Two Ways of Looking at Maestro Martino

review essay | nancy harmon jenkins Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005 208 pp. $29.95 (cloth) Maestro Martino: Libro de Arte Coquinaria, Rome, ca. 1465 From the Katherine Golden Bitting Collection, Library of Congress Translated by Gillian Riley, with an appreciation by Alice Waters and supportive text material by Bruno Laurioux, Gillian Riley, and Paul Shaw Oakland, ca: Octavo Editions: 2005 287 pp. $40.00 (cd-rom) The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano A critical edition and English translation by Terence Scully, initially with the collaboration of Rudolf Grewe Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000 256 pp. $60.00 (cloth) Who was maestro martino? We know almost nothing about this late fifteenth-century cook and cookbook writer except that he was an eminent Italian chef, the Mario Batali or Julia Child (or both, if the reader can imagine it) of his time and place. “Prince of cooks…from whom I learnt all about cooking” is the way he was described by his friend and colleague Bartolomeo Sacchi (called Platina) in De honesta voluptate, Platina’s own cookery text, published in Latin in Rome in 1474—the first known printed cookbook. Martino was unquestionably the most celebrated cook in Italy, more specifically in Rome, a professional chef of great repute within the lavish courtly environment of the papal curia during the exhilarating second half of the fifteenth century, a time of intense political, intellectual, religious, and social ferment. Since he was called variously Martino of Como and Martino of Milan, we conclude that he probably hailed from and spent his early years in the north of Italy; and since many of his recipes show obvious connections with Spanish cooking and especially with the Catalan manuscript “Libre de sent sovì,” we suspect that he spent some time in Naples, a city that had come under longlasting Catalan influence after its conquest by Alfonso (the Magnanimous) of Aragon in 1442. We know that Martino later served in Rome as cook to the Cardinal Patriarch of Aquileia, Ludovico Trevisan, who died in 1465, and to whom he dedicated a handsome copy of his cookery manuscript. And we know that he was later in service to the Milanese condottiere/adventurer Giangiacomo Trivulzio, although he may also have worked for one or more popes in the interim. At least four, and possibly five, Italian manuscript versions of Martino’s cookery text are known, all of which date from sometime in the late fifteenth century. It is usually described as a medieval recipe collection, representing the period art historians call Late Gothic International. But Luigi Ballerini, who teaches medieval and modern Italian literature at the University of California–Los Angeles and who has written a lengthy, rambling, somewhat speculative introduction to the University of California Press edition under review, claims it as “the first modern cookery book,” an interpretation that is a bit of a stretch, presumably to make Martino relevant to modern times. (Can modern European cuisine really have begun well before the introduction of any New World food products at all?) It’s a better bet, perhaps, to see Martino as on the cusp between medieval and modern kitchens. His recipe for “peacocks in all their plumage, which though cooked appear alive, spouting fire from their beaks,” with its very precise instructions for mounting the extravaganza, is straight out of the medieval banqueting tradition: “When you have skinned the body, pull the skin of the neck inside out over the head, which you then detach from the top of the neck, while leaving it gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 97–103, issn 1529-3262. © 2007 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press ’ s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2007.7.2.97. 97 GASTRONOMICA The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book The Eminent Maestro Martino of Como Edited and with an introduction by Luigi Ballerini Translated and annotated by Jeremy Parzen, with fifty modernized recipes by Stefania Barzini SPRING 2007 Two Ways of Looking at Maestro Martino connected just by the skin.”1 A dish like coppiette al modo romano (Roman-style coppiette or kebabs),2 could be served in Italy today, however, without anyone commenting on its strangeness, except for the use of coriander seeds, which are not well known in the modern Italian kitchen. Bruno Laurioux, the eminent French culinary historian, puts Martino in context when, in his contribution to the Octavo cd-rom also under review, he says that the text stands as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, “a symbol of the cuisine of humanism.” First things first: the four—possibly five—known versions of Martino’s recipe collection are as follows: • “Libro de arte