup plate and pour the hot consommé over it. Add the rose julienne and violet petals over it. Serve.

*Bignold, D. (2005, May). FLOWER POWER. Caterer & Hotelkeeper, 194, 28-31.

 

 

END NOTES

• Charlotte Birnbaum, Ed., Threee Banquets for a Queen. The Reception of Her Most Serene Majesty Christina Queen of Sweden by His Holiness Our Lord Pope Clement IX in Rome 1668 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), page 41.
• Amy Stewart, The Drunken Botanist. The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2013), page 221.
• In addition to Plat’s Delights of Ladies to Adorne their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories, with Beauties, Banquets, Perfumes and Waters, see Wendy Wall, “Distillation: Transformations in and out of the Kitchen” in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare. Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, Joan Fitzpatrick (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), esp. pages 95-98.

Pear – roasted or poached but never raw

Giovanna Garzoni

Shrove Tuesday is upon us and the raucous pleasures of Carnival come to a close for another year. But Valentine’s Day is less than a week away and so delights remain to be had! It is the combination, or ‘pairing,’ of these two events – the on-set of a meatless season & the prospect of happy coupling – that has inspired this post on pears. The word play between pear & pair is just too good to ignore. As for the conclusion of Carnival, which derives from the Latin carne vale, or ‘good-bye to meat,’ consider the pairing of pears and cheese. Not only is cheese a viable and delectable substitute for meat but the marriage of pears and cheese worked to the same medicinal end in medieval medical theory. Coming at the conclusion of a meal, a fruit and cheese course was believed to “seal” the stomach! (1)

Pliny the Elder (23-79 C.E.) noted no less than 41 varieties of pear in his encyclopedic Natural History (book 15, chapter 16). By the beginning of the 18^th century that number had almost tripled. A large painting by Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729) makes the point.

Bartolomeo Bimbi’s painting of pears, 1699

Like Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627) and Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670) before him, Bimbi was employed to record the flora beloved by the Medici dukes. Putting brush to canvas in 1699, Bimbi painted for Duke Cosimo III what has been characterized as an “inventory” of the 115 known types of pears. The painting is large – it measures approximately 5 ½ x 7 ½ feet – and the array of pears impressive. Piled in baskets, platters, and on the marble tabletop, Bimbi’s assemblage of pears is as colorful as any artist’s palette. Some are red. Others are yellow or green. A few, most notably the Worcester (or Warden) pear, are purplish black. And then there are those that are a blend of colors. (2)

The Worcester or Black Pear. Also known as the Warden Pear. “I must have saffron to color the Warden Pie.” – Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale 4.3.48

Surely Bimbi’s painting is a display worthy of a botanical treatise but did everyone see it as an enticing presentation? The jury is out, at least it was out in the Renaissance. The very thing that helped distinguish the pear as a “noble” fruit– its delicate flavor, perfume, and flesh – was the very thing that made some shy away. Pears have dark spots and, when ripe and at their most luscious, bruise quite easily. Thus in 1614, Giacomo Castelvetro praised the Bergamot pear but added a caveat. It turns “yellow as it ripens [and] is full of a delicate juice quite unlike anything else. Its only fault is that it does not keep well.” (3)

Bergamot Pears

It is this concern with perishability that gave rise to a medical advisory in Harrington’s The Englishman’s Doctor: Or the Schoole of Salerne, 1607.

“Raw pears a poison, baked, a medicine be.”(4)

Harrington’s opinion on the benefits of cooked pears was preceded by the commentary Master Chiquart Amiczo, who was chef to the House of Savoy, appended to a recipe for pears in his Du fait de cuisine, 1420. He advised that once you are sure that the pears “have cooked enough,” allow them to cool then “put them out into fine silver dishes; then they [can be] borne to the sick person.”(5)

But for many of the period, pears were simply too susceptible to rot. More to the point, their putrefaction was deemed unhealthy. As Thomas Cogan put it in The Haven of Health, first edition 1584,

“That peares may not hurt thee, take out the coares; Pare them, and salt them, & cast them out of doors.”(6)

Thankfully, the problem of pear consumption was easily remedied. Forget biting into a juicy raw pear. Eat only those that have been roasted or poached. In fact, the eminent chef Martino of Como included an entry on “How to prepare rotten pears or bruised pears or apple-pears” in his Art of Cooking, circa 1465.

