Tuesday 23 September 2014

Stefano Rosselli: secrets and the Medici


Genoese Cotognata (quince paste) in branches or other (shapes)
Take white tender quinces, cook them in the area of the oven that is hot enough that the quinces become tender enough to pound and put through a sieve but not too hot that they darken in colour. Pare them and remove the cores. If they redden, they will turn bad. Take five pounds of the strained pulp, five pounds of finely pounded sugar and stir with a wooden stick or spoon so it does not stick. When it is cooked sufficiently, remove from the fire. Take wooden moulds and shape into leaves, animals and what you please. Place in the sun. If there is no sun, put into a tepid stove, turning every day. Take out from the moulds when the outside is dry and the inside has set into a paste. When putting into the moulds, dust a little fine sugar over them. Leaves and other animals from the imagination can also be made on a wooden board. This is the method used by my son Francesco, but most times the quinces come out somewhat red and not so white. This is because quince pears change colour in the oven so they need to be cooked in a way that they become tender and do not darken. I believe they will turn out white, like Genoese cotognata, if cooked in water, sieved and left to dry in  a pan or wooden board on top of a stove.       

In the mid-sixteenth century, solid quince pastes imported into England from Italy, Spain and Portugal were variously known as marmalades (from the Portuguese ‘marmelo’ – quince). The first recipe in print to refer to marmalade in English appears in the 1562 Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piedmont: "To make conserve or confiture of quinces [..] as they dooe in Valence [Valencia] which also the Genoese dooe use, we call it in England marmalade" (from the original Italian of 1555 via the French translation)1


When Henry Lyte translated Rembert Dodoens' Cruydeboeck (1554) for an English audience, he stated that  "(quince) codignac or marmelade [...] made with sugar is very good and profitable for the stomacke to strengthen the same, and to retaine and keepe the meates in the same, until they be perfectly digested" and that it "closeth the mouth of the stomacke so fast, that no vapours can come foorth, nor ascend up to the brayne". We find the same medical practices associated with quince pastes in contemporary Italian sources: in 1566, the Venetian physician Prospero Borgarucci declared in his practical manual for pharmacists that doctors recommended cotognato to "prevent vapours from the stomach ascending to the head". It is for these reasons that cotognato was always served in the last course of Renaissance banquets.

The recipe above comes from a manuscript book of secrets compiled in Florence by Stefano di Romolo Rosselli, "apothecary at the sign of San Francesco on the Canto del Giglio", that he started on 10 August 1593.

What makes his recipes especially important are their connections to the Medici court (see also my earlier post on Medici anti-poison oil). They are vital records of practice because Giovanni Dal Maestro records that Rosselli supplied the confectionery for the Medici baptism of Prince Cosimo and his sister Eleonora in April 1592 ("calciotti con pistacchiata, ravioli cottianimali cottimostacciuoli ricamatimarroni franciosicalicetti pizzicate et coloratecannella confettamandorle riccuteanici confetti, pasta di Fiandrafunghi finti"). Two hundred boxes of cotognata were also ordered from the Pitti stores for that celebration. An even stronger link is that Stefano himself is listed amongst the Medici salaried staff between 1588 and 1595, earning 3 scudi a month plus a horse. Also now known is the prominent role of Coriolano Osio, the Medici's confettiere (confectioner) housed within the Fonderia in the Uffizi palace, at a salary of 8 scudi a month. It was from Coriolano that Rosselli obtained his recipe for "candied citron and lemons" which Rosselli says he made "many times, above all for the Grand Duke's wedding celebrations (May 1589), recently described as "one of the most expensive and spectacular festivities devised anywhere in the sixteenth century". 

Aged seventy, Rosselli intended this compilation as a legacy to his sons Francesco and Vincenzo, who had followed him into the profession. He included only those secrets "proved many times". However, Stefano had assiduously recorded "recipes of all sorts, true and not true which came to him from day to day" and "recipes and secrets that came into his hands, noting down from whom they were acquired", since at least 1569 when he  opened his shop on the Canto del Giglio. We know this because two further collections of his secrets have unusually survived, now in the Laurentian and Marucelliana libraries in Florence. 

These three working manuscripts provide us with rare insights into how recipes were collected, sifted and evaluated and into how recipes operated as "invitations to action and experimentation" (Pamela Smith). Taking a closer look at his recipe for Genoese cotognato, we see Stefano trying out and testing techniques to make a pale quince paste, judging his method better than his son's. Making this "white marmelade" called for extreme care and judgement to prevent the quinces developing a ruby-red hue as they cooked. Immediately preceding this recipe in the 1593 manuscript is one which Stefano had gathered from Antonia (de) Silva (Suarez) "spagnola", the wife of a prominent Portuguese merchant resident in Florence, for white "cotognato alla portug(h)ese, "which few here know how to make". This calls for the quinces to be boiled, then the pulp sieved; and Rosselli follows this advice. He may also have read the same method  advocated in texts such as Borgarucci's manual (in his recipe for cotognato sodo ("much used by the Genoese its inventors") or in Agostino Gallo's treatise, Le vinti giornate dell'agricoltura et de piaceri della villa (The Twenty Days of Agriculture and the Pleasures of the Villa). 