coquinaria,” in the Bitting collection of the Library of Congress, LC Medieval Manuscript 153, often referred to as MS Vehling, from Joseph Vehling, American chef, restaurateur, and rare-book collector who purchased it in 1926; both the University of California publication and the Octavo cd-rom under review are based on this text, the full title of which is “Libro de arte coquinaria composto per lo egregio maestro Martino coquo olim del Reverendiss Monsignor Camorlengo et Patriarcha de Aquileia” (Book of the Art of Cooking Composed by the Distinguished Master Martino One-time Cook to the Most Reverend Monsignor Chamberlain and Patriarch of Aquileia); • An untitled and unattributed manuscript in the Vatican’s Biblioteca Apostolica, MS Urbinate Latino 1203, that is almost identical to the Library of Congress manuscript, although written in a different hand; • “Libro de cosina” (Book of Cooking), also called the Riva del Garda manuscript, discovered in the 1980s in the local library of this town located at the northern end of Lake Garda, not too far SPRING 2007 from what this manuscript claims was Martino’s birthplace in the Ticino region, now a part of Switzerland; • Library, MS Bühler 19; as we shall see, Terence Scully, emeritus professor of French at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, whose translation of this manuscript is also under review, argues that this 98 GASTRONOMICA “Cuoco napoletano,” a manuscript in New York’s Pierpont Morgan is the earliest version, possibly not by Martino at all, though clearly the one on which the others are based; other scholars disagree; • A manuscript titled “Libro de arte coquinaria edito per lo egregio e peritissimo Mastro Martino coquo dei Rmo S. Cardinale de Aquileia” (Book of the Art of Cooking Edited by the Distinguished and Most Expert Master Martino, Cook of the Most Reverend Cardinal of Aquileia), which was sold at Christie’s to a private collector in 1974 and has not been seen since; written in a very fine hand (possibly that of the renowned scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito, according to the compilers of the Octavo cd-rom), this is a luxurious presentation copy, apparently made for the Patriarch of Aquileia, Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, who died in 1465—it must therefore predate his death.3 All of the above manuscripts were written in vernacular Italian. But another part of the Martino canon is the first great gastronomic text in the history of European printed books, Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Honest Pleasure and Good Health), written in Latin by Martino’s friend Bartolomeo Sacchi, the Vatican librarian, and first published in Rome in 1474. Most of the recipes in his book, Platina freely acknowledges, come from “my friend Martino of Como, from whom I got the greater part of what I write. You would think him another Carneades from the eloquent way he improvises on themes tossed at him” (Riley translation). The first two texts, the Library of Congress and Vatican versions, are generally held to be the most faithful to Martino’s original—if indeed an original autograph (that is, a manuscript written by Martino himself) ever existed. It is possible, even probable, that Martino dictated his text to a scribe or possibly even collaborated with Platina on the compilation. Certainly, the careful and beautiful Italic hand displayed in the Library of Congress manuscript indicates a professional scribe as its “author.” Paul Shaw, in his “Note on the Calligraphy” in the Octavo cd-rom, suggests that there were actually two different scribes, not an unusual occurrence. (A great virtue of the cd-rom is that you can see the actual manuscript pages and even enlarge them to make them more legible and to discern where the scribal hand changes.) The mystery manuscript, the elaborate presentation copy, presumably was transcribed some time before Trevisan’s death in 1465 since it describes Martino as the patriarch’s cook, while the Library of Congress text, with its title reference to “Martino coquo olim del…Patriarcha de Aquileia” (one-time or former cook to the patriarch of Aquileia), must have been written after Trevisan’s death when Martino apparently was in service with Trivulzio—though he may also have worked for one or more popes in the interim. The “Libro de cosina” from Riva del Garda and the “Cuoco napoletano” from the Morgan library, which apparently share some recipes that do not appear in either the Library of Congress or Vatican versions, may be earlier. Or they may be later. It depends on whose argument you accept. Terence Scully makes the case for the precedence of the Neapolitan and Riva del Garda manuscripts, suggesting that the less precise, more abbreviated language typical of both “Cuoco napoletano” and “Libro de cosina” indicates that Martino had yet to refine