The directions are simple. Clean the pear, Roast it over hot coals then marinade in wine that has been spiced with “a generous amount of cinnamon.” I suggest adding whole cloves, cardamom pods, and black peppercorns as well!

There was not a lot new about Martino’s approach. At the close of the fifth century, Gelasius I, who is credited with coming up with the idea of crêpes, suggested filling the delicate pancakes with sliced pears that had been poached in syrup… and don’t forget the magical last step. Drizzle the pear-stuffed crêpe with liquor.(7)

Perhaps my favorite pear recipe comes from an heir of Bartolomeo Bimbi’s patron. In Florentines: A Tuscan Feast, Lorenza de’ Medici provides the following recipe:

CROSTATA DI PERE AL CIOCCOLATO (Chocolate Pear Tart)

TART CRUST:

1 stick butter, softened

scant 1 ½ cups flour

1 egg

scant ½ cup fine sugar

½ cup cocoa powder

2 ½ tablespoons orange marmalade

2 pears

CHOCOLATE FILLING:

3 ½ oz. bittersweet chocolate

4 tablespoons butter

2 eggs, separated

½ cup fine sugar

Make a dough with the butter, flour, egg, sugar, and cocoa powder.Line an 8” tart pan with the dough, press to cover bottom of pan; Spread with marmalade. Peel, core & quarter pears then slice. Arrange them artfully in the dough case.

To make FILLING, melt chocolate and butter over low heat, then set aside to cool. Beat egg whites until stiff. Beat egg yolks and sugar very well (until pale & fluffy). Add chocolate mixture and fold in beaten egg whites. Pour the mixture over the pears. Bake in preheated 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes. – Lorenza de’Medici, Florentines: A Tuscan Feast (New York: Random House, 1992), page 99.

For a variation on the theme, try this one from:

http://tablematters.com/2014/10/17/falls-forgotten-fruit/

PEAR CHOCOLATE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE:

INGREDIENTS

¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter (at room temperature)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
½ cup packed light brown sugar
2 ripe pears (Bosc or Bartlett) peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
⅓ cup unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder
⅔ cup boiling water
4 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1½ cups sifted cake flour
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Melt ¼ cup of the butter in a cast iron skillet over medium heat. Stir in the brown sugar until well combined and remove the skillet from the heat. Arrange the pear slices in tight, overlapping circles on top of the sugar mixture, with the thin ends facing toward the center. Brush the sides of the plan with the melted butter.

In a small bowl, whisk together the cocoa powder and boiling water. Let the mixture cool to room temperature. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks, one quarter of the cocoa mixture, and the vanilla.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, lightly mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and cloves. Beat in the remaining 10 tablespoons of the butter and the remaining cocoa mixture. Beat on medium speed for 2 minutes. Scrape down the sides. Beat in the egg mixture, a third at a time, beating the mixture for 15-20 seconds between each addition.

Spoon the batter over the pears, smoothing it evenly with an offset spatula. Bake until a toothpick emerges clean, 40-45 minutes. Remove skillet from the oven and let the cake cool for 5 minutes in the pan on a wire rack. Run an offset spatula around the edges of the cake. Place a large plate on top of the skillet and carefully flip the cake over onto the plate. Let the cake stand for 2 minutes before lifting the skillet. Cool completely before serving.

Makes 1 10-inch cake

Recipe from Brian Nicholson and Sarah Huck’s Fruitful: Four Seasons of Fresh Fruit Recipes(Running Press, 2014)

 

And one final Valentine’s Day thought concerning enjoying food in the company of one’s beloved. It comes from Pietro Aretino (1492-1556)

“When she ate she seemed to be gilding the food; and when she drank she gave flavor to the wine.”

 

 

1. Massimo Montanari, Cheese, Pears, & History in a Proverb, trans. Beth Archer Brombert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). The proverb in question is: “Al contadino non far sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere,” or “Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears.” As Meryl S. Rosofsky states in a review in the journal Gastronomica (summer 2012), pages 111-112, Montanari “places the proverb in the ‘tradition of the rustic,’” ultimately positioning it as an emblem of class conflict.” In part, the conflict recognizes the fact that it is the peasant who makes the cheese and harvests the fruit. Of course he knows how good it is!
2. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Gretchen A. Hirschauer, The Flowering of Florence: Botanical Art for the Medici (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in Association with Lund Humphries, 200), pages 91-92.
3. Giacomo Castelvetro, The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy (1614), trans. Gillian Riley (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2012), page 88.
4. David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe. Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450-1800 (London: Bloomsbury Academic2016), page 117.
5. Terence Scully, Chiquart’s “On Cookery”: A Fifteenth-Century Savoyard Culinary Treatise (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1986), page 108.
6. Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), page 102.
7. Mariangela Rinaldi and Mariangela Vicini, Buon Appetito, Your Holiness. The Secrets of the Papal Table, trans. Adam Victor (New York: Arcade, 2000), pages 41-43.

