The Renaissance courts and the first printed Italian cookery

The first printed Italian cookery belongs to the fifteenth-century courts of the peninsula, where the household of a prince or prelate kept cooks, stewards and carvers in numbers that made the kitchen an instrument of state. Waverley Root, in The Food of Italy, treats this period as the point at which Italian cooking, long dispersed among regional and monastic practice, first acquired a written and printed form.

Root's account rests on the observation that Italy before unification was a country of separate courts and cities, and that its cooking was shaped by each in turn. The great houses, among them those of Florence, Ferrara, Mantua, Milan and Rome, competed in the splendour of their tables, and the cooks who served them were counted among the household's officers. The banquet was a matter of display as much as of nourishment, and the surviving descriptions of such feasts record the order of service, the spectacle and the quantities, which the cook was expected to organise with the carver and the steward. The printing press made it possible to fix this knowledge. The first printed Italian cookery, which Root associates with the later fifteenth century, gathered the practice of the courts into a text that could be copied exactly and carried from one kitchen to another. Its importance lies less in any single recipe than in the fact that cooking had become a subject worth setting in type, addressed to a reader who already knew the trade and wished to see it ordered. Root connects the courtly table with the wider movement of ingredients and manners. Sugar, spices and rich sauces held a prominent place in the grand cooking of the period, and the dishes of the nobility were far removed from the plain fare of the countryside. He also treats the story, often repeated, that Catherine de' Medici carried Italian cooking to France on her marriage in the sixteenth century, and he weighs it with caution, since the French kitchen drew on many sources besides the Florentine one. The courts thus left two legacies. The first was a body of technique and organisation, in which the roles of cook, carver and steward were defined and the progress of a meal was planned as a whole. The second was the habit of writing the kitchen down, from which the later Italian cookery books descend, and against which the regional and domestic traditions recorded by Artusi and others may be read.