Byzantine Murals

Some of the world's most beautiful murals, I believe, were made by mosaic artists and fresco painters working throughout the Byzantine Empire. Many extraordinary churches were built and decorated in a unique Byzantine style from the early days of Roman Byzantium through the Middle Ages. I'm especially fond of this artwork, and I've made efforts to visit cities where these churches are located in order to enjoy seeing this artwork. I did try to take pictures of the murals which are very large and not always well-lighted, so my photos of the murals are not fantastic. Thus, I've selected some available images, mainly from Wikipedia, to illustrate these historic and wonderful murals. I searched for images of the mosaics that I recall most vividly: I've chosen only one for each city that I've visited. If you are intrigued, you can easily find more.

Palermo, Sicily

King Roger II of Sicily being crowned by Christ. (Wikipedia)
Several churches in Palermo have remarkable murals by Byzantine artists
that were hired by the Norman kings of Sicily in the eleventh century.

Monreale, Sicily

Interior of Monreale Cathedral. Monreale is near Palermo. (Wikipedia)

Ravenna, Italy

The Emperor Justinian and his retinue, San Vitale Basilica, Ravenna. (Tripadvisor)

Venice, Italy

Mosaic: "Noah Releasing the Dove," Saint Mark's Cathedral, Venice. (Wikipedia)
In Saint Mark's, there's an entire series of murals illustrating the story of Noah, which I found incredibly impressive.

Istanbul, Turkey

Mosaic from the Chora Church, Istanbul. This is an amazing little church far from the center of the city. (Wikipedia)
Some parts of the church are also decorated with frescos.

An Extremely Brief History 

Mosaic depicting the Emperor Constantine. (Wikipedia)

You probably know this: in the year 330 of the current era, the Roman Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the Greek city of Byzantium. The city received a new name: Constantinople. The depiction of Constantine is one of the famous mosaics of Hagia Sophia.

At the time, "Barbarians" from northern Europe had taken over much of the Italian peninsula including Rome. However, emperors based in Constantinople continued to rule a substantial part of the empire, including the areas now belonging to Greece, to parts of current Turkey, to Sicily, and to other cities in Italy. Based on ancient Roman traditions, the Byzantines developed unique art and culture during their 1000 year existence. In particular, Roman mosaic art, which had largely been secular, developed into a new and rather different type of Christian art during the long Byzantine era -- as illustrated above.

In 1453, after a long series of territorial losses, the final defeat of Byzantium/Constantinople ended the empire. The Ottoman Turks took over the city and renamed it Istanbul. In the growing Ottoman Empire, Islam became the dominant religion. Though the rulers never prohibited Christian worship, the most famous Byzantine murals, those of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, were covered over by plaster soon after the takeover. The building was converted from a church to a mosque where representative art was prohibited. Today this remarkable building is neither a church nor a mosque, but is kept open as a monument to art and history. I fear that its integrity as a work of art may be endangered by current religious nationalism in Turkey.

For more worldwide murals see the weekly post Monday Murals at Colorful World.

A Disappointing Detective Novel by Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri writes delightful police procedurals about his Sicilia detective Inspector Montalbano. The plots are usually pretty good, but above all, Montalbano is a serious eater and Camilleri has a vivid way of describing what Montalbano eats. The inspector especially loves the local fish dishes that are special to his southern-Sicilian town -- which actually is the town of Agrigento, though in the books it goes by another name.

The Wings of the Sphinx, which I read this week, is pretty good at suspense. But it really disappointed me with its lackluster food descriptions. Montalbano in the course of the book eats quite a few meals, and even talks to a fisherman who brings in the fresh fish for the local restaurant and to Enzo, the restaurant proprietor. Unfortunately the fish preparations, mostly mullet, are mentioned without much in the way of the detail that a regular reader comes to expect in this series. And I think I've read at least 10 of the Montalbano books, so I know what to expect. Just not up to the usual standard!

Here's an example of how the author just names the dishes without any of the usual mouth-watering detail: "Enzo brought him a dish of pasta with pesto alla trapanese, and as a second, piscistoccu alla ghiotta, stockfish prepared according to the Messinese recipe." (pp. 94-95)

In the entire book one very complicated recipe does appear, but overall, I'm afraid the author's heart wasn't in it this time. This recipe is the only detailed food passage in the book. The dish is "’mpanata di maiali" and we are told that the inspector obtained the recipe from the cook in a restaurant. The recipe is inserted in the text without an introduction, and it's not at all vivid compared to Camillari's usual descriptions. I guess you could cook it and find out for yourself how it tastes, but I don't feel like doing that --

“Poach a head of cauliflower in salted water, remove it when still slightly firm, and chop it into large chunks. Then season it in a skillet after you have sautéed a small onion, thinly sliced, in olive oil in the same pan. In another pan, fry up a piece of fresh sausage, and the moment it turns golden, cut it into small disks no more than an inch wide, removing the skin. Add the cauliflower to the pan with the sausage bits and oil, adding a few potatoes sliced into thin, transparent disks, some chopped black olives, salt, and spices. Stir this assortment well. Knead some leavened bread dough into a broad, flat disk and mold this into a cake tin with a tall rim; fill this with the mixture and cover with another round sheet of dough, kneading the edges together. Spread lard over the upper parts and put the tin into a very hot oven. Remove it as soon as it turns golden brown (but this will take half an hour or so).” (pp. 159-160)

I may try another of the books in the series, but I'm pretty discouraged by this encounter!

