The Taste of Conquest (13 page)

The mostly French and English tourists (“The Italian public think with their stomachs,” he grumbles) who order from the historical menu can sample dishes that date back to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. That the flavors can never be entirely authentic goes without saying. At best, this is culinary tourism; however, in a sense, Sergio’s re-creations are no less representative of the past than the medieval palazzi that have been ripped apart and reassembled to install indoor plumbing and fiber-optic lines. In the same way that the sensitively modernized mansions remind us of a glorious past, the attractively arranged plates give us hints of ginger, turmeric, and pepper, sufficient to recall the spice-laden galleys but sparing us too much authenticity. I suppose I am just as pleased to do without the medieval city’s stinking canals, drafty rooms, and omnipresent fleas, even if I long for a little more spice.

Dinner proceeds in small, delicate courses, beginning with a fennel soup gently scented with cinnamon. We then move on to “ravioli,” more like superdelicate gnocchi in this case, with an admixture of sweet spices and herbs resting atop a yellow ocher reduction thickened with rice flour and turmeric—all this inspired by an anonymous fourteenth-century recipe compilation known as the
Anonimo Veneziano.
Next, a dish of sea bass arrives. The sweet fish is topped with an almond crust arranged atop a little ginger-infused puddle, the sauce with that slightly bitter, even chalky flavor that reminds you that ginger is dug out from the earth. The menu pointedly reassures the diner that although the ingredients are strictly traceable to the great Renaissance chef Maestro Martino, the recipe has been adapted to modern taste. Sergio insists I finish with
fritelle da imperador magnifici,
two small fritters of ricotta and pine nuts, gently crunchy on the outside, creamy inside, resting like two little pillows on a coverlet of sauce composed of
vin cotto,
honey, cinnamon, and cloves. The fritters (though not the sauce) are also cribbed from the
Anonimo Veneziano.
The original fourteenth-century recipe calls for a mixture of egg whites, fresh cheese (that is, ricotta), flour, and pine nuts. Once fried, they are sprinkled with sugar—lots of sugar to make them worthy of an emperor, the
imperador
of the name. I’ll forgive Sergio the sauce, because it happens to be delicious and I can’t resist his quiet enthusiasm. He’s probably right—authenticity has its limits.

Sergio insists that the moderate hand with the seasonings reflects the past as much as his desire not to offend contemporary European palates. Like Luca, he believes that the scholars who speak of an “orgy of spice” are talking through their hats. If only those medieval cookbooks were just a little more precise! One of the few medieval texts that is pretty consistent in its instructions is the
Anonimo Veneziano.
Perhaps because it was intended for a Venetian audience that was predominantly bourgeois, the quantities needed to be more specific than similar compilations used by highly trained professionals in aristocratic homes. Oddly, recipes from the Venetian cookbook are often used to prove how those insensate medieval diners consumed enormous quantities of spice. Luca thinks the misunderstanding comes from a faulty assumption about portion size. It may simply be that most historians just don’t know how to cook for a crowd. A quick glance, for example, at a recipe for
ambrosino,
a kind of chicken stew with dried fruit, would lead you to believe that a dozen guests will be consuming a dish seasoned with almost half a pound of spices (mostly ginger and cinnamon but also some bay leaves and a very small quantity of nutmeg, saffron, and cloves), in addition to a little more saffron and nutmeg. The problem with this analysis is that there is no way twelve people could eat this much food.
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Unlike the discreet little portions that arrive at Bistrot de Venise, the medieval tables of the wealthy were enormous smorgasbords where only a small portion of the food was likely to be eaten by the guests. That all the food was not intended to be eaten at these feasts is nicely illustrated in the
Ordinaciones
of 1344, a set of rules promulgated by Peter III (the Great) of the Iberian kingdom of Aragon. The king brought an accountant’s precision to the table arrangements: “Since it is appropriate that some persons are honored more than others according to their status, we desire that our plate should include food enough for eight persons.” The royal princes, the archbishops, and the bishops dining with the king would receive enough for six, while lesser prelates and ordinary knights were assigned a portion for four.