Skeletons on the table!

Think centerpiece… How about a construction of willow, fern, and flowers or perhaps an ensemble of candles artfully arranged around a blown glass figurine, or maybe a small flock of swans carved in ice? All are prosaic when compared with the creations – sometimes revealed as a parade of fanciful dishes – that in fact and fiction graced ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque banquet tables.(1) Consider, for example, this tidbit of culinary performance in Petronius’s mid-1^st century Satyricon (36).

“ ‘This is sauce for the dinner.’ As [Trimalchio, the host] spoke, four dancers ran up in time with the music and took off the top part of the dish. Then we saw… fat fowls and sow bellies, and in the middle there was a hare with wings like Pegasus. Four figures of [the satyr] Marsyas positioned at each corner of the plate also caught the eye; they let a spiced sauce run from their wine-skin [flasks] over the fish swimming about in a kind of sauce tide.”

If Petronius’s imagination is too much for one’s credulity to swallow, then consider the elaborate sugar sculptures recorded in etchings by the Dutch artist Arnold van Westerhout (1651-1725) after confectionary creations by Giovanni Battista Lenardi (1656-1704).(2) (see my earlier post, “Sugar… and ingegno“)

To these impressive images-of-record we can add Bartolomeo Scappi’s brief notations concerning some statue di butiro, or butter sculptures, in his Art and Craft of a Master Cook, 1570:

“An elephant with a castle on its back,” “Hercules wrenching the jaw of a lion,” and “a Moorish king astride a camel.” (3)

But these wonderful molded concoctions and constructions were not the only things placed amid an abundance of dishes, bowls, and platters featuring the diversity and fecundity of nature as well as the creativity of those manipulating it. Again, I turn to Petronius’s Satyricon (34) and the banquet of excess known as the Cena Trimalchionis.

“As we were poring over the labels [proclaiming that the wine had spent ‘100 years in the bottle’], Trimalchio clapped his hands and cried, ‘Ah me, wine lives longer than miserable man. So let us be merry.”

Trimalchio’s declaration was accompanied by an object; a small “silver skeleton made so that its joints and sockets could be moved and bent in every direction.”

These skeletons are noted with a fair amount of frequency in the literature on the ancient Roman table and its customs but I never focused on them until I saw one in the exhibition “Nutrire l’impero. Storie di alimentazione da Roma e Pompei” at the Museum of the Ara Pacis in Rome in the fall of 2015. (4) The small, bronze figure – a larva convivialis – is one of only ten or so that have survived from antiquity into the modern era. As Petronius’s text suggests, the skeleton is meant as a reminder of our mortality, hence carpe diem, seize the day, eat, drink, and be merry! Yet these little skeletons do something else. They are a material example of the close ties that bind food and drink to death in both the ritualized practices surrounding grief and loss and in the carefree frivolity of popular festivals associated with, for example, the Day of the Dead and Lent. (5)

In fact, the Victorian practice of picnicking at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia (where I live) remains alive and well! http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/5891-how-to-picnic-right-at-hollywood-forever-cemetery

The union of joyful feasting and the less than palatable prospect of a death had some interesting iterations over the centuries. In Renaissance Italy young men of patrician rank and some of the most renowned artistic talents of the day organized themselves into compagnie to express youthful exuberance and exhibit impressive talents. Sporting names such as The Company of Hose (as in hosiery), The Company of the [Mason’s] Trowel, and the Company of the Cauldron, these compagnie had a typical “membership” of one or two-dozen men. Imbibing copiously, company members enjoyed banquets worthy of Petronius’s Cena Trimalchionis with its acrobatic performances, mock combats, and poetical recitations. During the 16^th century, courses were punctuated with theatrical interludes (intermezzi), short farces, costume contests, and, especially in Venice, masked dances and pageantry (momarie). Humor generally attended such revelry but sometimes the death cast its shadow over an evening’s lightheartedness.