"On Persephone's Island"

In the 1960s, when Mary Taylor Simeti began her life in Sicily, peasants still
used the traditional painted carts to at least occasionally, she wrote. By the time
we were there, only vendors to tourists used them. (Photo from our trip in 2002)

Last night my culinary book club discussed the book On Persephone's Island by Mary Taylor Simeti, which was published in 1986, and describes her life in Sicily from 1964 until the 1980s. Simeti's year abroad after her graduation from college became a lifetime commitment when she married a Sicilian. She tells of her adjustment to his family, how she was raising her children to have both a Sicilian and American identity, and how she had adapted to the rhythm of life in the countryside in summer and in Palermo in winter. Her husband is a teacher and also manages the family farm, and her children were in school in the city.

Last night everyone seemed to have found the book as charming as I do. Most of the books we read take a scholarly or other systematic approach to food. In Simeti's book, food is an important part of family life and community life, but she doesn't look deeply into its history or systematically examine foodways. I at least found this a welcome variation on our usual reading. For example, I loved her description of the tradition for some holidays of grilling artichokes with garlic.

The Martorana Church in Palermo where a wedding was taking place.
Simeti mentions this as a popular choice for weddings.

We agreed that we were surprised by her descriptions of the major impact that the Mafia had on the ordinary people in the book. Huge sums of money were expected: if not paid, the Mafia would blow up homes or businesses. And the Mafia murdered a number of government officials who tried to establish the rule of law.

Though we enjoyed the book, much of our discussion ended up being our own travelers' tales -- of the eight people present, four had been to Sicily. In response, I looked up these photos from one of our trips.

Simeti's book explores her sense of connection to the ancient Greeks who settled many parts of the island, and to the
many Greek myths that take place in Sicily -- such as the abduction of Persephone. Above: one of the temples of
Agrigento, a beautiful and major Greek city.

All of us had very strong memories of the mosaic floors at the villa at Piazza Armerena.
That's me holding a green Michelin guide.

One memorable experience shared by a member of our group was about stopping to talk to a man who was working in his vineyard. He asked about the wine, and the man invited the traveler and his wife (both present last night) to come home with him to taste his wine. The guests were seated in the parlor, which was obviously saved for special events, while the host and hostess prepared food. Several other people from the village joined them, and entertained them for around 2 hours. The people of Sicily, our friend concluded, were among the warmest and most welcoming in Europe.

No Toga Party: What did poor people eat in ancient Rome

Photo and blog post © 2010 mae sander

The Roman banquet is as familiar in American popular culture as the toga party -- though the popular conception of a toga party probably is more rooted in John Belushi than in echoes of classical studies from university life of old. 

Say "Roman Banquet" and what comes to mind? Eggs to apples. Exotic delicacies like roasted hedgehogs and flamingo tongues. Honey-sweetened wine, perhaps deliciously flavored with lead from the glaze of the drinking vessels. Spices brought from all over the Roman Empire and traded from the East. Olive oil. White bread made from the best flour. Produce from the host's country estates, perhaps nearby, perhaps farther off in Sicily or other areas. Slaves to cook, serve, and entertain the guests (all men). 

Most of the people in ancient Rome were very poor. Everyone knows that they had bread and circuses. Archaeology provides a glimpse of the circus, but what about the bread? What did the really poor Romans eat? 

Indeed, the Romans, both rich and poor, ate bread. In the later centuries of the Roman Empire, distribution of grain -- wheat and barley -- to the large poverty-stricken population provided an important part of the diet, at least to the lucky poor who were eligible for free food. Wheat was higher-status than barley -- so poor people were more likely to afford barley when they had to buy their own food. They sometimes made their grain rations into bread, and sometimes into porridge. 

Porridge was lower-status than bread for many reasons, especially because it could be made from the coarser and less desired barley. Because the process of making bread with yeast results in a more nutritious product (the fermentation process makes some nutrients more accessible) those who ate bread were on the whole healthier, as well as richer. 

"Apart from cereals," we learn, "dry legumes, in particular lentils, chickpeas and broad beans, were the main source of protein as of calories in the Mediterranean basin as a whole.... Dry legumes also supplied the amino acids in which wheat and barley were low, and the missing vitamin A. The flour of legumes was commonly blended with wheat flour to make bread." * 

Artisans and other non-upper-class Romans thus ate beans. Street vendors sold a "kind of pudding" made of chickpeas -- I wonder if it was like hummus. Imports from the fertile agricultural regions of Egypt included lentils and chickpeas, as well as the high-quality wheat for which the Nile valley was widely known. Sometimes rich or official benefactors gave out free food at festivals, but this was unusual. One Roman politician spent a fortune showering the crowd at the Circus with chickpeas, beans, and lentils. (I'm thinking of Meg Whitman spending $141.5 million -- except I don't know if the Roman won or lost his election.) 

 

Garden produce was sometimes affordable to the lower or maybe middle classes, according to literary sources -- cabbage, leeks, beets, onions, garlic. It was a commonplace that poor people drank only water, while those who could afford it, drank wine. High-quality fish and the famous garum fish sauces were food for rich people, but poorer people could sometimes manage to buy or catch some not-so-nice fish from the even-then-polluted Tiber River. Even salt cost money -- spices were only for the rich. 

By late antiquity (3rd-4th centuries) Emperor Aurelian introduced distribution of free pork -- up to 25 kilos per person -- to as many as 120,000 people per year. Like the grain distributions, though, the recipients were often the representatives of larger families, who had to share their portions. Many poor people weren't eligible for any free food, with the result that malnutrition, especially among children, was common. The people of ancient Rome included the upper class rulers, slaves, freedmen (former slaves), artisans, soldiers, small farmers, and a vast number of urban poor. The banquets and refined cuisine that one most often hears about included participants from only a tiny fraction of the large Roman population.

