Ludovico loved cheese almost as much as he loved siring children – he had nineteen of them (by the same wife) – and he dispatched Pantaleone to study the subject at a time when cheese had fallen from favour. The prevailing view during the Renaissance was that it was unhealthy. So perhaps the book was Ludovico’s way of arguing for his passion (although sadly the book wasn’t published in his lifetime as he died in 1465). He trusted Pantaleone implicitly to do the job and in his favour the latter had a good reputation as a man to be taken seriously on matters of health. Not only was he a professor of medicine, but he had also, while travelling around with his boss in 1464, apparently found a cure for a friend of the King of France, a General Nicolas Tigland, who had been declared incurable by doctors. History does not record what he suffered from, or how Pantaleone cured him, but his reputation soared as a result. Maybe he got him eating cheese.
In the course of his research, Pantaleone visited markets and cheese producers; he questioned those he met about methods of cheese-making, thought long and hard about flavour and texture, and in his book presents a strong case in favour of his subject. The prevailing view may have been that cheese wasn’t good for you but, he claimed, he had met ‘kings, dukes, counts, marquises, barons, soldiers, nobles and merchants’ all of whom regularly consumed and loved cheese.
His book begins with a description of the different types of milk used to make cheese, reflecting on the different ages and breeds of animals used – whether cows, goats or sheep – and the variety of places and climates that cheese is made in. He explains the different shapes it comes in, that you can buy cheese with holes in, for instance, and that some have crusty edges. And he goes on to detail all the cheeses he has discovered. The list is impressive: there are cheeses from France and Switzerland, there are Flemish cheeses and British varieties – the latter discovered not by crossing the Channel, but in a market in Antwerp. They are, he says, as good as the best to be found in Italy. The German types of cheese he has less time for, however – they are mediocris saporis (of unexceptional flavour). Of those he champions in his home country, which include Robiola from Piedmont and a variety from the Aosta Valley, he particularly likes Piacenza Parma, a Parmesan-style cheese.
Panteleone explains how cheese can be good for your health, which type would suit your age, how you should eat it and, interestingly, which cheese you should eat to match your temperament. There is much more going for cheese than just taste, he argues, and it is eminently practical: ‘Cheese is eaten after lunch, or gluttony, to remove the greasiness which remains in the teeth after chewing meat fat, or to remove any taste in the mouth after other foods.’ He glories in its qualities as a palate cleanser and bemoans that so many people spurn it. ‘I grieve at the thought of living in an era when I, a great eater of cheese, should refrain,’ he writes.
To his great consolation he discovered that cheese-making was flourishing across Europe. Producers were pooling their efforts and creating co-operatives. The product was clearly developing well from its ancient origins.
No one can pinpoint when cheese into being, although as cheese came into being, although as cheese historian Andrew Dalby says, ‘It was surely no momentous event.’ As milk curdles quite quickly if not kept cool, it can’t have been long after man (Neolithic, around 7000 BC) started to keep domesticated animals for milk that he discovered cheese.
We can imagine the scene. An Arab nomad jogs through the desert one warm sunny day. Over his shoulder he carries some milk in a container made of animal stomach. Reacting to the rennet in the stomach lining, the milk quickly curdles. Then, when our nomad pauses for a swig, he finds there are white lumps (curds) in the mixture. It might not refresh him, but he likes the taste. Thus cheese is born.
Given that, naturally, milk would be seasonal, cheese becomes the way to store and consume it and its valuable nutrients. Historians describe the discovery of cheese as part of the ‘secondary products revolution’, which marks the time before which animals were just used for their meat, bones and hide.
By the time Pantaleone was writing, cheese-making had become sophisticated, as had its consumption. He champions cheese made in the Aosta Valley as being particularly good when cooked. ‘It becomes stringy,’ he says, no doubt having enjoyed a good fondue. In fact cheese-makers from the region still quote his recommendation of their cheese when publicising it today.
He also discovers cheeses in Piedmont that are ideal for those on a tight budget. These have ‘a spicy flavour, so much so it is said they are useful to the poor; firstly, because of their hot flavour, they eat very little of it’. It’s not a very right-on argument but he redeems himself a little as he continues: ‘Secondly, it is said to be useful to the poor because in the dishes prepared by them, thanks to the sharp taste of the cheeses, there is no need for spices and salt.’
Pantaleone was a pioneer of taste. He encouraged a more sophisticated view of food and demonstrated how writing about a specific foodstuff could be used to encapsulate ideas on the economy, well-being and culture. His enthusiasm still encourages one to sniff out a good Brie or cook up some Gouda in a cheesy tart. For my money he’s up there with Aquinas.
1465
AUTHOR: Martino de Rossi
FROM: Libro de arte coquinaria (Book on the Art of Cooking)
To make ten servings: take a half libra of aged cheese, and a little fatty cheese and a libra of fatty pork belly or veal teat, and boil until it comes apart easily; then chop well and take some good, well-chopped herbs, and pepper, cloves, and ginger; and it would be even better if you added some ground capon breast; incorporate all these things together.
Then make a thin sheet of pasta and encase the mixture in the pasta, as for other ravioli. These ravioli should not be larger than half a chestnut; cook them in capon broth, or good meat broth that you have made yellow with saffron when it boils. Let the ravioli simmer for the time it takes to say two Lord’s Prayers.
For centuries Martino de Rossi played a bit part in culinary history. He was the man who’d got a mention, albeit a very flattering one, in a seminal cookbook published in 1475. Its author was Bartolomeo de Sacchi, a writer and humanist who lived and worked in Rome and went by the name of Platina. His work, De honesta voluptate et valitudine (‘On Honourable Pleasure and Health’), was credited with dragging cooking from the medieval dark ages to the enlightened Renaissance. With its 250 recipes it was revolutionary in everything from ingredients to techniques. His recipes heralded not just the birth of modern Italian cooking, but it was the first printed cookbook, it enjoyed wide distribution and was translated into at least four European languages.
As Platina lapped up the praise and adulation, he spares a thought for the man who, he says, inspired his recipe writing. ‘What a cook, oh immortal gods, you bestowed in my friend Martino of Como,’ he writes of the man he describes as the ‘Prince of cooks, from whom I learned all abut cooking’.
And that’s it. We hear no more of Martino, who he was, where he lived, when he lived, who he worked for and whether he himself published any recipes. The man disappears from the culinary radar. That is until 1927 when a studious German-American chef, hotelier and scholar, one Joseph Dommers Vehling, comes across an ancient manuscript owned by an antiquarian bookseller in Italy. The author’s name catches his eye and he buys the handwritten manuscript with the title Libro de arte coquinaria, or ‘Book on the Art of Cooking’. Having got his hands on it, he begins to translate the Italian