A History of Food in 100 Recipes. William Sitwell
When she came to Paris, she was not alone. She brought cooks, and her cooks brought ingredients and know-how.
At the time of her marriage, on 28 October 1533, gastronomy was reaching a high point in Florence. Knowledge had been accumulating since Apicius was writing recipes back in AD 10. And now new ingredients were arriving, thanks to the Spanish conquistadors. The court menus from the time show considerable Italian influence too. There is macaroni, along with sweetbreads, truffles, sherbets, even ices (records exist of her bringing a Sicilian to Paris to make granitas for a wedding party). Her cooks brought their techniques with them, so that along with deep-frying we see the introduction of béchamel sauce, crêpes and cooking with a bain-marie. The latter crucial for that zabaglione, the device – a container of hot water in which a smaller container holding the food is inserted – enabling the cook to whisk the mixture while it warms gently without burning.
It was brought to France, some say, by Catherine who knew of it from the medieval Spanish alchemist Maria de Cleofa who wrote on medicine, magic and cookery. Although others claim the device was invented far earlier. Was it, for example, alchemist Miriam the Prophetess (also known as Mary the Jewess), the sister of Moses, who is mentioned in Exodus, who invented it? Or did Apicius come up with the idea, as he appears to have used one to keep food warm when his boss was vague about what time he should serve dinner.
Whoever originally thought up the bain-marie, the Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi didn’t appear to have a name for it, as is evident from his recipe for zabaglione. It was just this type of recipe, published in Italy – during the years that Catherine was the French Queen Mother – and then translated into other languages, that her chefs would have turned out in her kitchens along with her beloved artichoke. The latter ingredient which Scappi turns into soup and makes a nice tart with.
She often overdid it on the artichoke front, in fact, specifically on the day of the wedding of one Marquis de Loménie to Mademoiselle de Martigues in June 1576. The French diarist Pierre de L’Estoile records how ‘the Queen Mother ate so much she thought she would die, and was very ill with diarrhoea. They said it was from eating too many artichoke bottoms and the combs and kidney of cockerels, of which she was very fond.’
A great lover of food in general, Catherine kept her own personal recipes, from fish dishes to soups, while her chefs were keen to demonstrate to the French how herbs and spices could be used to enhance the flavour of meat and not just added to conceal the fact that it had gone off, a practice common since medieval times. Nearly eighty years later, in 1651, La Varenne’s definitive cookbook Le Cuisinier François reflects this influence. His spices are flavour-enhancers not foils, his touches are more delicate; he uses a roux as a sauce thickener, for instance, rather than just bread.
Likewise Catherine separated sweet dishes from savoury, and arranged courses with that in mind, the medieval way to still have plenty of courses, but the table still with an array of puddings (jellies or blancmanges, for example) alongside the meat. Thus, fully laden with olive oil, beans and good cooks, she was able to remain unfazed by her husband’s behaviour by getting stuck into the catering arrangements.
Her tastes and cooking did not just bring Italian food to France, but helped transform French cooking into a rich discipline, in which French cuisine actually enhanced the Italian contribution, with certain techniques, almost forgotten in Italy, given a new lease of life in France. In this respect, Catherine de Medici is regarded as the mother of French gastronomy. As the twentieth-century writer Jean Orieux has put it: ‘It was exactly a Florentine who reformed the antique French cooking of medieval tradition; and was reborn as the modern French cooking.’
Meanwhile, Catherine’s culinary ideas were disseminated across the country. Her cooks demonstrated professional cookery to the staff of other households. Visitors tasted her dishes at her frequent ‘magnificences’ or feasts and they saw her embroidered table-cloths, her porcelain plates and Venetian glass. They also saw her forks, an implement as yet unknown in France and one that still took some considerable time for the French to get used to. With her bread-making, pastries and cakes, Catherine set a new style that reached its zenith 200 years later during the reign of Louise XIV at Versailles. Outliving most of her children, and navigating her way through plots, assassinations and massacres, she had an instinct for survival that carried her through childhood and beyond and ensured that French gastronomy would be nothing if it weren’t for the Italians.
(Potatoes fried and simmered with bacon bits)
1581
AUTHOR: Marx Rumpolt, FROM: Ein new Kochbuch (A New Cookbook)
Peel and cut them small, simmer them in water and press it well out through a fine cloth; chop them small and fry them in bacon that is cut small; take a little milk there under and let it simmer therewith so it is good and well tasting.
The history of the potato rarely relates the role played by the German archbishop of Mainz, Daniel Brendel von Homburg. In the latter part of the sixteenth century, he was selected for the senior role of elector in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. It was a time of religious and political shenanigans (when isn’t it?) and he worked hard to keep the peace between the Lutherans (thought by many to be obstinate heretics who followed the strict Protestantism of Martin Luther) and the Catholic princes.
How did he keep the peace? Well, given that he had a seriously good chef in his kitchen, it’s likely that he entertained them to dinner. And what kind of dishes did he present? A whole manner of fabulous treats – from roasts, pastries, pies and soups to tortes and salads. There was simple fare – stewed pears and tasty plates of fava beans fried with bacon – but there were exotic dishes too, using ingredients never seen before in Germany or more widely in Europe. In particular there was a dish of ‘earth apples’, what we today call potatoes, but the Germans still call earth apples (Erdäpfel), as of course do the French (pommes de terre) and other nations.
The cook was one Marx Rumpolt and this and around 2,000 other recipes appear in his 1581 Ein new Kochbuch, or ‘A New Cookbook’. Rumpolt produced feasts and banquets for his master as he went about his political and religious business. So prolific was his cooking that he wrote his recipes down, publishing them with the specific aim of helping and encouraging young cooks.
Before landing a job with the Elector of Mainz, Rumpolt had worked for a variety of European nobles, learning the cuisines of different regions. He was proud of his knowledge, making it clear in his introduction that these were his own recipes. He had not purloined them from others cooks as many others had, did and indeed would. His cookbook also includes descriptions of wine-making and 150 woodcut illustrations.
His recipe for a potato dish is historic in being the earliest surviving recipe using potatoes. In addition, it demonstrates a good understanding of how to cook the vegetable: Rumpolt simmers his potatoes, before straining and drying them and then, after cutting them into smaller pieces, fries them with bacon and adds a little milk. However delicious the dish was, though, for the princes and religious types who were lucky enough to eat it, perhaps it was ahead of its time for it took another 150 years for the potato to find favour in Europe, although it had been popular for centuries in North and South America, where it had grown as a wild perennial in the mountains.
It was discovered, as were so many exotic ingredients, by the sixteenth-century conquistadors, its arrival in Europe much mythologised by historians and others. Was it Pedro de León, who came across them in Peru in 1553, or Jiménez de Quesada in Colombia in 1537? Possibly both. The latter apparently came upon a village whose inhabitants had vanished – unsurprisingly given the Spaniards’ reputation for slaughtering people. There he found maize, beans and what he described as ‘truffles’. They were a delicacy to the Indians, with good flavour. The Italians called them truffles because they were small, misshapen and knobbly, which sound a bit like the Pink Fir Apple variety of potato.