*Information comes from Peter Garnsey, Cities Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity, 1998, p. 242-245; Jeremy Paterson, "Trade and traders in the Roman world" in Trade, Traders and the Ancient City, ed. Parkins and Smith; and Neville Morley, Trade in Classical Antiquity. Photo shows Roman Emperor's villa at Piazza Armerina, Sicily.

Inspector Montalbano Identifies Himself

Inspector Montalbano is a Sicilian detective in the series by Andrea Camilleri. Montalbano loves Sicilian food. He appreciates the culinary skills of his housekeeper Adelina and of the neighborhood restaurant owners. Dishes that he consumes in the course of the novel The Terra-Cotta Dog -- which I just read -- are named and lovingly described at every chance: "pasta with tomatoes, basil, and black passuluna olives that gave off an aroma to wake the dead"; pasta al forno; a snack of roasted chickpeas, peanuts, and pumpkin seeds; fresh anchovies baked in lemon juice, and on and on.

Montalbano definitely following the gourmet tradition of many other detectives, and he knows it. Near the beginning of The Terra-Cotta Dog this is indicated directly:

He [Montalbano] took his two courses, a bottle of wine, and some bread to the table, turned on the television, and sat down to dinner. He loved to eat alone, relishing every bite in silence. ... It occurred to him that in matters of taste he was closer to Maigret than to Pepe Carvalho, the protagonist of Montalban's novels, who stuffed himself with dishes that would have set a shark's belly on fire. (p. 42)

I've read many of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret books, and know all about how the inspector loves to eat, especially the cooking of Madame Maigret. This is the first I've heard of Pepe Carvalho and his author Montalban, for whom I gather Camilleri named his character Montalbano. How interesting to find the fictional detective comparing himself to other fictional detectives! I must read a Pepe Carvalho mystery soon.

I wrote about another Inspector Montalbano book that I read here:

"The Snack Thief"

Sicily, Ancient and Modern

I've been enjoying Pomp and Sustenance by Mary Taylor Simeti, whose other books I've enjoyed in the past. Sicilian heritage, she shows, is rich with food writing. Simeti starts us off with Homer -- remember the roast meats whose aromas waft up to please the gods? Remember the gardens in the land of the Cyclops? That was Sicily, with pomegranates, pears, apples, figs, olives, and grape vines.

Archestratus of Gela, Sicily, in the fourth century BC wrote about roast tuna sprinkled with vinegar. Plato mentioned "gorging food twice a day" in Sicily. The fish and vegetables of the ancient isle compare remarkably to the deliciacies of Simeti's twentieth-century life on a farm with her own olive oil and her own produce.

She offers classic recipes: pasta with eggplant, oil, basil, ricotta and tomatoes. Pasta with fresh sardines, fennel, pine nuts, currants, saffron, and toasted breadcrumbs. She discusses the influence of the Arabs a millenium later.

She makes me want to go back to Sicily. Or at least try to cook some of these dishes or read some classics. I'm lazy. I'll just peruse her book.

After Artusi

Italian food, all cookbook writers agree, is really regional food, despite the unifying influence of Artusi's cookbook (which I wrote about here).

Following on, I've been perusing a variety of cookbooks that treat one or several regions and include food memoirs, history, and a variety of information about cuisines. I haven't tried any recipes yet, but I hope I'll be brave enough to tackle a few soon.

The Good Food of Italy by Claudia Roden, written about 20 years ago, includes a great survey of Italian regional cooking. Most interesting are her specific observations about how much industrialization, the move from rural to urban life, and the resulting prosperity after World War II, changed the way Italians eat.

The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger (1996) contains a magnificent collection of images of food and cooking from antiquity. Recipes offer modern methods of making the foods of specific times and places in ancient Greece and Rome, beginning with Odysseus and wrapping up at the Roman baths.

Cucina Paradiso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily by Clifford A. Wright (1992) attempts to identify the Arab influence in the cooking of Sicily from nearly 300 years of Arab rule during the Middle Ages. However, I'm sceptical about the author's scholarship -- he writes "A new invention from the windy and arid regions of the Arab world, the windmill, arrived in the early tenth century. Now more flour could be milled and more bread eaten. Pizzas such as the tasty Carbuciu, a double pizza stuffed with tomatoes, oregano and anchovy, became popular." (p. 28) Really. Tomatoes are a new-world product. They couldn't have reached Sicily until centuries after the Arabs left. Maybe the recipes are better than the author's rather thin summary of history.

The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews by Edda Servi Machlin (1981) is one of my favorite food memoirs. Her early life in a small town before the persecution and essential expulsion of the Jews from Italy is very important, and this is a classic record of a lost tradition. I reread it every time I'm in that section of the library.

La Cucina di Lidia by Lidia Bastianich and Jay Jacobs (1990) has intrigued me since I watched one of Lidia's recent cooking shows on the PBS Create channel. She's so unlike the Food Network stars -- modest, and interested in good food and how people enjoy it. This is a celebrity biography, but enjoyable, and I bought the book because I have high hopes for the recipes.

"The Snack Thief"

Andrea Camilleri's detective, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, has individualistic and even eccentric habits -- as do most of the heroes of police procedural detective stories. The Sicilian setting where he works (a renamed version of the Sicilian city of Agrigento) provides a colorful background: another essential for a good suspense tale. Bumbling or otherwise inept subordinates and variously ineffectual superiors leave Montalbano to face his challenges pretty much alone: a third element of a successful contender in this genre of fiction. The inspector's private life, including a beautiful girlfriend from northern Italy, constantly has to be put on hold as he becomes absorbed in solving his case -- also typical. In my opinion, skillful use of the norms of genre fiction leads to success: that's what I think Camilleri does.

