An excerpt from 'Food timeline history' on Renaissance foods and presentation.
COMMON FOODS
These foods were commonly prepared in Renaissance Italy
Bread, hard biscuits, wine, rice (rissoto), pasta: lasagne, ravioli & pizza WITHOUT TOMATO SAUCE, cheese: mozzarella (from buffalo milk), Pecorino, omelettes, meatballs, pork, small birds & game, and sausages. Fresh fruits and vegetables were eaten in season; dried items consumed in other seasons. Soups and stews were eaten by rich and poor alike. Fish was also popular, especially in Lent. It was served fresh, dried, and salted. Cheesecake and flan were often served for dessert. Olive oil was used for flavor and as a cooking medium.
Genoa's foods at the time of Columbus (slightly earlier period, but useful information).
WHAT FOODS WERE SERVED AT BANQUETS
"To illustrate the pomp and cicumstance of the banquet tradition, let us turn to the Renaissance Chronicler Bernadino Corio (1459-1519?), who in his Historia di Milano described in great detail a fabulous feast hed in Rome in 1473..."The banquet... took place in a great hall ...where there was a sideboard with twelve shelves on which the gem-studded trays so silver and gold were featured. Two tables covered by four tablecloths were prepared in the middle of the hall: the first was for the seven nobles of the highest station while the other table was for the lesser among them. In accordance with the custom in uage since the beginning of the century, the guests were still standing when they were served a meal that included trays of candied fruit covered with gold leaves and accompanied by painted glasses of malvasia. Once the guests were seated, musicians with horns and pipes announced the next dishes, which were divided into four serves in correspondence with the four tablecloths that covered the tables. The first service combined pork livers, blancmange, meats with relish, tortes and pies, salt-cured pork loin and sausage, roast veal, kid, squab, chicken, rabbit...whole roasted large game, and fowl dressed in their skin or feathers. Next came golden tortes and muscat pears in cups."...And this was just the first service!...list of foods brought forth in the remaining there services (at the end of each the tablecloth would be removed, and the guests washed their hands because they served themselves from comunal trays and forks were not in use): fried dough shaped like pine cones, smothered with honey and rose water, silver-wrapped lemons in sugary syrup; relishes; lies; sturgeon and lamprey; aspics, more tortes; junket drowning in white wine; Catalan-style chicken; green blancmange; stewed veal; mutton and roebuck; suckling pig; capon; and duck and black and sour cherries mascreated in Tyrian wine. And dulcis in fundo: ices, almonds, coriander seeds, anise seeds, cinnamon, and pine nuts..."
---The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, Martino of Como, edited and with an introduction by Luigi Ballerni, translated and annotated by jeremy Parzen [University of California Press:Berkeley CA] 2005 (p. 4-5)
"Banquet thrown January 23, 1529 by the son of the Duke of Ferrara for his father and various dignitaries. The total guest list numbered 104. Sugar suclptures of the labors of Hercules appeared first, in deference to the host himself, named "Hercole." The antipasto course consisted of cold dishes: a caper, truffle and raisin salad in pastry, another salad of greens with citron juice and anchovy salads. There were also radishes carved into shapes and animals, little cream pies, prosciutto of pork tongue, boar pies, mortadella and liver pies, smoked mullet served several different ways, and gilt-head bream. The first hot course had capon fritters sprinkled with sugar, quails, tomaselle (liver sausage), capon liver stuffed into a caul (netting of pork fat) and roasted pheasants, an onion dish, pigeons in puff pastry, tarts of fish ilt (spleen), fried trout tails and barbel (a fish), quails, meatballs, white servelat sausage, veal, capon German style in sweeet wine, pigeon pastries, carp, turbot, shrimp, trout roe pies, a yellow almond concoction, and pastires. The third course had partridge, rabbit, turtledoves, sausages, boned capon, pigeons and more fish. This goes on to a fourth course, again with birds, fish, a rice pie, and other dishes. A fifth course with some suckling pig, veal and more birds and fish as well. A sixth course with more veal prepared a different way, peacock, goat, boar and also more fish. The seventh course finally sees some vegetables, fennel, olives, grapes, pears, and other pastries; the ninth citron, lettuce, cucumbers and almonds in syrup, various fruits and confections...What is immediately striking is that guests were given individual plates for many of the dishes, only larger foods or presentations of several ingredients together came out in multiples of 25 or 50, and would have been divided up and served. Many of the foods came out in multiples of 104 on 25 larger plates as well. Because Messisbugo specified the number of plates needed for each food in each course, they can be counted. This meal used 2,835 plates."
---Food in Early Modern Europe, Ken Albala [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2002 (p. 124-5)
[NOTE: This book is an excellent source for common foods and regional variations. See: Italy (p. 111-140). Your librarian can help you find a copy.]
Emily