the more meticulous prescriptions of his recipes characteristic of the Library of Congress’s MS Vehling. Laurioux makes a case, however, SPRING 2007 for Platina’s own direct involvement in the compilation represented by the Vehling and Vatican manuscripts and, consequently, reasons that the Riva del Garda manuscript was set down by Martino himself “in his twilight years” without the linguistic refinements that his more literate friend Platina had earlier provided. In any case, in whatever order they were written, all five texts “were probably composed in peninsular Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century or the early sixteenth century,” according to food historian Jeremy Parzen, the Above: Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Cardinal Lodovico Trevisano (1401–1465). Undated. Oil on poplar, 44.8 x 33.9 cm. Inv. 9. photo by joerg p. anders. gemaeldegalerie, staatliche museen zu berlin, berlin, germany. photo credit: bildarchiv preussischer kulturbesitz / art translator of the uc Press edition. And all five clearly belong to what Scully calls the Martino tradition—all versions of a recipe collection, Scully says, “to which the name of Martino [has]…regularly been attached.” But, he suggests, the history of this tradition is more complex than previously believed, and possibly darker: the “Cuoco napoletano,” in Scully’s GASTRONOMICA 99 judgment, may represent what he calls a prototext that Martino discovered (while working in and among Catalaninspired kitchens in Naples?) and then adopted as his own and later expanded. If so (but we really have no reason to believe Scully’s thesis), Martino may have been the first, but would surely not have been the last, cookbook writer to appropriate another’s work, all or in part, as his own. To illustrate the difference between the Neapolitan text and that from the Library of Congress manuscript, here are the instructions from “Cuoco napoletano” for preparing turbot: Boil it, and because it is so soft, tie it to a reed tray and boil it gently in a large vessel; for its sauce, it takes verjuice, ground parsley, pepper and saffron on top.4 (Terrence Scully translation) In the “Libro de arte coquinaria,” however, the description of the process is indeed a good deal fuller and more detailed, although lacking information about the sauce: To cook turbot Poach it and, since this is a very fragile fish and breaks easily, cook in a fish kettle or tied to a board so that it can be removed whole without disintegrating. It should simmer very gently. Indeed, all fish in general should cook gently, and you need to understand how to recognize and distinguish the qualities of different fish—which are soft and which are firm fleshed, and hence how long they should be cooked but all of them should be poached slowly, gently, and carefully until they are SPRING 2007 properly cooked.5 (Gillian Riley translation) GASTRONOMICA 100 Which came first? We may never know the answer. It seems equally plausible that the Neapolitan recipes, along with the Riva del Garda manuscript, might represent the kind of shorthand any cook would jot down to remind himself of a recipe, long after he has described the preparation in detail for the benefit of a noncook like his boss, the Patriarch of Aquileia. Just so, in my grandmother’s handwritten kitchen notebook the recipes are not really instructions so much as notes to jog the cook’s memory so that no key ingredient or step in the process is left out. Scully, in any case, does a thoroughgoing and tremendously useful job of analyzing the text of his “Cuoco napoletano,” publishing the Italian original of each recipe, along with an English translation and commentary, often extensive, for each. Moreover, his appendices detail the similarities and differences between the “Cuoco napoletano” and the Catalan recipe collections from the same and earlier periods, including the great fourteenth-century “Libre de sent sovì” and the somewhat later Libre del coch of Mestre Robert (also known as Ruperto di Nola).6 This kind of epigraphic analysis is interesting, but far more so, at least to me, is what Martino’s recipe collection tells us about the exciting times in which he lived and the food he prepared for his wealthy and aristocratic patrons. Whether the Neapolitan manuscript antedates or postdates the Library of Congress text is in a certain sense irrelevant, since taken together, all the versions of Martino’s manuscript are part of a progression of ideas and practices leading from the earliest culinary compilations, such as the “Sent sovì” and even earlier Arabic texts, on through later Italian cookbooks to modern European cookery. I don’t mean to suggest that it all began with Maestro Martino. Certainly, since until very recently his book existed only in a few manuscript copies, his direct influence on the development of