Camilleri's 14 novels about the inspector (ten available in English) have sold many millions of copies. However, I admit, I just heard of him this week when reading The Oxford Companion to Food. Inspector Montalbano, you see, is a great gourmet with a prodigious appetite. He particularly loves Sicilian seafood dishes -- so much that the food descriptions from the stories are cited in something like ten entries in this encyclopedia! Sicily has been a seafood-loving and innovating country since the time of Odysseus: the mosaic in the illustration -- showing a fish that will no doubt soon be someone's dinner -- is from the Roman villa at Piazza Armerina, a few hours' drive from Agrigento. We made the drive (and took the photo) in 2002; on that visit, we stayed at a resort-hotel very near Camilleri's birthplace, Porto Empedocle, adjacent to Agrigento. Of course this makes the books even more appealing to me.

In The Snack Thief, the first Montalbano Mystery I've read (third in the series), the inspector is faced with two murders: a middle-class retired businessman found stabbed in the elevator of his apartment building, and a Tunisian fisherman on a boat just outside Italian territorial waters.

At the beginning, the police commissioner invites Montalbano for a dinner of "black spaghettin in squid ink. It's delicious." (p. 6) However, he becomes too immersed in following his case, and repeatedly has to call and cancel a series of promised meals at his boss's house.

As the inspector intensely follows the leads on the case, however, he stops around every 10 pages for a meal or a snack. Some delicious ones:

• "Bring me a generous serving of the hake [in anchovy sauce]," he asks at lunch, just after beginning his investigation. He also orders "a nice plate of seafood antipasto. He was overcome by doubt. Was that a light meal? ... Eight pieces of hake arrived, enough to feed four people. They were crying out in their joy... at having been cooked the way God had meant them to be. One whiff was enough to convey the dish's perfection, achieved by the right amount of breadcrumbs and the delicate balance between the anchovies and the whisked egg. ... He let the flavor spread sweetly and uniformly over his tongue and palate." (p. 29-30)
• "The woman [an elderly Tunisian] was crushing minced meat in a mortar, folding in grains of cooked wheat. On a platter beside her, all ready to be roasted, were some skewers of meat, with each morsel wrapped in a vine leaf.... Montalbano wasn't too thrilled with the kubba, but the kebabs had a tart, herbal flavor that made them a little more sprightly, or so, at least, he defined them according to his imperfect use of adjectives." (p. 79-80)
• "He set the table, then looked in the fridge and found the pasta 'ncasciata [translator's note -- a casserole of ... elbow macaroni, penne, ziti, mezzi ziti, or something similar -- tomato sauce, ground beef, Parmesan cheese, and bechamel] and veal roulade from the day before. He put them in the oven at low heat... The delicious meal... prevented him from getting as angry as he would have liked." (p. 124-5)
• "He drew up a rapid, unhappy inventory: as a first course, he could make a little pasta with garlic and oil; as a second course, he could throw something together using sardines in brine, olives, caciocavallo cheese, and canned tuna." (p. 132-33)
• "He gobbled up a saute of clams in bread-crumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it all off with a bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce." (p. 225)

Does this explain why this author is so often quoted in a cooking encyclopedia? Oh, yes -- the title of the book is also food related: a child who holds a key to the murders is abandoned, and begins to steal snacks -- such as an omelet -- from other children.

For some reason, we took a photo of a police car while staying at the resort and sightseeing the ancient Greek ruins that attract tourists and historians to the region, along with the fantastic food.

From ABBACCHIO to ZUPPA INGLESE

Zuppa Inglese is approximately equal to an English Trifle, according to the very last entry in the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Italian Food by Gillian Riley. For several days, I've been browsing through this unusual work.

The book doesn't look unusual -- letter by letter, it goes through ingredients (like the first entry, abbacchio, which refers the reader to see LAMB), regions of Italy, classic dishes, food writers, famous Italians (if they had something to say about food), and concepts like SLOW FOOD and FAST FOOD. It has illustrations -- black and white, a bit grainy. It has consistent cross references. After Z there's a bibliography and an index; the front matter is also complete.

But the content reflects the author's ideas, which are interesting, and I would say, unusual.

• First, it's fabulously historical -- for example, the entry on Sicily begins at the beginning of history, when Greeks and Phoenicians began to colonize the territory already inhabited by local people. In the Odyssey, the Cyclops adventure took place on Sicily -- and one thing the Cyclops did was to make cheese. Myth or reality? "By 400 BC, Sicilian salt pork and cheese were being exported to Greece," we learn. Also, "Mithaikos, the first celebrity chef, is said to have migrated ... from his native Syracuse [in Sicily] to Greece."
• Second, the author makes such interesting connections. Zuppa Inglese, or trifle, for example, is linked to many other egg-custard-based desserts -- lighter versions, flummery, syllabub, dishes "where slices of bread are toasted or fried then allowed to absorb a liquid," bread-and-butter puddings, savory bread puddings, budins, other cake and custard dishes, tiramisu, and by implication related custards such as creme brulee.
• And third, the work makes such wonderful use of Italian literary food references and even art references, such as the citrus fruits that appear in the works of Andrea Mantegna. I think I've in fact been introduced to a new mystery writer that uses food in his works -- I'll post more when I've followed it up.

In all -- I love browsing in this book. It's a really different experience from online browsing!

Waverley Root

Are you planning a trip to Italy? A reading project about an aspect of Italian life? If you plan to go even slightly away from the big, crowded tourist attractions, there's a 35-year-old classic book that can give you some unusual insights. In The Food of Italy, Waverley Root presents Italy's distinguished past as background for the development of Italian cuisine. Root connects amazing details about the foods produced and served in each region to the cultural past. These details can be overwhelming, but also fascinating.