The painter and art critic/historian Giorgio Vasari recounted one such occasion in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 2^nd edition, 1568. It was a banquet staged by the men of the Company of the Cazzuola, or mason’s trowel, that had as its theme the myth of Pluto’s abduction of Proserpine, the daughter of the goddess of agriculture and fecundity. That evening, the assembled company had an objective. They were to descend to the “infernal regions” of Hades over which Pluto ruled. Their assigned task was to assist Proserpine’s mother in liberating the maiden from the clutches of lord of death and dark. As Vasari tells the tale,

“The invitation [to assist in the rescue] was accepted. Whereupon, all having entered through that mouth [of Hell], which was full of teeth, and which, being hung on hinges, opened to each couple of men who entered, and then shut again, and which had no light but a very little one in the center… they could hardly see one another. There, having been pushed into their seats with a great fork by a most hideous Devil who was in the middle beside tables draped in black, Pluto commanded” that his marriage to Proserpine be conducted. “Now in that room were painted all the chasms of the regions of the damned, with their pains and their torments.”

As for the food, it appeared to be all manner of “animals vile and most hideous … but within, under the loathly covering” of pastry, were the “most delicate meats of many kinds.”

But “bats,” “lizards,” “toads,” and “scorpions” were not the only thing on the table. So was a Renaissance version of Trimalchio’s skeleton. There were, says Vasari, “dead men’s bones” (ossa di morti), confections set within a reliquary fashioned of sugary fruits!(6)

All of this stands in stark contrast to the decoration and mealtime practices in medieval monasteries.

The refectory, or dining area, in Europe’s 13^th century monasteries was a significant place of gathering for cloistered communities. Consequently, the arrangement of the tables in relationship to the art on the walls served a didactic role. At Cluny, Monte Cassino, and other monasteries a refectory was “a place of corporeal punishment.”

“Infractions in the refectory were corrected in front of the abbot’s table often situated before a Majesty or Judgment picture. A painting of the Last Judgment, showing Christ meting out justice, was germane in [this] penitential context.” This, together with images emphasizing abstinence, gluttony was condemned and mortification of the body imposed. (7)

Would the ever-famished Pulcinella have been able to stomach all of this? Regardless of whether it was the fantastically horrific constructs gracing the banquet table at the Company of the Trowel or the monastic meal of meager sustenance (but spiritual fullness) eaten under the critical eye of a painting of a judgmental Christ, I know I would find swallowing a difficult task!

 

As an addenda, here is a recipe fit for Pulcinella!

Recipe: Cooking-With-Nothing Spaghetti

http://www.wsj.com/articles/recipe-cooking-with-nothing-spaghetti-1452789220

 

 

Notes

1. For a recent, informative survey, see The Edible Monument. The Art of Food for Festivals, edited by Marcia Reed (Los Angeles: The Getty Institute, 2015).
2. The Edible Monument. The Art of Food for Festivals, edited by Marcia Reed, pages 112-113, figures 1-3. Also see my earlier post “Sugar… and ingegno”.
3. The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570), Terence Scully commentary and translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), page 398. There is a new and terrific addition to the literature on Scappi. Deborah L. Krohn, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy. Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015.
4. Nutrire l’impero. Storie di alimentazione da Roma e Pompei, Claudio Parisi Presicce and Orietta Rossini, eds. (‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 2015), page 214, cat. no. R69. Also see the very informative site: http://www.lifeandland.org/2009/02/skeletons-on-the-table/
5. For a brief and wonderful survey, see Jane Levi, “Melancholy and Mourning. Black Banquets and Funerary Feasts,” Gastronomica, vol. 12 (winter 2012), pages 96-103.
6. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Gaston Du C. de Vere, trans. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), vol. 3, page 1715. The account is included in the biography of Giovan Francesco Rustici. The Italian is in Gaetano Milanesi, editor (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), vol. 6: page 616.
7. I have relied on the dissertation of Irene Kabala, “Medieval decorated refectories in France, Italy and England until 1250 (The Johns Hopkins University, 2001).

 

 

The Indulgence of Meat!

