The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice
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Overall, though, the chef whom you meet in Platina’s popular book (as well as in Martino’s own earlier manuscripts) is a cook at the top of his game, using a broad battery of cooking styles and seasonings to create a complex and sophisticated cuisine. And yet, although the cooking is decidedly more refined than the recipes we find in earlier Italian or French cookery manuals, its flavor structure is still largely Byzantine and Arabic. Sweet is blended with acid and balanced with spice, even if sugar has mostly replaced honey. The earlier medieval penchant for ginger is beginning to shift somewhat to cinnamon, and the use of pepper is much more explicit than it was in some of the earlier sources. But the cosmopolitan approach of the earlier cuisine is also still there, with Catalan and French recipes right beside dishes from Italy. In other words, this is no culinary revolution. Among Roman foodies, Martino may have been more famous than Michelangelo, but he was no iconoclast like the ceiling painter down at the Vatican. Yet even if Renaissance Italian cooking didn’t invent the culinary equivalent of perspective, it was just as influential in the kitchens of northern Europe as the radical Italian picture makers were in Flemish and German artists’ studios.
A late-Renaissance banquet, as illustrated in Cristoforo da Messisbugo’s Banchetti.
In the two hundred years or so between the last Crusades and the arrival of the all-too-worldly popes of the late fourteen hundreds, the centers of fashion had drifted away from the French-speaking world. In part, this was simply a matter of a shrinking French sphere of dominance. The Franks were ejected from Outremer, the Gallic kings of the house of Anjou lost southern Italy, the English ruling classes stopped speaking French, and the popes returned to Rome from a long sojourn in Avignon. Then there was the cataclysm of the Black Death, the pandemic that wiped out somewhere between a quarter and a third of Europe’s population. The fleas that carried bubonic plague apparently first arrived in western Europe in 1348 in the same way as the fork: on Venetian ships from Constantinople. The routes that transported pepper to Paris and cloves to Cologne turned out to be an all too efficient vector for the disease. This is not to suggest that the Black Death was a consequence of the spice trade; however, the same network of exchange that had encouraged the diffusion of a cosmopolitan cuisine among the elite now facilitated the spread of the bacterium among the population at large. Trade suffered enormously as a result of the plague, not merely because, in some urban centers, half the customers were dead but also due to the onerous restrictions placed on travel in the following years.*15 This constriction in exchange made every town a little more provincial in the next few years, Paris included. France, however, had the additional tragedy of over a century of more or less continuous carnage, the so-called Hundred Years’ War, which would peter out only in the middle of the fourteen hundreds. This made room for Italy to become the undisputed capital of style for the continent.
The recovery from the Black Death was patchy and slow, and Europe as a whole did not recover its preplague population until perhaps 1500. Venice was especially hard hit by the epidemic, though her moneymaking prowess, even if not her residents, recovered relatively quickly. It was Florence and Rome, however, along with a number of other minor northern Italian cities that would first play host to the phenomenon for which German nineteenth-century historians invented the term Renaissance. By this time, Florence was in her twilight as the manufacturing and banking center that had made her a world player in the preplague years. Rome was crusty and corrupt but full of people trying to make a name for themselves. Hiring the top decorator of the time to paint your chapel and the finest chef to cater your banquets was essential if you wanted to stand out from the crowd. Elsewhere in Italy, the petty princes did their best to keep up. Consequently, celebrity chefs were in high demand.
Still, to call Martino a chef barely begins to do justice to his job description. Sure, he had to make certain that the cooks didn’t arrive at work drunk and that breakfast was served on time like any professional today, but he also had to supervise extravaganzas that would test the skills of a circus impresario. While medieval banquets had always been a feast for all the senses—with a vaudeville revue of music, dancing, and other entertainments interspersed with the courses—the impression given by the descriptions of Italian Renaissance feasts is that you’ve stepped out of an off-Broadway variety show into a Busby Berkeley extravaganza.
The wedding dinner thrown by Giovanni II Bentivoglio in Bologna in 1487 to celebrate the wedding of his son Annibale to Lucrezia d’Este is typical of this kind of over-the-top spectacle. Our reporter at the event, Cherubino Ghirardacci, describes a supper that started at eight at night and lasted until three the next morning. The dinner opened with a selection of sweet, spiced wines and antipasti of various little birds, including partridges “with sugared olives and grapes.” The servants then brought in a castle of sugar “with artfully constructed battlements and towers” packed with live birds, which were set loose to careen across the dining room, “to the great pleasure and delight of the diners.” A seemingly endless procession of meat was then paraded into the hall. Deer and ostrich surrounded by pies, veal, capons, goats, sausages, and partridge, cooked in all sorts of ways, each with their own sauce, presumably seasoned with cinnamon, pepper, and ginger as Martino instructs; then peacocks “dressed up in their own feathers as if spreading their tails,” one for each guest; then mortadella, hares, and stewed venison re-formed into its skin so skillfully “as to appear alive” then doves and pheasant “from whose beaks issued flames,” accompanied by citrus and spiced sauces; then sugar and almond cakes, cheesecakes, and biscotti; then more meat and game birds as well as “a castle full of rabbits,” who ran out among the diners’ feet; then rabbit pies and dressed capons; then an “artful castle” imprisoning a large pig, which grunted and snorted within its crenulated cage; then the waiters arrived with whole, golden-brown, roasted suckling pigs, various other roasts, wild duck, “and the like.” Finally came sweets made from milk, jellies, pears, pastries, candies, marzipans, “and other similar favors.” And just before leaving, the guests were given spiced confections and “precious wines” on their way to bed.