In Root's introduction to Sicilian cooking, for instance, he begins with the ancients. "Archestratus," he writes, "was a Sicilian, born in Gela early in the 4th century B.C. He has been called the Brillat-Savarin of ancient times, though Brillat-Savarin was deadly serious about a subject which Archestratus treated lightly in his mock heroic poem, Gastronomie.... In typically Sicilian fashion, he interested himself particularly in fish. Yet little trace of Greek cooking ... remains in Sicily." (p. 596) Then he gives all sorts of details about the most famous Sicilian sweets, caponata, couscous, pasta with sardines (only in Palermo, you'll learn, the photo shows some I had last summer), and all sorts of mouth-watering vegetables and meats.

Most writers view Italian history as a progression of accomplishment in art, music, literature, and political innovation, from the era of the Etruscans (who, Root notes, perhaps invented pasta), through the Greeks, Romans (whose banquets are of course legendary), the Renaissance (when popes led the world in fine dining and gluttony), and into the 20th century.

Root presents each region's specialties and agricultural products with scholarship and humor. Concrete material on agriculture and cooking technique as well as legends, plays, and poetry all contribute to the narrative. You can learn a lot about pasta, in passages like this:

"The ring shape of tortellini suggests to the Bolognese mind the human navel -- or more exactly the feminine navel, for it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the male umbilicus possesses inspirational qualities. Obsession with this resemblance has produced a number of stories about the origin of tortellini which contribute little to history, but do shed some light on Bolognese psychology. A 17th-century story is the simplest: it maintains that tortellini was born when a cook molded his pasta directly in the navel of a Bolognese woman. The image is fetching, but the exact process by which edible pasta could thus be arrived at is not easy to figure out." (p. 195)

Root goes on to cite literary sources in which the navel origin of pasta plays a role. Similarly, Root grounds his disquisitions of food and wine in details about the leaders of the land; for example, when describing the foods of the region north of Rome, he writes that eels become so tasty in the waters of Bolsena "that they led Pope Martin IV into the sin of gluttony. He was from the Touraine, where matelote of eel is a much appreciated dish; but this was not considered an extenuating circumstance by Dante (anti-French anyway) who punished him by placing him in purgatory in the Divine Comedy." (p. 99)

Another papal story: "In the 14th century, an offbeat gastronomic note was inserted into history by one of the less admired members of the powerful Visconti family, then ruling Milan. This was Barnabo, who had been excommunicated by the pope." This tyrant forced the monks who represented the pope to eat the bull of excommunication: "parchment, ribbons, seals and all." While the bull didn't poison the monks, Barnabo himself was poisoned somewhat later. A food story? Well, maybe. (p. 257)

Root often digresses from his vivid descriptions of the many dishes from every region of Italy. "In ancient Roman days, as in ours, a whole roast pig was customarily served with an apple in its mouth, and the apple was likely to be Picenian. Horace described Picenian apples as small but exceedingly tasty, whose like could be found nowhere else. A few centuries later another famous writer, Boccaccio, praised Picenian salame, whose superiority he attributed to the fact that the sausage casings were made from the intestines of the same pig which produced the meat." Delightful digressions! (p. 129)

It's impossible to summarize his work, as it's encyclopedic. In reading it -- preferably one regional section at a time -- you realize numerous connections in Italian culture. The Renaissance, for example, was a rebirth not only of art and literature, but also of food; Root shows you exactly how this truism might apply to your dinner, if you find the right small, non-touristy restaurant. The Romans left an indelible mark on the land and its food; you'll be more likely to notice the marks if you read the book.

Almost at the beginning of the book, Root writes: "while French cooking has become professional cooking even when it is executed by amateurs, Italian cooking has remained basically amateur cooking even when it is executed by professionals. It is, in short, home cooking... human, light-hearted and informal." (p. 18) Throughout this work, I appreciated the range of specific details that demonstrated how Italian cooking comes from the people.

Good Books on Italian Food

My previous post may seem very negative. To offset that impression, here are images of some Italian food and cooking books that I really like -- besides the PBS show "Lidia's Italy."

I've especially enjoyed the books of Mary Taylor Simieti on Sicily. She writes wonderful details of life there from the mid-60s until recently.

The depicted book on Italian-Jewish cooking by Edda Servi Machlin includes a sketch of "a vanished way of life" in her town of Pitigliano. Her story of life there is especially enjoyable. I regret that I have never yet purchased a copy, but I always intend to get one.

My plan is to reread more of these, and maybe some new ones. I've just finished with Elizabeth David's Italian Food. I love the way she intersperses anecdotes and recipes. She is just as informative as Pellegrini -- whose book I find so annoying that I ranted about it this morning. She often compares early-1950s English food to that of Italy, and though it's not a favorable comparison, she is never nasty and snide the way he is about American food and people. Sure, she thinks the English would enjoy life more if they ate more adventurously, but she tries to show them what's possible. And indeed, she succeeded in changing the English diet, as much as anyone could. (Another book I hope to read is a recent biography of Davis by Artemis Cooper.)

Check here from time to time for more book reports!

Citrus Citrus Citrus!

Everyone thinks about citrus at this time of year. I've been reading Citrus: A History, as I've mentioned. Today, the L.A.Times food section went over the top:

100 things to do with a Meyer lemon

The local Whole Foods has Meyer lemons all the time, so I have developed a taste for them as a squeeze on fish or chicken dishes. I admit, I also like to eat a wedge of Meyer lemon now and then: not quite as sour as a generic lemon. (Those were Meyer lemons in the trout dish I made a few weeks ago -- see Trout.)

