Italy and France: the exchange between two court kitchens

The exchange between Italian and French cooking is anchored in the courts of the Renaissance, above all Florence under the Medici and the French court to which Italian marriages and Italian households carried their habits. Root's The Food of Italy treats the question as one of long reciprocal influence between neighbouring kitchens, and the tradition he reports places the Florentine marriage of Caterina de' Medici to the future Henri II of France at the centre of the story.

Root takes up the old claim that French cooking was taught to cook by Italy, and that the lesson was carried to Paris with Caterina de' Medici when she married in the 1530s. The tradition holds that she brought Florentine cooks with her and that their methods, their sauces, their vegetables and their sweet confections refined the table of the French court. Root reports this view as the received one, and the reader should hold it as a tradition of the kitchens rather than as a matter proved in every particular. The account is complicated, in Root's telling, by the fact that the debt did not run in one direction only. French cooking of the later centuries developed a codified professional discipline, with fixed sauces, a ranked brigade and a written grammar of technique, and Italian cooks of the great houses came in time to look to it. The two courts therefore stand as a pair, each lending and each borrowing, rather than as teacher and pupil. What divides them, in the end, is the temper of the cooking. Root sets the Italian habit of letting a good ingredient speak, in kitchens bound to the market and the region, against the French tendency to build a structure of preparation upon it. The contrast is one of emphasis and not of absolute difference, since each cuisine contains something of the other. For the cook, the lesson of the exchange lies in recognising how much of what is called French has an Italian root, and how much of what is served in the grand Italian houses was shaped by French method. The book of Provenance places the subject among the threads of Italian cooking because it shows a cuisine that was never sealed, and that took and gave at the tables of the powerful.

Root's contrast is one of table as much as history: Italian cooking leans on the clear flavour of the principal ingredient, while French cooking of the court tradition tends to work through sauce and preparation. A cook serving both should taste for that difference of emphasis, and should not treat either as the lesser.