cuisine was negligible. But Platina’s Latin translation of Martino’s recipes, published in 1474, went through many editions, including a retranslation into Italian in 1487, as well as French and German translations a few years later. Moreover, if the manuscripts themselves were not in wide circulation, knowledge of the style most certainly influenced the development of European cooking. To know and read these original versions of Martino’s cookbook today is to understand important threads that link us directly to the cuisine he represents. Martino’s Rome, like Naples, Florence, and other Italian cities, was a center of brilliance, vigor, and contagious artistic ferment. The Renaissance was new and thrilling: Petrarch had introduced Italian intellectuals to the ideas of humanism; Brunelleschi’s dome was complete; Gutenberg had printed his Bible; and in Italy the first printed book was produced in Rome in 1467. The Spanish ruled Naples and the south, including Sicily; the Vatican ruled central Italy apart from Tuscany; and the Ottoman Turks had kicked open the door to Byzantium (which sent a tremor through Christian Europe as palpable as the shudders induced today by terrorist activity in the Middle East and elsewhere), while Venice and Genova still for a few decades longer held the east—not exactly in thrall but certainly exerting and absorbing a good deal of influence, culinary and otherwise. The list of Italian artists active during the period is breath stopping: Carpaccio, Perugino, Luca Signorelli, Donatello, Alberti, Botticelli, the Bellinis in Venice, Antonello da Messina in Sicily, Mantegna in Mantua, Piero della Francesca in Tuscany and Umbria. Popes like Nicholas v and Pius ii were as distinguished for their intellectual rigor as others were for their corrupt and lascivious behavior. While modern historians argue that the Renaissance was a phenomenon with far greater effect on the aristocratic and mercantile classes than its negligible impact on workers and peasants, it was to this more exalted SPRING 2007 Catalan collections: “De apereylar bé de menyar”; what he calls the primitive “Sent soví”; and the early sixteenth-century Libre del coch of Mestre Robert.9 Such a link suggests that Martino must have spent time in Catalan court circles in Naples, then one of the most brilliant, sophisticated, and urbane cities in the entire Mediterranean—indeed in all of Europe. Catalans were everywhere in Renaissance Italy—kings of Naples, dukes of Calabria, popes (Callixtus iii, Alfonso Borja or Borgia, ruled from 1455–1458, while his nephew Rodrigo served as a Vatican vice-chancellor and, much later, 1492–1506, as the great pope Alexander vi). The Borgias were originally from Játiva in Valencia and brought their cooks with them when they moved with Alfonso to Naples and, eventually, to Rome. The Catalan recipes in “De arte coquinaria,” like those in “Cuoco napoletano,” may have come directly from Catalan cooks working for these notables, or they may have been lifted from the pages of the “Sent soví” and other, as yet unknown, Catalan manuscripts. In any case, without going into the differences among the three known Catalan texts or the difficulties of dating them, it seems clear that Catalonia represented then, as it does today, a style of cooking that was very much à la mode, so that a cook with any sort of pretensions would certainly have to know about Catalan dishes and techniques and, if nothing else, use a certain Catalan culinary vocabulary in his descriptions. Another example of a specifically Catalan presentation is the recipe called in the Library of Congress manuscript Mirause catalano and in the “Cuoco napoletano” Mirausto alla catalana.10 The recipe, which is on p.54 of the uc Press edition, pp.10–11 of “Translation” (pp.130–131 of the overall edition) in the Octavo cd-rom, and p.51 of “Cuoco napoletano,” calls for half-roasting (mi-raust) a bird or birds and then continuing the cooking in a pot (specifically a pignata) with a sauce made of crushed toasted almonds and toasted bread mixed with egg yolks, a little vinegar, and broth and spiced with ginger, sugar, and cinnamon. This is a recipe that comes straight out of the “Sent soví” where, however, Scully notes, it is thickened with the mashed livers of the birds instead of with egg yolks. These thick sauces based on crushed nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, pine nuts, etc.) have a long history in the Mediterranean. I think immediately of the best known, Ligurian pesto, but there’s also the Catalan salsa romesco, made nowadays with New World red peppers, but in origin not unlike the mirause sauce in the “Sent soví.” In Granada some years ago, I watched a restaurant chef prepare a sauce with fried almonds, fried bread, and the fried livers of the bird he was grilling, along with dried chilies, a dash of vinegar, and