Bartolomeo Scappi and the Opera of 1570

Bartolomeo Scappi was a cook of the sixteenth century, born in Lombardy according to the tradition that has come down to us, who served in the households of cardinals and later in the kitchen of the Vatican. His Opera, published in Venice in 1570, is the fullest account of the table of Renaissance Italy and the text from which later writers on the Italian kitchen take their bearings.

The Opera is a book of a cook's working practice, not a collection of occasional recipes. It sets out the organisation of the kitchen, the tools and the vessels, the management of fire, and the order of service for banquets, and it places the cook at the head of a disciplined household rather than at the margin of it. Root treats such a book as evidence of how far Italian cookery had been systematised before the cooks of other countries wrote comparable works, and it is in that sense that Scappi stands at the head of the lineage on which this library draws. The recipes themselves are numerous, and they cover meat, game, fish, vegetables, pastry, pies and the dishes proper to fast days. The attention given to fish and to the Lenten table reflects the observances of a clerical household, in which a large part of the year was meatless and the cook was expected to meet that rule with variety and skill. The reader who turns to the Opera finds a cuisine of considerable range, built on stuffings, spiced preparations, roasts and elaborate pastry work, and the cook is shown to be answerable for both economy and display. For the history of pasta and of the Italian table generally, the book is a point of reference that later authorities return to. Its dishes show what was cooked in the great houses of Rome and the north in the second half of the sixteenth century, and they allow the later development of regional cooking to be measured against a fixed point. Where the Opera names ingredients that were later displaced or transformed, the difference tells the cook how much the kitchen has changed in the centuries since, and the essay should be read with that comparison in mind. The publication in Venice is itself of interest, since the city was a centre of printing and the book could be produced there with the engraved illustrations of kitchens and implements that form part of its value. Those plates preserve the physical setting of the work: the hearths, spits, pans and tables at which the dishes were prepared. Anyone who wishes to understand the technique of the period will find the plates as instructive as the text. Scappi remains, in Root's account and in the wider literature, the chief witness to the Renaissance kitchen of Italy.

The table described in the Opera is one of rich and varied preparations, in which meats, fish and pastry were served in a planned sequence at banquets. Spices and sweet and savoury combinations that the modern cook may find unfamiliar have a place in it, and the cook should read the dishes as the product of their period rather than adapt them to present habit.