Suffritto di Pollastri—Renaissance Saffron Chicken

We promised you a recipe from De Arte Coquinaria, the famous cookbook written in the 1460’s by Maestro Martino da Como, chief cook to the Pope and many other nabobs of Renaissance Italy. I found one I liked but it’s had to wait until I could find a bottle of agresto, known as verjus here in France. They still make it nearby in Périgord, where some folks deglaze their pan-fried foie gras with it, but usually you can only find it in the fancy shops.

Here’s what Maestro Martino was cooking for the nabobs:

Per fare un suffritto de carne, o de pippioni,
 o de pollastri, o capretto.

In prima nectali molto bene et tagliali in quarti, o vero in pezzi 
piccholi, et poneli in una pignatta a frigere con bono lardo voltando 

spesse volte col cocchiaro. Et quando la carne è quasi cotta getta
fore la maiore parte del grasso de la pignatta. Et dapoi togli de
bono agresto, doi rosci d'ova, un pocho pocho de bono brodo et 
de bone spetie, et meschola queste cose inseme con tanto zafrano 
che siano gialle et ponile in la dicta pignatta inseme co la carne et
 lasciali bollire anchora un pocho tanto che tutte queste cose ti parano 
cotte. Dapoi togli un pocho pocho de petrosillo battuto menuto et
 ponilo insieme col ditto soffritto in un piattello et mandalo ad tavola. 
Et questo tale soffritto vole essere dolce o agro secundo il gusto 
comuno o del patrone.

(To make a soffrito of meat, or of pigeon, or of poultry, or kid

First clean them very well and cut them in quarters, or else in small pieces, and put them in a pan with some good lardo, turning them often with the spoon. And when the meat is almost cooked throw out most of the fat from the pan. And then take some good verjus, two egg yolks, a little bit of broth and some good spices; mix these things together with enough saffron to make it yellow and put them in the pan with the meat;  let it boil until they seem well cooked to you. Then take a little bit of chopped parsley and add it to this soffritto on a platter and send it to table. And this soffritto may be sweet or tart depending on common agreement, or the boss’s taste.)

Dead simple, and intriguing; we’ll try it with a chicken.  A soffrito, which now means frying a mix of onion, garlic, parsley etc to start a dish,  for Maestro Martino was just a technique of slow-frying. For lardo he would have meant rendered lard, or maybe something like bacon grease.  I’m going for duck fat.  Like everyone else here, I have a tub of it in the back of the fridge for frying potatoes (This is always part lard anyhow; they have to top up the duck fat to cover the confits. And it’s still the best stuff in the world)

The ‘good spices’? Martino doesn’t say so we’ll have to guess from the medieval repertoire.

But before I can get the recipe down, the computer tells me someone has already done it for me—an absolutely wonderful site called Medieval Cuisine, run by Euriol of Lothian (Cassandra Baldassano) and her friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism. You can see her interpretation of the recipe here; mine differs only slightly.

a chicken, cut in fourteen pieces
duck fat, or lard, or olive oil
verjus
two egg yolks
chicken broth (cube is fine)
1 dose saffron
ground cloves (6) and ground cardamon (seeds from a dozen pods); black pepper and 1T or more ginger
parsley

Fry the chicken on medium heat until it’s almost done, with some colour on the skin. Reduce the fat if you must. Mix the other ingredients and throw them in, turn the heat down low and finish. Garnish with the chopped parsley.

Fine-tune this to please your taste (or your boss’s). If you dust the chicken with just a tiny bit of flour first, you’ll get a thicker sauce. After frying, start with just a little chicken stock, and add more if it’s getting dry. As Martino hints in the last sentence, the quantity of verjus is critical. A quarter cup will make it tart indeed, a little like lemon chicken. If you don’t want that, use less, and perhaps add a bit more of the ‘good spices’. Or you might temper the verjus with a teaspoon of sugar; we might try that next time.

And there will be a next time, ‘cause this was a treat. Maestro Martino, grazie mille!

De Arte Coquinaria

                                                                             making agresto (verjuice)

While researching the Menu Decoder, we found ourselves looking into a lot of early cookbooks. They’re good fun, and they can give insights into the past—the people’s past, the story of everyday life—that no formal history can. Over the last few years some good people have been putting many old texts online, in the original languages and sometimes even in English translation.