In January 1605, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) received a bill from his butcher. Over the course of roughly six weeks, between December 11, 1604 and January 29^th, the purveyor of meats delivered to the astronomer’s home no less than “260 pounds of beef, 83 pounds of lamb, and 54 pounds of veal.”[i] At this point in time, the older of Galileo’s two illegitimate daughters was only a toddler but within a decade the plentitude of her father’s table would stand in sharp contrast to the abstinence foist upon her. Born in 1600, Virginia Galilei was confined within the restrictive walls of the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri soon after her thirteenth birthday. Thereafter, the cloistered Virginia – or Sister Maria Celeste – could savor little more than fading memories of abbondanza.[ii]

The contrast between the abundance of Galileo’s larder and the poverty of the convent’s kitchen reflects the seeming ambiguous place meat had in medieval and Renaissance culture. Although featured on the tables of the social elite, meat – especially red meat – was associated with society’s more unsavory, bawdy, and crude types. To be sure, meat came to be seen by some as a critical component of a healthy diet but proponents of flesh faced the obstacle of tradition, which held that the temperaments of animals directly affected consumers. Hence, for example, “eating rabbit causes fear” while “eating goat incites lasciviousness.”[iii] But the larger issue was of a more general nature. Meat was moralized.

Consider, for example, the personification of gluttony as represented by Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450-1516) on Table Top of Seven Deadly Sins. Gluttony, his girth emphasized by the round table laden with an impressively large haunch, gnaws on the bone of some roasted beast. His appetite insatiable, Gluttony chows down as a serving woman brings him still more! Is it any wonder that Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the corpulent comic foil to the regal Prince Hal, is characterized as cuts of meat or the beasts from which they were carved: “chops,” “guts,” “sweet beef,” “sow,” “a little tidy Bartholomew boar pig,” “a Manning Ox with pudding in his belly.”[iv] Clearly, Shakespeare’s audience, like Bosch’s viewers, identified meat as an enticement that leads to sinful excess and reveals the folly of intemperance.

Similar to Bosch, Anthonius Claessen (ca. 1538-1613) set meat enticingly in the center of his painting, A Family Saying Grace before a Meal, and he, too, included a servant, platter in hand, entering the room. But these likenesses are inconsequential. Claessen’s pious family, unlike Bosch’s sinful glutton, can conquer temptation.

In A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, 1551, the Netherlandish painter Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575) visualized the ambivalent place meat held in Renaissance society. Aertsen crammed the foreground of his painting with sausages, pig’s feet, the heads of a boar and a cow, roosters ready for the plucking, a side of beef, a bowl of curd, molded cheeses… and four fish, two fresh, two smoked. Through the stall’s doorway and windows we see two very different scenes. In the right background, just behind another hanging carcass, people indulge in life’s pleasures at a tavern. In the open landscape in the left background, the Holy Family gives the little they have by way of material goods to those in need. Significantly, the Holy Family – Joseph, leading the donkey bearing the Virgin and Infant Christ – align with the two fish on the pewter plate within the butcher’s stall. As an adult, Jesus would multiply two small fish and five barley cakes in order to feed five thousand.

Like Carnival – a time of indulgence – and Lent – a time of abstinence, meat and fish were not typically mixed. While it is true that sixteen of the seventeen courses served at the 1368 wedding banquet of Violante Visconti and Duke Lionel of Clarence combined meat with fish – gilded veal with gilded trout (3^rd course), or beef pies with cheese and eel pies (8^th course) – eating fish and meat on the same day, let alone at the same meal, was not the norm. In fact, the week was divided into fish days and flesh days. If the division had religious significance, it increasingly had economic justification. Londoners, it seems, not only had a hardy taste for meat, they associated it with the raucous times of festivals of Misrule. As the city’s population grew and consumption increased, shortages occurred, most notably in 1552/3 when fishing ships were diverted to London quays to avert famine. Government action was required to halt future depletions of meat stocks. By the 1580s secular regulation overtook religious custom. “The week was almost halved in favor of fish. Butchers were not officially allowed to sell on Wednesday, Friday or Saturday…. And though they had a market on Monday, by 1605 they were not allowed to kill or dress carcasses on Sunday.”[v]

So, as the Holiday season approaches and menus are devised for the feast of Roast Beast, as Dr. Seuss would have it, I advise all to choose judiciously whether to serve meat or fish. The choice is laden with nuance.