Nevertheless, even the moderate quantity of spice called for by the
Anonimo Veneziano
is a great deal more than Sergio’s clients are used to when they go out for Italian food. (Italians are just about at the bottom of Europe’s generally measly spice consumption statistics, each contemporary Italian eating less than a quarter pound per year.) But that is probably the wrong comparison. The flavor combinations in contemporary Italian food have very little to do with medieval tastes. North Africa would be a better model. The ingredient list of the
ambrosino
—almonds, dates, raisins, prunes, ginger, cinnamon, and saffron cooked with chicken—reads like a contemporary Moroccan recipe, and the spicing is only marginally more copious. Indeed, the Arabic influence on medieval food is always implicit even where it is not explicit. The slightly earlier Neapolitan cookbook
Liber de coquina
, mentioned above, has several typically Arabic recipes, including a Saracen-style soup. That collection, originally written in Latin, was one of the first widely disseminated cookbooks in Europe. It calls for spices in many of its recipes, though nowhere near as many as the Venetian compilation. It would seem to make sense that in Venice, where Oriental seasonings were considerably cheaper than elsewhere, and where the Near Eastern cultural influence was the strongest, a more liberal hand with seasoning would prevail.

All the same, the late-fourteenth-century
Ménagier de Paris,
roughly contemporary with the
Anonimo Veneziano,
seems at least as generous with the spicing—though, admittedly, this can only be deduced from the few recipes that actually give quantities. A recipe for meat in aspic has you cook a pig, four calves’ feet, two chickens, and two rabbits with ten or twelve
cloches
(knobs) of ginger and five or six
cloches
of galingale (a spice similar to ginger) as well as much more modest quantities of melegueta, mace, zedoary, cubebs, spikenard, bay leaves, and nutmeg. All these spices are ground up and tied up like a big tea bag to stew along with the meat. Although it’s hard to know just how big a
cloche
of ginger is, it is safe to say we’re dealing with close to a pound of ginger and another ounce or two of the other spices combined. But then we’re also cooking well over a hundred pounds of meat! What’s more, the
Ménagier
’s pound of ginger, after its long trek round the world, was certainly not as spicy as it would be today. To make
ypocras,
the spiced wine that medieval Franks loved just as much as the Byzantines, the author instructs you to add a little sugar and half an ounce of a mix of cinnamon, ginger, melegueta, nutmeg, and galingale to a
quarte
(a little over two liters) of wine—in other words, about a quarter teaspoon of spice in each wineglass. But even this was typically served in modest doses at the end of dinner as a sort of digestif. For anyone still convinced that the wealthy people of the time buried their food under avalanches of spice, it’s worth parsing the shopping directions the
Ménagier
gives for throwing a wedding party. This is the famous two pounds of spices intended to season the dinner (and supper) of some forty guests that appears on the same checklist as some 650 pounds of meat! In other words, a paltry few grams, less than a half teaspoon for every pound of meat.
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Of course, looking at averages won’t tell us how much seasoning went into any particular dish. Some were surely spicier than others. But it does tell us something about the level of spicing in the cuisine overall.

Though cookbooks of the time from Venice, France, Catalonia, England, and Germany are all more or less generous with Oriental seasoning, the fashion for spice was not uniform across western Europe. The French, as is clear from the
Ménagier
’s recipes, seemed much more eclectic in their choice of spices than the Italians. The slightly earlier
Viandier
(circa 1375), attributed to the French royal chef Taillevent, mentions some seventeen “spices,” including those Byzantine favorites zedoary and spikenard along with the more common mace and cinnamon. By comparison, the
Anonimo Veneziano
’s spice rack is limited to about a dozen. German collections are more restricted still. Yet despite certain other regional preferences (melegueta shows up regularly in France but hardly ever in Italy; pepper more often in Germany than France), the similarities among the cookbooks are more striking than the differences. In the fourteenth century, the trendy spices are the same everywhere. Ginger is by far the favorite, with saffron coming a close second.

