Maestro Martino and the Libro de arte coquinaria

Maestro Martino de Rossi, a cook of the fifteenth century, worked in the service of high ecclesiastical households, notably that of the Patriarch of Aquileia, Ludovico Trevisan, and is associated with Rome. His Libro de arte coquinaria is among the earliest cookery texts of the Italian Renaissance, and it stands at the head of the written lineage on which a book of Italian provenance must rest.

Waverley Root, in The Food of Italy, treats the Italian table as a body of regional practice that took form long before the nation, and the written record of that practice begins in earnest with the cooks of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Among them Maestro Martino holds the place that later writers return to. His Libro de arte coquinaria is a working text, compiled by a professional for professionals, and it is valued because it records how a court kitchen of his day actually proceeded and not how it wished to appear. The interest of the book lies in its method. The recipes are set out in an orderly sequence by type of dish, and they give the cook directions on procedure, on the handling of fire and on the management of timing, where earlier compilations had often offered little more than lists of ingredients and flourishes. Root and the historians he draws upon read in this a movement away from the heavily spiced and sweetened cookery of the medieval inheritance towards a cuisine in which the character of the principal ingredient is allowed to show. The book also bears on the history of pasta, of the roasting and boiling of meats, of the preparation of fish, of vegetable dishes and of the pies and tarts that belonged to the great household. Pasta in these pages is cooked in broth or water and is already a considered preparation. A reader of the Italian regional tradition will recognise in such recipes the early outline of dishes that later centuries refined and attached to particular places. Martino's text passed into the printed record through the work of Bartolomeo Sacchi, called Platina, whose De honesta voluptate et valetudine drew on it extensively. This transmission is the reason the cook's name survives beyond the manuscripts, and it shows how the knowledge of a practising professional entered the learned literature of the period. The later authorities named in this book, from Artusi to Boni, belong to the same line of written instruction that Martino opens. For the modern cook the value of the Libro lies in its evidence of continuity and of change. The sense of proportion, the respect for the main ingredient and the ordered logic of the kitchen are recognisable across five centuries, and the points at which later practice departs from the text show what the Italian table subsequently gained, notably from the arrival of new foods from the Americas, which Martino could not have known.