My expertise focuses on the ART of the Italian Renaissance, but whenever I join in with a book club to discuss my novels, readers always have questions about the food. I think it’s because food is such an important part of our daily lives and because so many book clubs feature a meal — or at least wine.
So, I got in touch with my favorite historical Italian food novelist, Crystal King, author of the fabulous Feast of Sorrow (set in Ancient Rome) and The Chef’s Secret (set in Renaissance Rome) — both delicious stories featuring historical Italian chefs.
I asked her to answer some questions about what the food scene would’ve been like for my protagonists, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. #amazonassociate
I hope this interview (along with some art depicting Renaissance food and banquets that I wove in) makes your book club discussion (or your reading) even more satisfying!
(After our exchange, Crystal reminded me of a great book about all of this that I hadn’t thought about in years: Da Vinci’s Kitchen: A Secret History of Italian Cuisine — if you want to read more on this topic, we both recommend it!)
Stephanie Storey: Can you give readers a quick overview of the average eating habits during the Italian Renaissance?
Crystal King: In medieval times, two meals a day was most common, around noon, and just before dusk. As the types of meals served became more elaborate, the times were often pushed out to accommodate the additional preparation and dining times. That led to people breaking their long fast by having a small snack upon waking, usually a little bit of bread, and perhaps some butter or cheese. By the Renaissance, one generally didn’t eat much in the morning, but the mid-day and evening meals could be quite elaborate in noble households.
Herod’s Banquet (1486-90) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence
For grand occasions, the banquet also provided dancing and entertainment which might often be followed by additional drinks and desserts. It was common for many courses to be served at each meal, often up to ten or twelve courses. The courses could sometimes include as many as 100 dishes each, which meant that a very fancy feast for the Pope or an Italian prince may have as many as 1,000 dishes served throughout the meal! But not everyone would be served each dish—the most luxurious dishes (e.g. pheasant gilded with gold, or perhaps a rare meat, such as turkey) would be reserved for the most important people at the table.
In general, food was a major differentiator between the nobility and the peasant classes. But both depended on two things: bread and wine. Bread was the main source of calories for the poor, but it was enjoyed by the wealthy as well. By this time in history, white bread was common, but the whiter the bread, the more expensive it was. If it was a bread made from mixed grains, it was only suitable for the poorest of Italians. There were charitable organizations who helped make sure the poor were fed, and much of that food was bread. The wealthy could afford elaborate pastries, pies and fritters.
Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) by Veronese, in the Louvre
Wine was also a common denominator. Grape vines were easy to grow all over the country, and even peasants could make their own wine. Some common grapes of that era include prosecco, lambrusco, sangiovese, malvasia, nebbiolo, albano and chianti. Wine was always diluted with water or ice, and could often be flavored with spices, honey or licorice. It was drank by children and adults alike because the water was often suspect, and they drank much higher quantities of alcohol than we generally do today. But, as it is still the case in Italy, being drunk, especially in public, was frowned upon.
The 1500s were also a time of a number of treatise about health, and many of them remarked upon how the rich and the poor should eat, as though their physiology was different. The World of Renaissance Italy encyclopedia tells us about Dr. Baldassare Pisanelli of Bologna, who wrote in 1585 that "the rich man's proper diet will sicken the poor man just as quickly as the poor man's diet will cripple the noble. When peasants dine on birds, they get sick." He was espousing information that was commonly believed at the time, that the closer to the ground the food is, the more it is a food for peasants, while food that is higher, such as fruit from trees, long legged-animals, and of course, birds, were better suited for the nobility. This is also why the cookbooks of the time don't contain many vegetables, and if they do, they are taller foods, with leafy greens, as they were preferable to root vegetables that were underground. If you were to use a lowly food at a Lord's table, it should be ennobled by a food of a higher order. In other words, garlic with fowl would be acceptable.
Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge, Caravaggio, 1605-1610
In general, the poor ate more of foods low to the ground, such as turnips, garlic, onions and carrots, while nobility dined on "higher" foods such as artichokes, peaches, pheasant, and pears.
SS: There wasn't a Kroger or Trader Joe's back then... Where did people get their food? Did families gather around a table for meals like they do today? And did people go OUT to eat to restaurants or trattorias?
CK: Farmers brought food into the cities to sell at the busy markets. In the times of Rafaello, the main market in Rome was in Piazza Navona. It was later moved to Campo dei Fiori in the latter half of the 17th century because principessa Olimpia Maidalchini, who was rumored to be the mistress of Innocent X, didn’t like the sight of the dirty market from her newly built palazzo.
Just as we do today, the people of Renaissance Italy often met over meals, or ate at a restaurant when they were traveling. While most denizens of a city took most of their meals at home with friends and family, there were a variety of options for individuals looking for a public place to eat.
The markets themselves were full of vendors that could provide a quick snack to eat on the go. But there were also osterie, (inns) or fraschette, wine shops. Travelers stopped in them when they were spending time in the city but locals could also partake in simple fare and local wines. In many cases families could come for a meal, and the osteria would serve the wine.
One of the oldest pubs in the world is Osteria del Sole which got its start in 1465 in Bologna. It still exists today and functions much like it did five hundred years ago. You bring the food, and they'll pour the wine. If you can read Italian, you'll see that one of the signs on the front says Chi non beve: È pregato di stare fuori, which means, "If you don't drink, please stay outside."