some good broth. He tipped it all into a food processor, buzzed it a couple of 101 GASTRONOMICA class that Martino belonged, if only by virtue of his craft. Both Luigi Ballerini, in his introduction to the uc Press edition, and Gillian Riley, in her commentary on the Octavo cd-rom, yield to the temptation to reconstruct a prominent role for our chef in this rollicking environment, but it is not necessary to imagine Martino carousing and cavorting with artists and rebellious intellectuals in the taverns and catacombs of Rome to understand his importance. In any case, “De arte coquinaria” presents a first-rate example of the kinds of ideas about food and cooking that were circulating in Europe. It seems clear that the manuscript represents not so much Martino’s inventions as a selection from what were probably several hundred recipes circulating as common currency in court circles (including ecclesiastical court circles) in Italy and Spain, France and England, and probably in other parts of western Europe as well. The late Phyllis Pray Bober stressed the international nature of all these cuisines and the fertile interrelationships, formed through marriages, diplomatic alliances, and ceremonial ties among courts and prelates, that created, among other phenomena, a “commonality in basic culinary procedures and results.”7 A good example of that can be found in the several recipes for biancomangiare (which Riley and Scully translate as “white dish,” while Parzen calls it blancmange). In Riley’s very useful glossary, she describes biancomangiare as an aristocratic dish made of costly ingredients—sugar, rosewater, ginger, and almonds—to which is added the pounded flesh of a cooked chicken breast or, on fasting days, white-meat fish. Rice is also a frequent, though not constant, ingredient. This is a dish with a history as long as it is broad. It or a very similar preparation with a similar name shows up everywhere from the “Libre de sent soví” (as Manyar blanch) to the Forme of Curye (as Blank maunger) to the Buch von Güter Speiser (as blamensier). Scully calls it “the most widely known of all late-medieval culinary preparations.”8 And it persists, although by the time Mrs. Beeton published her recipe Rice Blancmange in the nineteenth century, the chicken had disappeared and the crushed almonds had been replaced by almond extract, resulting in a bland, sweet pudding flavored with lemon peel rather than the subtle spicing of the original. In modern Italian versions the chicken (or fish) has also gone, with cornstarch added in its place as a thickener, but essentially biancomangiare still exists as a rare but much loved, old-fashioned, countrified sweet, one with a very long history. (Much closer to the original is kazandibi tavuk gögsü, made with chicken, milk, and rice or rice flour and still a much-loved dish in Turkey.) Scully has identified thirty-one recipes in the “Cuoco napoletano” that have a counterpart in at least one of three SPRING 2007 GASTRONOMICA 102 times to make a coarse paste, and then served it with the grilled bird. Delicious! But what is most remarkable, in going over the various editions and translations of Martino’s text, is the persistence of certain Italian culinary traditions. The use of fennel to flavor sausages, for instance, or the recipe for carbonata on p.19 of “Translation” (p.139 of the full text) in the Octavo edition, p.58 of the uc Press edition. This manner of preparing thick rashers of unsmoked cured bacon or pancetta and topping it with vinegar and spices is prepared exactly as my Tuscan butcher advises to this day. Stewing fresh fava beans or peas with mint and a little salt-cured meat is another tradition that persists to the present. What is also remarkable is the great variety of vegetables used in fifteenth-century Italy, reminding me of another delightful translation by Gillian Riley, Giacomo Castelvetro’s Brieve racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l’erbe e di tutti i frutti che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano, published by Viking in 1990 as The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy. Among the vegetables and fruits I found in Maestro Martino’s text were chard, parsley, green wheat, fava beans and peas (both fresh and dried), onions, apples, lettuce, turnips, fennel, cauliflower, squash, mushrooms, garlic, quinces, hemp seeds, borage, broccoli, sorrel, eggplant (a new arrival on the Italian table), skirrets, garden cresses, black cherries and cornel cherries, mulberries, grapes, prunes, rose-apples, dates, and figs, as well as fresh herbs including marjoram, mint, sage, bay leaves, and rosemary, most of which are used in one or another part of Italy to this day. So much for those who claim that medieval and Renaissance cooks were indifferent to fruits and vegetables. For modern cooks and writers