            Today we offer a tribute to our forebear Maestro Martino da Como, the author of one of the first printed cookbooks, the Libro de Arte Coquinaria. Martino was a boy from a small village in the Swiss-Italian Canton Ticino who worked his way up cooking for princes and prelates, counts and condottieri, and eventually ran the kitchens of the Pope.

Martino lived in interesting times. When he was busy at his cookbook, in the 1460’s, Cosimo de’ Medici and Francesco Sforza ruled in Florence and Milan, and Italy was getting its first printing press. Pope Nicholas V statyed up nights planning the rebuilding of Rome, and the terrible Turk was making himself at home in newly-captured Constantinople.

They were good times too, especially for anyone with a skill to offer  Renaissance Italy’s sophisticated elite. Consumption then could be very conspicuous indeed, and Martino had the talent for coming up with unique culinary spectaculars. One recipe in the De Arte informs us ‘How to Dress a Peacock With All Its Feathers, So that When Cooked, It Appears To Be Alive and Spews Fire From Its Beak’. 

Italian cooking has always had its divisions of class. One thing you won’t find in De Arte is onions. Not much garlic either; as the Maestro frankly explains: ’Garlic and onions are good for the peasants, who eat them willingly and depend on them because of their poverty and because of the work they do’.

Surprisingly though, many of the recipes he chose to include are simple, even humble: porchetta and sausages, cockscombs, peas and beans—even pastine in brodo. Not so long ago, every trattoria in Italy still had this modest dish on the menu—plain broth with nothing but tiny noodles in it, mostly for people whose digestion was telling them to leave the pasta alone that day.  Five hundred years ago, Martino was cooking it for the princes of the Church.  We like his idea of putting a pinch of saffron in the broth. We’re not so sure about his recommendation to boil the noodles for a full hour—it seems in Martino’s kitchen there was always a whole lot of boiling going on.

De Arte has its quirks; the casualness of his approach seems charming to a modern cook: ‘To cook an egg, let it boil for the time it takes to say an Our Father’—per spatio d’un paternostro. Precise quantities are hardly if ever given. We cooks are invited to use secundo che pare a la tua discrezione—‘as much as we think best’. He’ll tell us to put in ‘the good spices’ but never says which ones they are.

Maestro Martino certainly would have enjoyed a longer spice rack than most other cooks in his day, but any upper-crust kitchen would have had saffron, ginger, mace, cumin, nutmeg and the lemony peppery spice called ‘grains of paradise’ (or maniguette to the French, who once were very fond of it), as well as most of the common garden herbs we know today.

Martino had an interesting palette of flavours. The great chef is said to have spent some early days in Naples, and there is definitely a sweet hint of the south in many of his recipes: plenty of almonds and almond milk, as well as raisins and other dried fruits. Another star ingredient is agresto (verjuice), prominent in many soups and sauces. People in the Renaissance liked a touch of tartness in their dinner more than in later ages. Verjuice is the squeezings of unripe grapes, a kinder, gentler  sort of vinegar. Maybe it’s time for this old favourite to make a comeback; if you have a lot of grapes, there’s a recipe for making it here. 

Anyone with the time to go through De Arte will find plenty of fascinating sidelights and surprises. If you thought cheesecake was a modern innovation you’ll see a perfectly serviceable recipe for it here: torta bianca, made with lots of ricotta and flavoured with ginger and rosewater. There are cheesecake variants too, including one that calls for a pound of garlic (!)

Maestro Martino’s work lived on for centuries. Later editions, some good and some pennydreadfuls, added whatever they pleased to the original recipes. One even included (entirely fantastical) instructions on carving and cooking an elephant:

You can see the whole text of De Arte Coquinaria here (in Italian) . And a few of his recipes have been translated into English here. There is also an English translation in print, though a flawed and controversial one. 

Online resources are getting better all the time, and anyone with an interest in old recipes, or anything else Italian, will be delighted to see John Florio’s 1611 English-Italian dictionary reproduced in a beautiful facsimile copy (thanks, Greg Lindahl!). Florio, a born Londoner, was the son of an Italian refugee who became a great scholar and a friend of Shakespeare; he spied on the French ambassador for Walsingham, and did much to introduce the English to the arts and manners of Italy. For words where Florio is no help, try the massive Tesoro della Lingua Italia delle Origini, a dictionary of Italian words going back to the Middle Ages