SS: Moving specifically down to Rome and the Vatican (for my Raphael novel), how was food managed in the papal palace? Who was in charge of it, how was it served, etc?
The cuoco segreto, translated literally to “secret chef,” was the private chef to the Pope. He worked alongside the main cuoco to the papal kitchens and the scalco, or steward, who ran papal household. There were hundreds of servants that the scalco and cuoco managed to keep everything running smoothly.
We know a lot about what a papal kitchen looked like because of Bartolomeo Scappi (the subject of my novel, THE CHEF’S SECRET), who worked for several cardinals and Popes during the mid-1500s. He left behind a cookbook with over 1000 recipes and also some woodcuts of the kitchens.
As you can see, the kitchen is very clean, and well-ordered. There was even an area kept extra clean for the making of “white” foods such as blancmange, a white almond pudding. White foods were hard to come by and thus extremely desirable.
Many dozens of servers would be responsible for delivering the food to the tables at a banquet. And amidst the food being served, there would be entertainment. In addition to buffoons and jesters, banquets would have musical accompaniments, plays performed between courses, acrobats, belly dancers, and sometimes (outdoors) even fireworks.
The delivery of the food itself was part of the entertainment. The trinciante, the meat carver, was front and center at a banquet. The role of the carver was a special one, not beholden to the steward or the maestro of the kitchen. He was a master swordsman, held his own titles and lands, and having one serve you was a great honor. Vincenzo Cervio was one of the most famous, and his book Il Trinciante, describes all manner of carving meats in aria—in the air—with the meat falling perfectly onto the plate of the noble he served. A big feast would have multiple trincianti.
Banquet of Cupid and Psyche by Raphael (1517) in the Villa Farnesina in Rome
SS: What did Renaissance popes eat on an average day?
It really depended on the Pope! The Pope probably ate luxuriously no matter when he ate, but we don’t have any specific idea of what they ate on a day to day basis. Pope Julius III might have dined on tortellini stuffed with peas, lobsters and cherry pie. But Pope Pius IV and V ate very little, mostly barley gruel and perhaps apples and simple foods, banning large banquets as too luxurious.
SS: Was there anything about papal court food that was substantially different from OTHER famous courts of the era (in Ferrara, Milan, Urbino...) or were all courts of the era pretty much the same in what they ate?
For the most part, food would be different in regional ways, similar to how today certain dishes are common in Venice but very different foods are served in Rome. One thing that was generally the same was the breakout of meat days and lean days. The Catholic Church honored 150 lean or fasting days a year in which no meat could be eaten. Which means that the primary dish on Fridays and these Saint’s Days were fish.
SS: What would have been served during a papal court banquet?
CK: There would be many courses, and sweet and savory foods would be mixed throughout. Imagine a service of candied, gilded fruit on plates of gold and silver, then a course from the credenza, the monstrous sideboard which held all the courses of cold foods, usually pre-sliced. There would be platters of oysters, salads, slices of pumpkin pie, gilded pastries, olives and all manner of pickled vegetables.
The music begins, with the sound of flutes and tambourines accompanying the basins of gold filled with lavender water so guests could wash their hands. Next there might be a zuppe de duca, a soup with gilded sweetbreads and kid's heads, delivered to the table accompanied by the sound of trumpets. Then a course of quail, pigeons, and capons, or perhaps a peacock dressed in its own feathers and made to look like it might still be alive. Then pheasants gilded in gold leaf, gelatins shaped into the mold of of the Papal crest, pies of calf-brains, ox tongues or veal fingers, macaroni soup or perhaps an pottage made of goat kid’s blood. The foods were varied and while many of them sound unappetizing to the modern palate, many others, such as apple crostata or omelets are very familiar to us today.
One thing that would have been at many banquets were sugar sculptures. These beautiful (and inedible) sculptures were all the rage in the Renaissance as sugar became more and more available from the New World. In the Renaissance sugar was a costly luxury and to sculpt elaborate designs from it was one of the ultimate demonstrations of wealth and power in this time.
The sculptures could be quite elaborate and many sculptors of the day tried their hands at making sculptures or molds, including Leonardo da Vinci and Titian. In my own novel, THE CHEF’S SECRET, I have a scene in which Michelangelo gives them a try.
SS: What has most surprised you about Renaissance food/eating habits?
I was surprised by a few things. But I think the MOST surprising was that fried chicken originated at least in the Renaissance. There is a recipe in the Scappi cookbook for it that is exactly how we might make fried chicken today, except that the spices include coriander, nutmeg, cinnamon and clove! There is also a delicious pumpkin pie recipe that I love to make. Oh, and they LOVED sugar, maybe even more than we do today. Of Scappi’s 1,000 recipes, over 900 of them contain sugar.
SS: For those who want to experiment with some Renaissance recipes, where can they go?
I share a bevy of information on my website, crystalking.com. I also have a companion cookbook to my novel, THE CHEF’S SECRET, which readers can download for free here.
Crystal King is the author of The Chef’s Secret and Feast of Sorrow, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She is an author, culinary enthusiast, and marketing expert. Her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy. She has taught classes in writing, creativity, and social media at several universities including Harvard Extension School and Boston University, as well as at GrubStreet, one of the leading creative writing centers in the US. A Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and former co-editor of the online literary arts journal Plum Ruby Review, Crystal received her MA in critical and creative thinking from UMass Boston, where she developed a series of exercises and writing prompts to help fiction writers in medias res. She resides in Boston. You can find her at crystalking.com.