Christmas mince pies with stars and icing sugar on top on wooden chopping board

16^th Century Recipe for Yuletide Mincemeat Pie from A Propre new booke of Cokery, 1545:

“Pyes of mutton or beif must be fyne mynced & seasoned with pepper and salte and a lytel saffron to colour it / suet or marrow a good quantitie / a lytell vynegre / pruynes / great reasons / and dates / take the fattest of the broath of powdred beefe. And if you will have paest royall / take butter and yolkes of egges & so to temper the floure to make the paest.”

(Pie filling of mutton or beef must be finely minced and seasoned with pepper and salt and a little saffron to colour it. [Add] a good quantity of suet or marrow, a little vinegar, prunes, raisins and dates. [Put in] the fattest of the broth of salted beef. And, if you want Royal pastry, take butter and egg yolks and [combine them with] flour to make the paste.)

Or try this one instead…

http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/STAR-TOPPED-MINCE-PIES-5238

 

[i] The quantities are indeed impressive but Galileo’s taste for meat was by no means unique. In 1348 the first of several outbreaks of the plague swept across Europe cutting in half the populations of cities such as Paris, London, Hamburg, and Florence. The demographic shock, it has been suggested, left the living a greater portion of pork, mutton, beef, and poultry on which to feast. Hannele Klemettilä, The Medieval Kitchen. A Social History with Recipes (London: Reaktion, 2012), page 63. To what extent a devastated populace had the energy and resources to raise domestic animals for consumption is, I think, debatable. It has been argued, however, that arable land was left fallow due to the same drop in population. As a consequence, there was a reduction of fodder for cattle feed and this, in turn, points to pattern of subsistence farming. There was little left for market. Harry Kitsikopoulos, “The Impact of the Black Death on Peasant Economy in England, 1350-1500,” The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 29, no. 2 (2002), pages 71-90.

[ii] Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter. A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 1999).

[iii] Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pages 79-80.

[iv] Sandra Billington, “Butchers and Fishmongers: Their Historical Contribution to London’s Festivity,” Folklore, vol. 101, no. 1 (1990), page 101.

[v] Sandra Billington, “Butchers and Fishmongers: Their Historical Contribution to London’s Festivity,” Folklore, vol. 101, no. 1 (1990), page 98.

The Leek (allium ampeloprasum) & the Scallion (allium fistolosum) & the Onion (allium cepa)

Leeks, scallions, and the more pedestrian onion have been around a long time. Wandering in the wildness with Moses leading the way, the disgruntled “rabble that was among [the Israelites] had a strong craving” for the food, if not the laborious life style, they had left behind in Egypt. As the Israelites’s cuisine choices diminished and the rumblings of their stomachs grew louder, memories of forced labor faded. The only thing the despondent wanderers could recall was a bountiful table. And so, according to the biblical author of Numbers (11: 4-6), “the people of Israel wept again, and said, ‘O that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt…, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna…’” [See previous entry on quail.]

Cultivated worldwide for millennia, leeks, scallions, and onions have long been valued as recipe enhancers. Raw, they prick the palate and assault the nose. Cooked, their spicy bite is tempered to a delicate and aromatic sweetness. It was, perhaps, this culinary versatility that in 1211 prompted the Bishop of Winchester to authorize the expenditure of 1 shilling, 4 pence on “onion sets and shallots to plant, besides 6 pence on 2 pounds of onion seed, [and] 2 ½ pence for leeks.” Considered in terms of ground coverage rather than money, “we can estimate that about a quarter-acre [of the Bishop’s garden in Southwark] was under onions and shallots.”(1)

But taste enrichment was not the only benefit to be had from onions, leeks, and scallions. Whether green or dried and regardless of bulb size, the odiferous vegetable was believed to have a host of medicinal applications. Writing in the first century, Pliny the Elder (23-79 C.E.) reported in Natural History (book 19: 33. 108) that Nero, the infamous emperor who reportedly fiddled as Rome burned in July of 64 C.E., consumed leeks daily in order to maintain the clarity of his singing voice! The physician Alfonso Chirino (circa 1365-circa 1429) thought the piquant vegetable had better application elsewhere. In his Menor dano de la medicina, a book that provides therapies that enabled the general public to avoid visits to greatly feared medieval doctors, Chirino advised people suffering from hemorrhoids to mix onion with oil and apply to the affected area. (2) Presumably, the anti-inflammatory effects onions had on hemorrhoids also prompted its use to ease the pain of buboes during outbreaks of the bubonic plague. In Traicté de la Peste, 1566, François Vallériole proposed theriac,* a complex compound that included opiates, be stuffed into the hollow of a cooked onion that could then be applied as a poultice.