Interestingly, pepper is less common, especially in the French collections. Was it already assumed that you added pepper (the recipes don’t include salt either) to your food without having to spell it out? Or, perhaps more likely, pepper was already too commonplace to be served to the genetically stuck-up consumers of these culinary style sheets. Early account books tend to back up the latter argument. Typically, as you went up the social scale, the shopping list for spices grew longer and longer, while more common people could afford little more than pepper. Thus, the French king Jean II and his entourage, while imprisoned by the English in the 1350s (evidently under rather cushy conditions), went through some dozen spices but no black pepper. A roughly contemporary French viscount limited himself to four: pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and saffron. Pepper by itself, on the other hand, is mentioned as part of a 1258 consignment to a French poorhouse and commended as a “sauce for field laborers who mix it with broad beans and peas” by at least one medieval diet guide.

Needless to say, trying to figure out what fourteenth-century Europeans actually ate based on elite cookbooks is about as easy as extrapolating the typical American’s diet from a Martha Stewart entertaining guide. Here, some numbers serve as a useful corrective, even if coming up with any sort of hard statistics for the Middle Ages is a tricky affair. Economics historians do have a rough idea of how much spice Europeans were importing, at least after the fourteenth century, when Venice ruled the spice trade.
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In 1400, it’s been estimated that Christendom consumed about two million pounds of pepper and perhaps another million of the other Asian spices, with ginger by far the most popular of these, followed at a distance by cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, and the others. When you consider that there may have been about three or four million people (roughly 5 percent of the population) who could afford the more expensive aromatics, you realize that average per capita consumption couldn’t have been all that high. To give some sense of comparison, Americans today eat about 1
¹
/2 pounds of spices per head every year. Contemporary Europeans eat about half that, and Moroccans roughly double. So was the medieval elite eating food that, on the whole, was about as spicy as what most Americans eat now? Well, perhaps the kings and queens were, but for the rest, spicy dining must have been a special-occasion treat. There just weren’t enough spices to go around for everyone to eat spicy food day in and day out. What’s more, many of the more expensive and obscure spices ended up in medicine, and even the likes of cinnamon, ginger, and melegueta were used to season beer and wine as often as food. Even the embalming business swallowed up some unknown percentage of the imports. So, at best, that top 5 percent may have been eating something on the order of two or three ounces of spices (other than pepper) a year in 1400, and perhaps double that a hundred years later.

Of course, average numbers obscure the fact that not every meal was as spicy as the next or that some people just didn’t go in for all that much seasoning. But that is as true today as it was in medieval France. No doubt the hyperelite consumed quite a bit more. For them, those special-occasion meals of spiced capons and hippocras were an everyday occurrence. You could compare them to today’s executives on expense accounts who don’t think twice about dropping several hundred dollars on a restaurant dinner that less privileged mortals eat once or twice a year. But even so, it isn’t likely that King Jean II, even after his return home from English captivity in 1360, would have been eating much more than the monthly couple of ounces consumed by today’s average American. The rest of the population, presumably, had to wait for weddings and holidays to indulge in expensive foods such as chicken and eggs spiced up with ginger and cinnamon.

Or did they? Did they really use spices (other than pepper) as infrequently as we serve cranberry sauce? Cost alone couldn’t have been a determining factor. Some grades of ginger were actually cheaper than pepper, and you could buy clove stems for much the same price. If spices were eaten so infrequently, why would the cookbooks have dozens and dozens of recipes calling for pepper, cinnamon, and ginger? More than likely what actually happened was that special occasions called for pulling out all the stops, but that did not mean that everyday food was entirely devoid of spice.

The food of the time was different from contemporary European fare not merely in the way spices were used. Honey, and later sugar, along with dried fruit was combined with vinegar or verjuice (the sour juice of unripe grapes or apples) to produce a distinctly sweet-and-sour taste. A similar strategy is often adopted in contemporary cuisines in which spices are widely used. In Indian cooking, for example, spices often complement a dish sweetened by the addition of raw sugar and made sour from unripe mangoes.