Plus in another article: "Blood oranges: These crimson-fleshed citrus fruits are another produce item that has gone almost instantly from obscure to commonplace. It wasn't so long ago that you practically had to travel to Sicily to find them. Now they're in grocery stores." See: Oranges that taste of summer berries by Russ Parsons.

Mona Lisa: By Request

Renaissance Pasta or, What Did Mona Lisa Eat?

Before she got her current job in advertising (I collect her work — ads, postcards, greeting cards — all the jobs she poses for these days), Mona Lisa was a small town Tuscan girl. The year was 1503. She got her break from Leonardo da Vinci. Since I've put a lot of effort into seeing what people have been doing with her image more recently, I began to wonder — what did she eat?
She obviously had no tomatoes, no potato gnocci, no polenta made from maize, no roast peppers, no strawberries, no vanilla, and no chocolate — these all came from the New World, and although they traveled fast, probably took a little longer than 10 years to get to Italy.

Lots of dishes that seem classic and Italian were either not introduced or not invented yet. Mozzarella cheese and tomatoes, for example, came later in the 1500's; coffee reached Italy from places like Turkey in 1615; zabaglione was invented in the seventeenth century. Polenta from New-World corn meal replaced similarly-prepared buckwheat dishes, and new-world species of beans appeared in the diet of poor Italians in the early eighteenth century.

Tomato sauce for pasta — which Mona Lisa once advertised in a pair of pictures labeled "Original" and "Chunky" — did not become common until the nineteenth century. Tomato paste was invented in 1875. Other current Italian fads arose even more recently: raddichio was developed some time since World War II, and Tiramisu, the chocolate dessert, in the 1960's.

The "Mona Lisa Pizzeria" and the many other restaurants and Italian delis in Paris, Oslo, Berlin, Detroit, New Orleans, and San Diego, that use Mona Lisa's name or picture serve food that she would scarcely recognize.

However, their menus might seem to her a little more familiar than the South-American strawberry or quince preserves or Greek chocolate bars sold under her name. They would definitely be more familiar than the high-tech computers, printers, and other equipment in whose ads or catalogs she so often now appears. And maybe she would know what to do with beer mats from Mona Lisa beer!

During the fifteenth century, under the Medici rulers of Florence, a Renaissance in food, cooking, and table manners was underway along with the better-known Renaissance in art and culture. Northern Italian food was the finest in Europe, and a model for other European cuisine. The food people ate and the ways it was presented and served were all very different than they had been even 100 years earlier, and were substantially different from our ways of cooking, serving, and eating. Noble banquets offered three or more courses, with numerous dishes in each course, and elaborate display and presentation of the dishes. A particularly memorable one at the Este court in 1529 offered 10 courses, 120 dishes, music, and a play written for the occasion. In fact, Leonardo called the Este court in Ferrera "the most brilliant and enlightened court in Europe."

The order of serving a meal that we consider normal — appetizers or soup followed by main courses, with sweets last — was not introduced until some time later, in Italy, although one author states that this method was introduced earlier into the Spanish court. Each course included several types of dishes, soups, and fruits, and many meat dishes were flavored with fruits and sweet spice combinations. Above all, sugar, which had only recently arrived in Italy, appeared in a vast number of dishes. There were also sweet and sour sauces, introduced by Jews fleeing from Spain. These contained sugar and agresto, the juice of sour grapes, which was the precursor of Italian tomato sauce preparations developed later.

In rich and or noble houses, it had become customary to have individual plates for each diner, made of faience or glass or a richer material. Mona Lisa ate her meals with two-tined forks rather than dipping into a common bowl with her fingers, as her grandmother might have done.
At the banquets and weddings of the day, food was elaborately decorated and displayed, as well as ceremoniously presented, and not only the dishes, but even the tablecloths were changed after each course. While I have a couple of designs of decorative paper napkins with Mona Lisa images on them, this is definitely not a Renaissance item! My Mona Lisa beer glass and coffee mugs would also look out of place at a Renaissance banquet.

Gold was considered healthful, so the rich ate gold leaf, which allowed for additional ways to decorate the food. And like the four-and-twenty blackbirds in the King's "dainty dish" of the nursery rhyme, live birds or rabbits were sealed in fancy pies, so that when the pie was opened, they flew or ran out across the table. I'm not the first modern person to wonder, though, who would want to eat anything from the inside of a bird cage — I'd rather eat bread and honey with the Queen or even hang out the clothes.

More common people might also have enjoyed good food, served luxuriously. A rich Tuscan townsman in 1497 was said to dine twice a day on ordinary days. He would eat a round loaf, a pigeon, a few vegetables, sweets, perhaps goat cheese, and fruit, with butcher's meat instead of small game for Sunday or special occasions, and he would share his plate and cup with his wife. Bread could be made plain or special, for example, with golden raisins. To obtain the healthful benefits of gold, people who couldn't afford gold leaf had to settle for "golden" dishes, such as breaded veal cutlets, or dishes made with egg yolk. Middle class display at feasts had become ostentatious enough to inspire regulation: no more than two or three courses and 25 places at the table were permitted at middle-class wedding celebrations. I don't know if Mona Lisa's wedding to Mr. Gioconda would have been limited this way, or if they were noble enough to celebrate in the more flamboyant way. The rule, in any case, was often ignored.