Jusespe de Ribera’s painting of “Smell” from a series of works imaging the senses, circa 1615

For those of robust disposition, onions and scallions had the added benefit of heightening sexual drive. Writing at the end of the 16^th century, Bartolomeo Pisanelli maintained, “scallions serve no other purpose than to excite the libido.”(3) Other writers were more specific. Onions were believed to be particularly felicitous to sexuality, promoting sperm production in males and lactation in women. (4) But there was always the problem of too much of a good thing… too much onion could cause headaches! Accordingly, in the instructive text he penned for students of medicine in the first decade of the 14^th century, Bernard de Gordon cautioned headache sufferers to refrain from consuming fish, walnuts, onions, and strong wine.(5) Headaches aside, the repeated positive correlation of onions and coitus is, to me at least, perplexing. As noted by the first century Roman poet Martial, “As often as you have eaten the strong-smelling shoots of Tarentine leeks, give kisses with a shut mouth.”(6)

“Pori”, or Leeks, Tucuinum sanitatis, 1380s, copy in the National Library of Vienna

The Tacuinum sanitatis, a guide to healthful eating that was probably written in the 11^th century and then translated from Arabic to Latin sometime in the 13^th century, provides a succinct summary of the benefits to be had from leeks, or “pori”, (and, perhaps by extension other members of the allium family). Beneath a picture of a man carrying a basket brimming with the leafy sheaths of the vegetable and a woman arranging bunches of them on a table is an informative commentary. Leeks, we are told, stimulate the flow of urine and encourage sexual activity. Additionally, when mixed with honey, leeks break-up chest congestion, a notion repeated by Giacomo Castelvetro in 1614. However, one must be aware that they can assault the senses (I assume the reference is to their pungent smell and biting taste) as well as the brain! To counter these effects, the reader is instructed to mix leeks with sesame or sweet almond oil. Finally, leeks are deemed particularly appropriate for the diets of the elderly and those living in northern climes. (7)

As for Renaissance recipes that include onions… well, they are perhaps best left alone. Bartolomeo Scappi (1570) suggested adding them to fricassees of cow’s udder. I think Julia Child’s classic onion soup is the better way to go!

http://www.food.com/recipe/authentic-french-onion-soup-courtesy-of-julia-child-356428

Finally, there is yet another use for onions, one that has nothing to do with food or physiology. Years ago, I rented an apartment not far from the magnificent church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. I was on the top floor. Daily, I made the climb and daily I had to tip-toe my way through a pile of chopped – and very smelly – onions on the landing between the 2^nd and 3^rd floors. An enquiry explained the obstacle. A very old (it’s fair to say ‘ancient’) woman scattered them about in an attempt to keep away a pounce of black cats!

*THERIAC: compounds included as many as 80 ingredients that ranged from rue to ground rubies, honey, pepper, and myrrh as well as coral and vinegar.Its palliative effects far out-weighed any curative properties.

1. John H. Harvey, “Vegetables in the Middle Ages,” Garden History, vol. 12, no. 2 (1984), page 94.
2. Michael Solomon, The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain (Cambridge University Press, 1997), page 100.
3. Pisanelli, Trattato della natura de’ cibi et del bere, p. 25, as cited in Sheila McTighe, “Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci,” Art Bulletin, vol. 86, no. 2 (2004), page 317.
4. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, “A Feast for Aesculapius: Historical Diets for Asthma and Sexual Pleasure,” Annual Review of Nutrition, vol. 31, no. 1 (1983), page 6.
5. Bernard de Gordon, Tractatus de conservation vite humane, as referenced in V. de Frutos Gonzáles and A.L. Guerrero Peral, “La neurologia en los regimina sanitatis medievales,” Nurologia, vol. 26 (2011), page 422.

6. Brucia Witthoft, “The Tacuinum Sanitatis: A Lombard Panorama,”Gesta, vol. 17, no. 1 (1978), pages 49-60; Luisa Cogliati Arano, Tacunium sanitatis (Milan: Electa, 1973).

7. Epigrams, book XIII. 18. For Castelvetro’s reference, see Giacomo Castelvetro, The Fruits, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy, trans. Gillian Riley (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2012), page 109.

See http://www.soupsong.com/fleek.html