The Taste of Conquest (14 page)

The Italian food historian Massimo Montanari has described modern Italian and European cooking as predominantly “analytical” in character, by which he means that we like to distinguish between flavors. As a result, we keep bonbons away from salami and segregate our spices into sweet or savory ghettos. The idea that “cabbage soup should taste of cabbages, leeks of leeks, turnips of turnips,” as one seventeenth-century Frenchman would put it, was not a concept with much currency in the centuries between the Crusades and the Reformation. To use Montanari’s terminology, the cuisine of that era was “synthetic.” Rather than trying to keep flavors apart, the art of the cook required careful synthesis so that, ideally, all the main flavors would be present in any given dish. In addition, contemporary dietary beliefs emphasized the need to balance or correct, as they would see it, the “natural” flavors of many ingredients. Spices were considered highly useful in this respect, but, theory aside, the people who got used to eating highly seasoned food would have found cabbages that taste like cabbages a bit of a bore.

T
HE
P
RICE OF
S
PICE

Buried in the Venice State Archive, there is a court record that gives us a clue about the price of spice (and incidentally, of cabbages) for upper-middle-class citizens in the 1340s. Apparently, a certain Bernardo Morosini had been charged with taking care of his younger brothers after his father’s death. Apart from his three young-adult brothers, he was responsible for feeding a household that consisted of some three servants as well as an elderly former slave who had been freed in his father’s will. Occasionally, others had to be fed, such as a nurse hired to take care of Bernardo during a protracted illness, as well as the porters who would arrive with the wine, wood, and grain.

Bernardo’s carefully recorded purchases give us a somewhat surprising insight into the diet of an upper-middle-class Venetian on the eve of the Black Death. (It’s worth remembering that this was a time of increasing famine and population pressures, which made food more expensive than it had been in centuries past or would be for the hundred years following the plague.) The register covers only the winter and spring months, so it is naturally skewed toward foods available or permitted (in the case of Lent). It should come as no surprise that meat would be more available in the colder seasons (it wouldn’t spoil and was relatively cheap); still, who would think the Morosini household would, in the three months preceding Lent, be consuming, on average, almost seven pounds of beef per day, over and above the geese, chickens, and fish they bought? And this for a paltry eight to ten people! During Lent, meat intake plummeted, but the fish, cheese, and egg purchases easily took up the slack. Wine consumption was similarly generous, with the household sopping up some sixteen liters daily! In other respects, the diet must have been dull, indeed. Cabbage is practically the only vegetable recorded for several months (it must have been cheap, even though exact figures are absent), only to be replaced by
le erbe,
most likely salad greens or radicchio. Intriguingly, pepper and saffron appear in the register, too, though it’s unclear whether these were intended purely as medicine or whether some of that beef was turned into steaks au poivre (or the medieval Venetian equivalent). Still, it’s obvious that for the Morosinis, pepper was no extraordinary luxury. Which is not to say that it wasn’t expensive, but then eggs were, too.

What is striking when you look at food prices across Europe—and this is more or less the case right through the Industrial Revolution—is that many foods we take for granted were virtually unaffordable for all but a small slice of the population. In good years, working-class Europeans would be spending some 80 percent of their income on bread or its equivalent. When a bad harvest hit, that figure could top 150 percent.

In other words, they’d starve. They certainly couldn’t afford imported spices; however, eggs, poultry, oil, and wine were also out of reach.

Somewhat surprisingly, when you compare the cost of spices to some of today’s more commonplace foods, the relationship was more or less the same in Bernardo Morosini’s lifetime as it is now. An ounce of pepper or the lesser grades of ginger was worth about a dozen and a half eggs. (Cinnamon and the most expensive grades of ginger were typically about twice that price.) And this is not an isolated case. That ounce was worth about ten eggs in Venice in 1225, a dozen or so in London in 1450, and much the same in Wroclaw (Poland) in 1506. Seventy years later in Vienna, eggs had gotten more expensive: you’d get only about nine eggs for your ounce. Compare that to today. My local supermarket charges around a dollar fifty to three dollars for an ounce of pepper, just about the same price as a dozen eggs. Similarly, when the
Ménagier
listed the prices paid for the wedding banquet, chickens were running about eight pennies a pound, while ginger could be had for six pennies an ounce. Compare the cost of a free-range chicken to ginger today. You’ll find the ratio is roughly similar.