Although the Renaissance Italians ate meat less frequently than we do, meat dishes seem to have been at least as varied as what we now know, as most meats we now eat were introduced into the New World from the Old (the dog, guinea pig, and insects consumed at Aztec and Inca feasts never caught on with the Europeans — only turkey). Beef was a specialty of the North Italian region, and there were also domestic duck, chicken, sheep, and pigs. Preparations included fois gras, minced fish or meat dishes like quenelles; duck stuffed with herbs and garlic and spit-roasted; veal sautéed with lemon and pistachios; whole calf's head with spices and garlic; chicken livers with giblets, embryo eggs, egg yolks, and lemon juice; and a roast with a sauce of hazelnuts, sugar, and spice. Mona Lisa may also have enjoyed honey used in preparing meats and poultry or game dishes including wild boar, rabbits, and birds. River fish — fresh-water crabs, trout, eels, frogs, and pike — appeared in Tuscan meals, as well as Mediterranean fish and shell-fish. Cheeses included parmesan and fontina, although many cheeses we now know were later inventions.

In 1500, Florentine diners enjoyed melon at the start of a meal. For later courses, fruit dishes and fruits often accompanied meat dishes. Mona Lisa could have tasted cherries, pomegranates, apricots (introduced into Europe by Alexander the Great), oranges (from the Arabs; opinions vary about the arrival date), apples, grapes, plums, and nuts such as pistachios, walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds. Almond milk, made from liquid soaked or pressed from almonds, was a base for many dishes. One contemporary recipe called for cherries with bread crumbs, ginger, and cinnamon. As for vegetables, leek and onion soup was a holdover from Roman times; chick peas and lentils perhaps even more ancient, and in addition, a Tuscan meal could include asparagus, artichokes, broccoli, cabbage, olives and olive oil, mushrooms of many sorts, truffles, eggplant, and chestnuts. Rice grew in the area near Parma, with saffron rice — another "golden" dish — being particularly prized. A dinner could include both wine and beer, which were considered healthful; but drunkenness was discouraged.

Sugar and spice, along with other sweets such as oranges and almonds, were a legacy of the Arabs, who had ruled lands as close as Sicily, where sugar cultivation had recently been introduced into Europe. Spices were a symbol of wealth, both for nobility and merchant classes, and there was a commodities market in spices from many places, particularly India, with fortunes made and lost in the spice trade. Remember, it was spices, particularly black pepper, that motivated Columbus and his backers to search for the new way to the far east. Spices from the East reached Italy first, where they were adapted and passed on to other European courts and merchants. Spices used in Mona Lisa's time included black pepper, rosemary, sage, myrtle, lavender, basil, saffron, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, parsley, anise, fennel, European bay (laurel), and garlic. Spice blends were based on formulas also imported from the East. (The major New World contribution to spice would be peppers — bell peppers, pimentos, chilies, etc.)

Perhaps Mona Lisa ate pie with a sweet crust and a filling of butter, salt pork, roast pigeons, sour-grape juice, saffron, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and pepper, as one contemporary recipe suggests. Many sorts of pies were popular during the Renaissance. At the end of a meal described in 1450, a turnip dish layered with cheese, pepper, and sweet spices was served. Other sweet dishes included "milk" pies, similar to quiches, ices, crepes, butter-thickened sauces, and cheese dishes. And of course those surprise pies in which live birds or rabbits were hiding, in which another edible pie would be included.

Was Mona Lisa's sweet smile an anticipation of sweets to eat? Was she thinking of the spices and sugar that provided the prized flavoring of many Renaissance dishes? Or perhaps, as one writer speculated, Leonardo gave his subjects sugar cubes to suck on while posing. Mona looks too young to be smiling with her lips closed for the reason attributed to Queen Elizabeth I of England 100 years later: tooth decay from all those sweets.

Mona Lisa and her contemporaries shared one type of dish with modern diners. Pasta had been around since the Etruscans, who left a carving illustrating it. A recipe for a pasta dish was published two years prior to the voyage on which Marco Polo is popularly thought to have brought pasta back from China. A preacher at the time criticized people's gluttony by mentioning pasta fried with garlic, and ravioli fried first in one pan, and then with cheese, in another pan. One writer described how cooks wrapped the pasta around an iron dowel to dry, flavoring the dough with rosewater, saffron, sugar, or butter. In Lent pasta was cooked with milk or water; in other times, in broth, with white-flour pasta reserved for the wealthy. Stuffed pasta or filled pasta dishes, especially very sweet ones, were favorites — these included spices, cheese, sugar, and cinnamon. So today's Mona Lisa brand of pasta, which features a medallion with her picture on each box, would at least be a product she would understand.

I conclude that Mona Lisa, as a member of the wealthier class in Florence or nearby, would have eaten a diet that we would find attractive and varied, in spite of containing more sugar than our meals and in spite of missing all the foods yet to be brought from the New World. She shared the excitement of new styles of cooking and new ingredients, mainly of Eastern or Arabic origin, that became popular during the previous century.
Her pizza had no tomato sauce, her ice cream had no chocolate sauce, her breakfast had no corn flakes and no KonaLisa coffee from Hawaii (like my coffee today in the photo), and there was no strawberry jam to put on her bread, but when she went to a banquet, she probably had a lot to smile about anyway.

When I first started to read about Mona Lisa's eating habits, finding early Italian recipes was much more challenging than it is now (I started writing in 1990, and updated this in 2001). A few manuscripts had been discovered, transcribed, and published without experimentation or much commentary; as many as 100 such manuscripts from the 14th and 15th centuries are said to exist. I gather that interest in actually cooking late Medieval food is growing, and I have looked at a number of really interesting popular-style cookbooks derived from these early French and Italian recipe manuscripts — or I've learned about their existence using Amazon.com, a research tool that's also emerged in the years since I began this book. The authors make various accommodation to modern kitchens (as one says, you wouldn't have anywhere to put a whole calf and stuff it with poultry.) Their efforts compare to "the task of unearthing Baroque music years ago," says Georges Duby, the French medievalist, in his introduction to The Medieval Kitchen by Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. ix).