As exhausting as all this sounds, it’s worth pointing out that most of this spectacle was just that, an impressive performance. The diners were not able to sample most of the food, if only for logistical reasons. But even if they could, they might not have found everything to their taste. In this respect, the Renaissance feast was the equivalent of one of those obscenely lavish buffets found on cruise ships: vastly too much food for the number of diners but also enough variety so that everyone will find something he or she likes. Also, much as on the Queen Mary, the guests were offered a different selection depending on their status. Medieval maître d’s saw it as part of their job to send the fanciest morsels to the VIP tables. All the same, everybody did get to watch the show.
In the coming years, the literate classes everywhere could read about these fantastic occasions in books such as Platina’s but even more explicitly in the likes of Messisbugo’s Banchetti, a kind of how-to guide on throwing a Renaissance feast published in 1549. The enduring but widely disparaged myth that Catherine de Médicis, when she married the French king in 1533, brought a fashion for all things Italian to the Parisian court isn’t without a grain of truth. Her arrival at the royal court certainly must have reinforced a trend that was already in full swing. The taste for spices had long been a feature of aristocratic cooking throughout Christendom; however, these new Italian cooking guides also made it trendy. The brand-new medium of the printed book spread the vogue for Italian seasoning to every corner of Renaissance Europe.
Venice was particularly well placed to take advantage of the communication revolution that swept across the continent after Gutenberg came up with movable type. While the Republic’s spice traders were increasingly shut out by the Portuguese and then wiped out completely by the Dutch, the city’s role as a world information hub blossomed. Venice had always been a communication cen
ter, if only because her pepper and silk merchants traveled the world and intelligence on everything from the price of rice in China to the latest harem coup in Istanbul was worth hard cash to the traders on the Rialto. Little wonder that four Venetian nobles once removed part of the roof of the Ducal Palace in order to listen to a confidential report from Istanbul. When rumors about Indian spices arriving in Lisbon reached Venice in 1501, the reaction of the government was to send an agent to Portugal to discover what was up. His report still survives. When Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza returned from his voyage round the world with Magellan, he visited Venice, where the bureaucrats charged with the spice trade heard his account of India “with the utmost attention.” Even more than a consumer of data, however, Venice was Europe’s preeminent distributor of information. This only increased with the arrival of printing in the city.
The technology came to Venice early because of the pepper routes that long connected her to central Europe. The first printers to arrive were the German brothers Johann and Wendelin von Speyer, who set up shop in the city a little before 1469. They had apparently learned the new technology in Mainz, where Gutenberg had started his printing business some fifteen years earlier. By 1500, about twenty-five German printing firms had opened in Venice. The city had two distinct perks for a printer: one was the ready supply of paper, and the other was that the church censors left you alone. Until the nineteenth century, Europeans made paper out of cotton or linen rags, and Venice was well supplied with both, and given the Republic’s mostly antagonistic relationship with Rome, the press was generally free of religious meddling. This, at least in part, accounts for the fact that there were more books printed in fifteenth-century Venice than in any other city in Europe (perhaps as many as 4,500 titles accounting for some 2.5 million copies), and while, in the next century, the city began to lose its lead over other centers such as Paris, it still managed to produce some 15,000 to 17,500 titles during the following one hundred years. These books were set in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Slavonic, German, French, and Spanish as well as various Italian dialects. Their subject matter ranged from theology to geography, from military treatises to handbooks on table manners. There were a good number of cookbooks and dietary manuals, too. It was only natural that the first cookbook ever published, Platina and Martino’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine, was set in type in Venice in 1475. At least five subsequent editions were printed here over the next thirty years.
There were, in fact, a great number of cookbooks published in Venice, including the first printed edition of Apicius, the sole surviving ancient Roman recipe collection. However, the majority were contemporary Italian food books by the likes of Cristoforo Messisbugo and the Venetian-born Bartolomeo Scappi, which were snapped up by trendy diners all over Europe. It’s clear from the many translations that cookbooks were in high demand, but the medical and dietary guides were even more popular. Many came out of Venice’s university at Padua, widely recognized in the fifteenth century as the Harvard Medical School of its day. Diet books, especially when endorsed by medical professionals, were as profitable for publishers then as they are now. It’s amazing to realize how quickly these Venetian books ricocheted across Europe. To give just one example, Girolamo Ruscelli’s Secreti, a collection of recipes and remedies, was first published in Venice (1555), then in a French translation (Antwerp, 1557), in English (London, 1558), Latin (Basle, 1559), Dutch (Antwerp, 1561), and German (Basle, 1575)—and this is the list only of those copies that survive in American collections!