made anxious by medieval culinary excesses, Martino does indeed represent a step toward a modern kitchen in which flavors are balanced and proportion is part of a new aesthetic. His mirabilia gulae (culinary wonders or marvels), like the peacock spewing fire from its beak or a flying pie in which, when the pie is opened, live birds fly out and about the room or directions for “how to make aspic in a carafe with a live fish inside,” are part of a dying medieval tradition, the banquet as mere spectacle, in which food seems not to have been as important to eat as to display. Still, people ate, have eaten throughout history, and they cannot thrive on live fish floating in aspic or live blackbirds flying out of a just-opened pie. The greater part of Martino’s recipes present real food for real people, the kind of fare to stuff a cardinal’s belly or, in the case of the emmer (farro) tart or manfrigo in minestre, equally the belly of a well-off peasant family.11 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole text—to me at least—is represented by the pasta or macaroni (maccaroni) recipes. Here, at last and possibly for the first time, we have very precise instructions for making pasta, and as Bill Buford has pointed out in a different context, there’s not an egg in sight.12 Roman-style macaroni is made with flour (and presumably with water) cut into ribbons or laces, cooked in broth or water, and dressed with cheese, butter, and sweet spices. Sicilian macaroni are made with flour and egg whites (but not today’s quintessential golden yolks), flavored with rosewater, rolled around an iron rod, dried in the sun (best if it’s the sun of August), cooked likewise in broth or water, and served with grated cheese, butter, and sweet spices. But, he notes, to the modern cook’s horror, “This kind of macaroni needs to cook for two hours.” (Riley notes that the Riva del Garda manuscript says the pasta should cook for only half an hour—it still sounds like mush to me.) So which of these books do I recommend? Obviously, The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano, because its manuscript is rather different from (and possibly earlier than) the manuscript in the Library of Congress and therefore essential for anyone interested in Italian culinary history. But we are fortunate indeed to have two excellent translations of the Vehling manuscript, published almost simultaneously and in two different formats, such that it becomes quite impossible to recommend one over the other. Both have virtues and both have drawbacks. The great virtue of the Octavo cd-rom is the ease with which you can look up terms and processes—always keeping in mind that you have them spelled correctly according to the translator’s interpretation. But the fact that the pagination is broken up among the different sections of the cd-rom makes it very hard to cite, as I have noted. The adjunct material, including Riley’s and Laurioux’s essays, adds greatly to our understanding of the context of Martino’s work. Luigi Ballerini’s introduction to the uc Press version also adds a lot to the sense of context, although to my mind he wastes a great deal of the reader’s time with his discussion of events that came long before or long after Martino and have little relevance to his work—such as, for instance, the Battle of Anghiari and Leonardo’s lost fresco in the Salone dei Cinquecento, or Pope Martin v’s early fourteenth-century efforts to restore Rome to its past glory. In any case, most of Ballerini’s introduction is devoted to Platina (Bartolomeo Sacchi), about whom a great deal more is known than about Martino. The translations differ in quality, but unevenly. That is, some are better (more accurate, more comprehensible) in Riley’s version; others, in Parzen’s. I offer sample translations of one recipe so that readers can decide. From Gillian Riley (p.70 of “Translation,” p.190 of the total cd-rom): A tart of red chickpeas Cook a pound of red chickpeas and pound them really well, then force through a very fine sieve with some of their cooking liquid and some rose water. Take a pound of blanched almonds so well ground that they won’t need to be put through a sieve and pound with them two ounces of raisins and three or four dried figs, with one and a half ounces of authentic), and several downright errors (baking soda, not baking powder, is used for soaking dried beans—but certainly not in the fifteenth century). Still, for cooks interested in reproducing early Renaissance/late-medieval dishes, the recipes are useful and would be both instructive and fun to use in a class or for a group interested in medieval cookery. So if you can afford it, by all means add both to your library, and put them on the shelf next to Scully’s Cuoco Napoletano.g pine nuts, crushed but not pulverized, adding sugar, rose water, cinnamon, and ginger and