Lecture 15: A Renaissance in the Kitchen

A Renaissance in the Kitchen .........................................................

Lecture 15

T

he dominant style of early 16th-century Italy, both in the arts and

cuisine, favored elaborate, sophisticated presentations offering as

many different ingredients as possible and cooked in as many ways

as possible. In cookbooks, many foods received increased emphasis than in

any medieval cookbook. Dairy products and cheeses received much greater

coverage as did organ meats and fi sh prepared dozens of different ways with

countless sauces. In this lecture, you will learn that although 16th-century

Italian cooking inherited many features from the Middle Ages, the wealth,

variety, and copiousness of presentation made it something quite new.

The Renaissance

 The setting for the Renaissance is the wealthy cities of late

medieval Italy that were actually city-states because they governed

the surrounding contado, or countryside, running their own affairs

and getting extraordinarily rich by supplying the rest of Europe

with luxury items and spices.

 Renaissance means “rebirth.” First and foremost, this is an

intellectual movement that sought to revive the culture of classical

antiquity by imitating its arts and literature, by building structures

that looked like ancient Greek and Roman buildings, and by

depicting naked bodies in marble—like the ancients.

 It even extends into government. Politicians read ancient histories

and political tracts and used them didactically to govern their own

states. What they sought was to equal, if not surpass, the greatness of

ancient Greece and Rome. This imitation was made possible partly

through archaeology—digging up old statues and restoring ruined

buildings—but more importantly, by recovering ancient texts.

 Europe received Greek and Roman works on science and

agriculture, for example, via translations from Arabic into Latin,