This information revolution had an immense influence on the dissemination of culture. As books rolled off the presses in hundreds and thousands of copies, many more people could glimpse the culinary fireworks long hidden behind palace walls.*16 The wives of merchants in Bordeaux and investment bankers in Augsburg could try to replicate the dishes served at the feasts of princes and popes. Undoubtedly, this was often as successful as some of the famous chefs’ dishes I have tried to reproduce from the pages of Gourmet magazine, but, however muddled the results, the middle classes did get the idea that spices were necessary, even if a little expensive, if you wanted to keep up with the Medici. The popular diet manuals must have had a similar effect. The literate public could now prattle on about the need to balance the phlegmatic characteristics of sturgeon with the addition of a little cinnamon, all on the learned authority of esteemed doctors from Padua.
The Italian interest in food wasn’t always appreciated. The visiting French writer Michel de Montaigne was clearly fed up with all the food lectures he had received on his 1580 visit to Italy when he penned a portrait of the obsessive head cook, or scalco:
I asked him about his job, and he replied with a discourse on the science of guzzling, delivered with magisterial gravity and demeanor as if he had been expounding some great point of theology. He spelled out to me the differences in appetites: the one we have before eating, the one we have after the second and third course; the means now of simply gratifying it, now of arousing and stimulating it; the organization of his sauces, first in general, and then particularizing the qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences in salads according to the season, which one should be warmed up and which served cold, the way of adorning and embellishing them to make them also pleasant to the sight. After that he entered upon the order of serving, full of beautiful and important considerations.
Hand in hand with a desire to ape the sophisticated Venetian, Roman, and Florentine fashions came a reaction against the decadent ways of the Italians. For every courtier trying to flatter Catherine de Médicis by having his cooks re-create dishes from Messisbugo’s Banchetti, there was another who wanted to return to an idealized French simplicity. Venice, in particular, was both admired and reviled. Like New York, the city was considered the paradigm of sophistication and the incarnation of sin. Also a little like New York, its role as fashion center came somewhat late in the day.
When we look at Carpaccio’s paintings from the late fourteen hundreds, we see a society dressed to the nines and ready to party. While perhaps not the most cultured city in fifteenth-century Europe, Venice was the continent’s wealthiest. Its position as international entrepôt made it the best place in Europe to shop not only for spices but for every other ornament to wealth as well. The Milanese priest Pietro Casola noted the abundance on a visit in 1494:
Something may be said about the quantity of merchandise in the said city, although not nearly the whole truth, because it is inestimable. Indeed it seems as if the whole world flocks there, and that human beings have concentrated there all their force for trading. I was taken to see various warehouses, beginning with that of the Germans—which it appears to me would suffice alone to supply all Italy with the goods that come and go—and so many others that it can be said they are innumerable…. And who could count the many shops so well furnished that they also seem warehouses, with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades and hangings of every design, carpets of every sort, camlets of every colour and texture, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and drugs, and so much beautiful white wax! These things stupefy the beholder, and cannot be fully described to those who have not seen them.
That the city was fantastically rich is without question. The wealth, however, was increasingly settling in the purses of fewer people as the moneymen turned away from buying and selling. At the height of the spice trade, everyone made at least something, from the rowers on the galleys to the wealthy widows who invested their gold ducats in pepper. But now that profits were more often sunk into real estate and manufacturing than commerce, a smaller fragment of the population benefited. In this climate, the old, powerful, but not always flush families became especially prickly when the nouveaux riches and even the middling classes began to flaunt their affluence by building great big mansions on the terra firma and throwing lavish bashes at their canal-side palazzi. So laws were passed over and over in a vain attempt to limit conspicuous consumption. E
xcessive expenses for weddings and banquets organized by the compagnie de calza were specifically singled out in legislation passed in 1460, then again in 1466. The government set a maximum limit of half a ducat per guest, and anyone breaking the rules would get nailed with a hefty penalty of two hundred ducats, or worse.*17 Informants got to keep half the fine, and if the snitch happened to be an indentured servant or slave, he would get his freedom, too. Then, since the monetary limit didn’t seem to be working, the grumpy bureaucrats started to set rules about just what could be cooked. Doves, peacocks, partridge, pheasants, and other game birds were inscribed on the forbidden-food index. No more than three dishes were to be allowed, not counting confections, and the gilding of food was outlawed. (That spices don’t show up on this list of banished delights seems to reinforce Luca’s contention that they were not considered especially luxurious.) Dinners in public, the kind of parties today’s I Antichi regularly throw on the Campo San Maurizio outside of Jurubeba’s house, would also no longer be tolerated: “rather only private ones in the chambers as the ancients were accustomed to do, and only with small sweets [served].”