So you can see that when we look at the recipe books from the fifteenth century, it isn’t merely the presence of ginger and saffron that distinguishes them as the cuisine of the well-to-do; it is also the abundance of poultry, sugar, and eggs. The spices stand out because we are not used to cooking with them, yet it would be hard to argue that they were extraordinarily expensive in relation to many other foods.
^*14

What has changed, though, is how much people earn. In the late fifteenth century, a skilled employee of the Arsenale, Venice’s shipbuilding works, would have needed to work something like an hour and a half to buy an ounce of pepper (and more like two and a half hours in northern Europe), while today, an employee of General Motors would earn that same ounce in a few minutes.

All this is to say that by the fifteenth century, at least some of the less expensive spices were affordable luxuries, less like a bottle of Dom Pérignon (two hundred dollars per liter) than a Starbucks latte (eight dollars per liter). Which doesn’t mean that the average man or woman working at the Arsenale (women were employed as sailmakers) could afford them, but for the kind of people who could afford the occasional dozen eggs or a roast capon, pepper and ginger were not an especially big stretch. (Period cookbooks occasionally show that they are mindful of less than princely budgets, recommending cheaper substitutions so that your tastes would not outweigh the ducats in your purse.) By the time of Bernardo Morosini’s death, pepper had become much more ubiquitous outside the kitchens of the high and mighty than any other imported seasoning. This may explain why, when the fashion for spicy food among the elite had passed, Europeans as a whole never stopped using black pepper.

Before that happened, though, increasing numbers of Europeans got a taste for the more expensive Asian condiments. The fifteenth century, in particular, saw a spectacular rise in the consumption of ginger (up 200 to 300 percent), while the following century was a boom time for cloves, nutmeg, and mace (up some 500 percent). In the meantime, the population slowly recovered from its Black Death losses, rising some 60 percent in the two centuries. In contrast, per capita pepper imports rose just a smidgen in the fourteen hundreds and hardly budged during the next hundred years. Then, in the seventeenth century, when a price war between the Dutch and English sent the price of pepper to unprecedented lows, consumption doubled even as the overall population stagnated. It would seem that the skyrocketing cost of basic foods (the fifteen hundreds were a time of rampant inflation) made it necessary for the middle classes to scrimp on superfluities such as pepper in the sixteenth century—the poor just died of malnutrition—but when pepper got relatively cheap in the next century, then they sprinkled it on.

Ironically, even as the price of basic foodstuffs was going up, the overall cost of living for the wealthy may actually have gone down. In the fifteen hundreds, the rich never spent much more than a quarter of their income on food, while the well-to-do may have spent twice that. Most of the rest of their money was spent on luxuries (arguably, many of the foods they purchased would fit into that category, too). And it was precisely the goods that you needed to keep up with the sixteenth-century Joneses that got cheaper in those years. Books, fine clothing, and servants were more affordable than ever. This was especially true in the Renaissance Italian city-states, where the inflationary spiral was not as severe as elsewhere in Europe. In sixteenth-century Florence, almost a quarter of all households could boast two or more servants, surely a pretty good indication of who could afford the newly popular spices. In Venice, if anything, the standard of living was even higher. Wages certainly were, and this in a town where wheat was often cheaper than on the mainland. Here, a master builder earned enough in a day to buy some thirty pounds of bread or about ten or more pounds of beef. At this wage scale, he could certainly afford the occasional ounce of pepper or ginger, costing about the same as a half pound of beef. Architects and bank managers were earning perhaps two to three times that amount, so you would imagine that, at least once in a while, they could splurge on an ounce of nutmeg or cinnamon at twice the pepper price. But this was Venice. In far-off England, where spices were easily two to four times as expensive in comparison to the normal wage, lordlings didn’t have it this good.

This may in part explain why pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg were so widespread in Italian Renaissance cooking. But any economic explanation surely tells only part of the story. Luca has the most succinct answer to the popularity of spices in the glory days of I Antichi and the other
compagnie de calza.
“Fa più figo,” he says. (Spices were “cool,” he translates.) They were trendy. Everybody who could afford it wanted ginger and cinnamon in their food. A given fashion has many explanations, but to a certain extent, it also has a life of its own.