mixing well together. To thicken the mixture, add notes starch or pike eggs….Cook with a layer of pastry underneath, and when 1. The recipe title and quotation are from Gillian Riley’s translation, p.11 of the section titled “Translation” in the Octavo cd-rom. (Listing citations and references in the cd-rom is an irritating problem, since each contribution to the volume is paginated independently from the others. Thus p.11 of “Translation” is actually p.131 of the complete disc.) The same recipe is given a slightly different reading by Jeremy Parzen in the uc Press edition, p.54. From Jeremy Parzen (p.86 of the uc Press edition): 2. “Translation,” p.13 (p.134), in the Octavo edition; p.56 in the uc Press edition. Cook a libra of red chickpeas, crush well, and together with their 3. A photograph of the handsome first page of this manuscript, presumably from the Christie’s catalog, is on p.2 of Paul Shaw’s “A Note on the Calligraphy,” p.19 in the complete Octavo edition. broth pass through a very thick stamine, and take a libra of well- 4. Recipe no. 204, p.207, in Scully, The Neapolitan Recipe Collection. peeled blanched almonds that have been very well crushed, because 5. “Libro de arte coquinaria,” “Translation,” pp.98–99 (p.218 of Octavo cd-rom). [How to Make a Red Chickpea Torte] they should not be passed through a stamine; and together with the almonds, crush two ounces of raisins and three or four dried figs; likewise an ounce and a half of slightly crushed pine nuts, not ground, 6. Scully himself was initially assisted in compiling the text of “Cuoco napoletano” by the late Rudolf Grewe, who transcribed the most up-to-date version of “Libre de sent sovì,” published in Barcelona by Editorial Barcino in 1979. adding some sugar, rose water, cinnamon, and ginger, mixing all these 7. Phyllis Pray Bober, Art, Culture and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 237. things together well. To make it thicken, incorporate some fine starch 8. Scully, The Neapolitan Recipe Collection, 160. or some pike roe…and cook it with a crust on the bottom; and when 9. The Libre del coch was first published in Catalan in 1520 and in Castilian Spanish in 1525. In the later text the author was called Ruperto de Nola, suggesting that he may have come from the town of Nola outside Naples. In any case, he is identified as cook to King Ferrante, who reigned in Naples from 1458 to 1494, making it possible, even likely, that if Martino was working in Naples, the two cooks may well have known each other and exchanged ideas. it appears to you to be nearly done cooking, top with some sugar and some rose water, and apply heat again from above from a high flame. Note that this torte should be short. Speaking purely from a cook’s perspective, Riley’s translation is much easier to use. Why Parzen neglects throughout the book to translate expressions like una libra and una stamegna is not at all clear since the terms are readily available in any modern Italian dictionary. Una stamegna bene stretta is much better understood as “a very fine sieve” rather than “a very thick stamine”; furthermore, a “short” torte is meaningless—or rather, it would make any accomplished cook think that the torte pastry or crust should be short, i.e., made with more fat than usual, rather than what the recipe clearly means, a thin, shallow tart. The uc Press book comes with fifty recipes, developed from Martino’s originals by Stefania Barzini, a food journalist in Rome. The recipes are fine as far as they go, but there are some questionable statements (such as that Etruscans ate lasagna in their chickpea stew), some inexplicable additions (such as the tomatoes and chili peppers included in Martino’s Roman Broccoli, doubtless delicious but hardly 10. In researching this recipe, I became aware of important indexing problems with each of the books under discussion. One must be aware of different possible spellings of late-medieval terms like mig-raust, mirraust, mirause. In the Octavo edition I searched in vain until I discovered the spelling used was mirrauste— inexplicably, since the Library of Congress manuscript uses the term mirause. In the uc Press edition index I found the recipe under Catalan but not under mirause; only The Neapolitan Recipe Collection had a listing for mirausto, as it’s written in that text, in the index. 11. Riley translates this recipe as manfrighi or malfattini, while Parzen, somewhat confusingly, calls it fregola pottage. 12. In Heat (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), Bill Buford discusses his search for the exact moment in Italian culinary history when whole eggs or egg yolks were added to pasta dough to enrich it. He fails to find it. SPRING 2007 plenty of heat from above. This should be a shallow tart. 103 GASTRONOMICA it seems almost done strew with sugar and rose water and then give it