I have posted this essay from my food autobiography, What I ate and Where I Ate It, at the request of my brother. Perhaps I'll post a few other excerpts eventually as well.

The Fruit Table

This is the last post from our trip to Sicily, July, 2007.

Fresh Fish

The fish we ate all tasted fabulously fresh; we knew it was coming in on little day boats in the Mediterranean.
Sardines in many forms are the signature dish of Sicilian cooking -- and can't be duplicted outside of Sicily. I especially liked these sardine balls: ground fish balls in tomato sauce.



Swordfish, snapper, and many other fish both large and small appeared on the hotel buffet, but I was always too immersed in enjoying my meal to photograph them. These photos all are from the restaurants in Palermo.

Aside: Palermitan Pastry in History

In 1686, Francesco Procopio de Coltelli of Palermo, Sicily, founded Le Procope, now the longest-lived cafe/restaurant in Paris. This is considered evidence that the Sicilians, especially the Palermitans, were recognized at that time as experts in sweets, coffee, and gelato. Coffee was just beginning its reign throughout Europe: it had recently come from the East, via the Arabs who were in contact with Ethiopia where the coffee plant had its origin. Now delicious, very strong small cups of espresso are one of the pleasures of visiting the island.

Many delicious desserts are native to Palermo -- I tasted only a very small number of them. Almond paste, jam and jelly, chocolate and vanilla creams, and other delicious substances fill the breakfast pastries. Tartes, cannolis (photo above), semi-freddo (an ice-cream cake, photo below), ice cream-filled brioches, marzipan shaped like fruit or toys, and many other specialties are on offer in Palermo's cafes and dessert shops. Small wineries and liqueur makers produce lemon and almond liqueur, Marsala (from not far away) and other sweet after-dinner alcohols.

The book Bitter Almonds: Recollections and recipes from a Sicilian girlhood, by Mary Taylor Simeti and Maria Grammatico documents the old ways with almond paste made by nuns. The hardships and mistreatment suffered by Maria Grammatico while she lived and learned in the convent make it a very modern story. The ancient tradition of pastry-making and other ways that nuns were exploited make it an old story as well. While Palermitans ate and made such confections, this book documents the shop in Erice where I have been on other trips.

Small Meals

Actually, we had no small meals in Sicily. We didn't choose to eat as much at breakfast and lunch. Here's a picture of the breakfast tray at the hotel in Palermo. I love the Italian rolls and breakfast pastries, though they are really rich, and we couldn't finish what was on the tray. At the hotel, in addition to rolls and pastry, there were buffets of scrambled eggs, bacon, cold meat and cheese, and the fruit selection that was present at every meal.


On the day we walked around in Palermo, we ate an outdoor lunch at a cafe that specialized in light meals and desserts. The smoked beef on mixed greens was very good, as was the roulade of beef with stuffing, served on a skewer and fried in breadcrumbs (at right). After this course, we had tartes -- a very small meal compared to our hotel experiences.

Antepasto Courses in Sicily

First we ate in several restaurants in Palermo, where we tried classics such as fruitti del mare and salad capresi.





At the beach resort, the antepasto was served on a big buffet, and included both hot and cold choices. Each day there were at least three cold dishes including many raw and cooked vegetables, peppers, shellfish, and numerous combinations. I didn't get to try anywhere near every dish -- I'm afraid I missed most of the hot stuffed vegetables as I loved the cold salads too much.

One day, I arranged the long-stemmed artichoke hearts, two types of tomatoes with two types of mozzerella, and so on on my plate for a photo. I also loved the tomato-greenbean-tuna combinations. The olive oil was especially delicious.













At the conference dinner, the buffet included small finger-foods such as olives, warm toasted almonds, filled puff pastry, and other things. At the sit-down part of the meal, we started with two types of smoked fish and some vegetables on a plate. I photographed only a small fraction of the vast number of things we ate: the buffets had new things at every lunch and dinner.

Medicinal Properties of Olive Oil from the Curious Cook

One of my favorite food writers, Harold McGee, has done it again in his newest Curious Cook column in the New York Times. He describes an olive oil tasting, where the tasters often cough, due to an irritant in the oil. He particularly discusses the reaction of Dr. Gary Beauchamp, the director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia:

At the 1999 international workshop on molecular and physical gastronomy, in the mist-shrouded mountain town of Erice, Sicily, the physicists Ugo and Beatrice Palma brought along oil freshly pressed from their own trees. Dr. Beauchamp tasted the oil and felt his throat burn, as did I and all the other attendees. But he was the only one who immediately thought of ibuprofen.

Then McGee reports on some research about what causes people to cough, and how the chemical responsible may prove incredibly valuable. Here are the amazing results:

“The moment I felt that burn from Ugo and Beatrice’s oil, I saw the whole picture in my head....There’s a natural analogue of ibuprofen in olive oil, and it could have anti-inflammatory properties, too.”

He, Dr. Breslin and several collaborators confirmed that the pungent substance in olive oil is a phenolic chemical, which they named oleocanthal. And they showed that oleocanthal is even more effective than ibuprofen at inhibiting enzymes in the body that create inflammation. “It took five years of spare-time unfunded research to prove it, but that was some of the best fun I’ve had doing science,” he said.

In their 2005 report to the journal Nature, the team noted that anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen appear to have long-term health benefits, including reduction in the risk of some forms of heart disease and cancer. They suggested that the oleocanthal in pungent olive oils might be one of the things that make traditional Mediterranean diets so healthful.