C
ELEBRITY
C
HEFS, THE
N
EW
M
EDIA, AND THE
R
ISE OF THE
P
ARTY
T
OWN

The Renaissance has been credited for cultural advances of all kinds, but one of that remarkable era’s lesser-known innovations may be the invention of the celebrity chef. “What a cook you bestowed, o immortal gods, in my friend Martino of Como,” bubbled the bookish Bartolomeo Sacchi (better known by his pen name, Platina) in his bestselling cookbook based on his friend’s recipes. One of the changes that came with the Renaissance was that craftsmen who had long labored in the shadows now stepped into the limelight. This phenomenon is well documented among painters, who morphed from anonymous blue-collar workers sprucing up palaces and churches into household names like Leonardo and Raphael. The same thing happened (admittedly on a much smaller scale) in the culinary arts. Not that we actually know all that much about Martino, “the chief cook of our age” (again, according to Platina), other than that he was probably born in Como, in the foothills of the Alps. He may have had red hair, since he was also known as Martino de Rossi.

Yet even if it were not for the cookbook author’s accolades, you can see from the chef ’s résumé that he was in high demand at Italy’s most glamorous courts. He appears to have worked for aristocrats in Milan and Naples. But his most prestigious assignment came when he arrived in Rome in the middle of the fifteenth century and took on the job of running the kitchens of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan. The cardinal was one of the richest members of the papal court and was famous for his appetites for gambling, horses, women, art, dogs, and fine cuisine. He was reputed to spend some twenty ducats a day on food alone. (That was the yearly wage of our laborer at the Arsenale!) He obviously snatched up the best cook in town, and it might have been at his house, around 1463, that the talented chef met the erudite Platina. Soon enough, they came up with a book of recipes. The fruit of their collaboration,
De honesta voluptate et valetudine
(On Honest Pleasure and Good Health), was to be the most widely read cookbook of its time. Where Martino was clearly a practical chef—or
scalco,
as these culinary maestros were known—Platina was an academic, employed as the Vatican librarian. Platina was part of a Roman circle of Humanists who appear to have divided their time between quoting Virgil and planning dinner. Similarly, the book is divided between scholarly references to long-dead Romans and recipes for roast piglet and Sicilian macaroni.

Of course, Martino would have been nothing without his highbrow publicist. Martino’s recipes had been collected before this, but without the prestige of someone like Platina writing in polished Latin, it’s unlikely the book would have been read outside the peninsula. And it was. There were at least eight Latin editions before 1517, but the collection became even more popular when translated into the vernacular. All told, there were some fifteen French, seven German, five Italian, and even a Dutch translation by the late fifteen hundreds. Moreover, Martino’s recipe collection was plagiarized and bastardized under an assortment of disguises in dozens of editions in the two hundred years following its publication. As a result, cooks in Elizabethan England (and elsewhere) were stuffing their pies with fillings seasoned in the Italian style as much as Shakespeare was packing his plays with Italian characters.

So what did gourmets eat on the eve of Columbus’s and da Gama’s voyages in search of the spiceries? It’s clear from the beginning that Martino’s cookbook is not for the budget-conscious. There is plenty of pricey poultry and game. Eggs, meat, and fish of all sorts are common. And the majority of recipes include at least some spice. The most popular by far is saffron, closely followed by cinnamon, ginger, and pepper. Cloves, nutmeg, and melegueta make a token appearance. Gone, however, are all of the more obscure spices of the earlier collections. You will search in vain for long pepper and galingale, to say nothing of cubebs and zedoary. In that sense, at least, it is a more bourgeois cuisine, using the more restricted palette of seasoning accessible to bankers and architects, not just to princes and cardinals. If we look at Martino’s original recipe for the
fior di ginestra
sauce (the one Sergio uses at Bistrot de Venise for his sea bass), it is actually a model of simplicity. Martino instructs you to make an almond milk–based sauce, which is then “tempered” with verjuice, thickened with egg yolk, colored with saffron, and scented with ginger. Presumably, salt would have been added as well. So here, at least, the seasoning is relatively austere. More typical, however, is a recipe for eel
torta
(a sort of pie), flavored with ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and saffron as well as a little sugar and rose water. As in so many cookbooks of the late Middle Ages, you just can’t tell how much of any of these spices went into the food, since neither Martino nor Platina thought to include quantities. If you look at slightly later Italian cookbooks, such as the 1549 edition of Cristoforo Messisbugo’s
Banchetti
(Banquets), the quantities of spice seem roughly commensurate with the
Anonimo Veneziano;
one to two teaspoons of spice per pound of meat are the norm.