Cotognato came in many varieties: the Genoese version was particularly renowned--so one variant known as "pizze di genoa" was offered for example alongside Portuguese "mermelada" and Bolognese quince in May 1581 in Mantua and alongside Bolognese and Portuguese "cotognato" at a banquet in Rome in May 1593. Though frequently packaged in small round wooden boxes, as the recipe above makes clear, cotognato could also be moulded into amazing translucent shapes--the most astounding example being a statue of "Florence with a lion at her feet", created by Coriolano Osio for the Medici in 1589 from wax bas-relief moulds produced by two sculptors and stone-cutters, Pagholo del Fantasia and Andrea di Michelagnolo Ferruzzi        

Select Bibliography

Stefano di Romolo Rosselli, Mes secrets à Florence au temps du Médicis 1593, (Paris, 1996). Recipe at cap.XXX, 186-7 
Stefano Rosselli, Segreti diversi (Florence, 1569-88), Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Florence, Ms Antinori 151
Stefano Rosselli, Zibaldone di diversi segreti, raccolto da Stefano di Maestro Romolo Rosselli, Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence, Cod. C-CXLV
Fanny Kieffer, La confiserie des Offices: art, sciences et magnificence à la cour des Médicis, Predella, Journal of Visual Arts, no. 33, 2013 [2014]
C. Anne Wilson, The Book of Marmalade, 2nd revised edition, (London, 2010)
Suzanne B. Butters, The Triumph of Vulcan: Sculptors' Tools, Porphyry, and the Prince in Ducal Florence, 2 vols (Florence, 1996)
James Shaw and Evelyn Welch, Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Amsterdam, 2011)







Saturday 14 June 2014

Doctor's orders

To make a concentrate (broth) of capon

Take a plump capon that is middle aged [i.e. between a year and eighteen months] not force-fed, not too young and not decrepit, because the young one lacks substance and the overly old one will be too tough and take too long to make a broth...The capon should be freshly slaughtered, because the longer it has been dead, the less strength the concentrate will have. Once the capon has been gutted, cut into small pieces. It will be better if its throat has been cut rather than its neck wrung, because its meat will stay whiter. And if you can do it without washing it, that would be better, though to make it cleaner and more delicate, wash it once without wringing it out. Place the little pieces into a glazed earthenware pot that does not smell and cover with four fingers of water. Boil it on a low fire and skim throughly. Once skimmed,  put an earthenware cover onto the pot, sealing it with dough all around so no vapour escapes. Then place the pot on the coals away from the flames, with a brick or another weight on top of the cover so the lid does not lift. Simmer slowly for around three hours, depending on the age of the chicken, until it has reduced by two-thirds. To be certain (about the timing) and without having to uncover the pot many times, put the chicken's feet into another pot and boil them too in water with the pot well-sealed. When the feet are cooked, then the broth will be well reduced and ready.  Put it through a filter or strainer. Give it for drinking with sugar or other substances as prescribed by the Physician.

This recipe is taken from Book VI of Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570) which deals with food for convalescents. Scappi had reached the pinnacle of his profession as the pope's personal cook. Yet throughout Book VI, he is painstakingly careful to show his recipes follow doctor's orders; for "court physicians...alone had the authority and the responsibility to prescribe what should be consumed by the truly sick" (Terence Scully).  Scappi even tells us that the pope's physician, Federigo Donati, could testify that these preparations had been tried and tested (esperimentade) on many signori. Within the recipes, repeated reference is made to the Physician determining whether to add or exclude certain ingredients. 

According to medical tradition, rich concentrated capon or chicken broths were prescribed when physicians wished to restore the lagging strength of the sick, the elderly and women in childbirth.  


Complexion or temperament was the individual balance of the qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry resulting from the mixture of elements in the body. All foods were variously classified as relatively hot, cold, wet and dry and so to eat right was to select foods matched to a person's individual complexion or which could temper any imbalance. To eat right involved calibrating the right combinations of foods in in the right amounts at the right time, taking into account other factors such as age, season and exercise taken.  


The physician Castor Durante, who practiced in Rome, describes capon as highly nutritious, "perfectly temperate in all qualities",  agreeable for "all complexions" and preferable to all other meats because it "generates perfect blood and balances all the humours". Capon, he says, was good for all ages and all seasons. 


Actual recipes and what physicians thought should be eaten are often at total variance with each other. But not here. Scappi follows medical advice in offering capon to recovering patients in its most concentrated and easily digestible form; a restorative drink, to be supped by those too weak to fully digest even the lightest foods.   The aging cardinal Pietro Bembo was dosed by Scappi with a distilled concentrate of capon. Here his recipe closely resembles the method outlined in an official printed pharmacopoeia, the Ricettario Fiorentino,  with the capon meat suspended by little (silk) threads in a sealed glass flask. The key point about Scappi's recipes for convalescents is that he expected physicians to tailor these preparations to match individual complexions--sugar or other ingredients were added according to the doctor's individual prescription. 


There is no indication that Scappi was familiar with learned medical tracts and he never tries to explain why these broths worked. But the value of such restoratives was already widely diffused in popular culture. Ulisse Aldrovandi noted 
"Our (Milanese) women pound up a pullet with its bones and cook it in its own broth until it is reduced to a very small quantity and acquires the consistency of a white pap; this they give to patients with excellent results".  Scipione Mercurio observed that in Venice "at the start of almost any illness, people immediately resort to a restorative--an essence of distilled chicken".