Vehling finally wrote up his findings in October 1932 in the publication Hotel Bulletin and the Nation’s Chefs and in it he brought to light his most astonishing revelation. Martino didn’t just influence Platina’s book; all but ten of Platina’s 250 recipes were his, word for word. The other ten, incidentally, being those of Apicius. On Vehling’s death in 1950, the manuscript was gifted to the Library of Congress in Washington, where it still resides.
Scholars, who had wondered exactly how it was that a man whose main job was writing papal briefs came to know so much about cooking, now had their answer. Was Platina simply the biggest recipe plagiariser of all time?
Meanwhile, from Martino’s own writings we now know a little bit more about the man himself. His recipes show a degree of Spanish influence, he cooked for a time for a family in Milan, and then moved to Rome where his employer was Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, a powerful and high-ranking Catholic prelate whose name is cited on the book’s title page.
But it is the recipes themselves that are revolutionary. Until this point, as we have seen, cookbooks worked more as aides-memoires for experienced chefs. They listed the ingredients needed for particular dishes and recorded extravagant banquets and feasts. Many were highly illuminating, culturally, but in practical terms at the low end of the helpful scale. Martino’s book is different, however. Not only does he give actual quantities, he provides cooking times for the reader.
Take his recipe for game consommé, for example. He mentions ‘an ounce of salt cured meat, 40 crushed peppercorns … three or four garlic cloves, five or six sage leaves torn into three pieces each … two sprigs of laurel …’ And, at last, the bit we’ve been waiting for since the dawn of time: ‘let it simmer in the pot for seven hours’. When it comes to the minutiae of minutes, he is helpful but is reluctant to throw himself totally into the modern world. His favoured method of referring to two minutes, for example, being ‘the time it takes to say two Lord’s Prayers’. But given what had gone before, that was pretty useful even so.
Likewise he brings a little colour to his description of techniques. In a recipe for a ‘dainty broth with game’, he adds ‘a generous amount of lard that has been cut up into small pieces like playing dice’. Likewise in making pie with deer or roebuck, he instructs you to ‘first cut the meat into pieces the size of your fist’.
Yet his recipes are more than just useful. There are new techniques (he shows how egg can be used to clarify jelly, for instance), his recipes for pastry are all edible, he uses shorter cooking times, promotes the natural taste of food and adds considerable degrees of subtlety to cookery in general. He understands that one drop of olive oil can add flavour, two can ruin the dish. Garlic is ‘well crushed’; before it was always ‘roughly’ or ‘finely’ chopped. A pedantic detail, perhaps, but one that good cooks will understand. He uses sugar not just to season dishes but to make them properly sweet. He also cooks vegetables al dente. In his recipe for ‘Roman broccoli’ he removes the vegetable from the pot when it is ‘half cooked’, at which point he adds a few knobs of chopped lard and finishes it back on the heat, using some of the retained water, for just ‘a short time’.
Octavo Corp and The Library of Congress
The first book to mention actual quantities and cooking times in the recipes as well as useful techniques, the Libro de arte coquinaria was groundbreaking as the first printed cookbook.
Gone were the peasant days of boiling veg to the point of mush. It took until my parents’ generation in the 1970s to start all that again. In fact he actually introduced vegetables to the nobility that he worked for, demonstrating that although they might be the food of peasants they could very respectfully appear alongside the meat dishes of the rich.
Even so, Martino can’t resist a nod to the trickery and extravagance of the grand banquet. There’s a recipe for ‘How to dress a peacock with all its feathers, so that, when cooked, it appears to be alive and spews fire from its beak’ (using camphor and cotton wool soaked in alcohol). But his instinct was towards smaller, more convivial dinners, while the fashionable prevailing wind was still for showy feasts. His recipes cater for much smaller numbers. So one could also make the claim that Martino invented the dinner party.
With his recipes for sauces, tortes, fritters, eggs and other dishes he fused traditional ingredients with more modern produce. His cuisine was a fusion of two eras that brought cooking closer to the modern world.
But what of Platina? Should he be cast aside for fraudulence? The answer is actually no. Because, were it not for him, Martino’s ideas might have remained in oblivion. By translating his work into Latin and publishing the first ever printed cookbook, Platina ensured these new ideas rightly reached a wide audience. Platina also added an introduction and a chapter on diet and health. Good food was, he argued, not just about decadence and gluttony. His book would ‘assist the well-bred man who desires to be healthy and to eat in a decorous way’. It was not aimed at one who ‘searches after luxury and extravagance’.
Platina’s own life was not without discomfort. One might have though that writing papal briefs would keep him out of trouble. But Platina was a man with opinions and in 1464 he had a row with Pope Paul II, who slung him into the prison of the vast Castal Sant’Angelo, built originally by Emperor Hadrian as a family mausoleum. ‘It was probably the worst dungeon you can imagine,’ says a current Vatican curator. A sixteenth-century inmate, the artist Benvenuto Cellini, went further, recalling how his cell would ‘swell with water and was full of big spiders and many venomous worms’, while his hemp mattress ‘soaked up water like a sponge’.
When Platina was released one might have thought he’d play it safe to avoid more such discomfort. But he got into trouble soon after, this time charged with conspiracy to assassinate the pope. Lack of evidence led to another release and he then tried a better tack, which was to write a flattering Lives of the Popes. This did the trick. Not only did he stay out of trouble, but he was ennobled by Pope Sixtus IV with an appointment as prefect of the Vatican Library, an event immortalised in a painting by Melozzo da Forli which can be seen in the Pinacoteca Vaticana museum.
Perhaps it was his time in jail that got Platina thinking about food. Perhaps while he dreamed of the dishes he had enjoyed as a free man and recalled his friendship with Martino, he vowed to commit his passion for food to publishing a book about it. Immediately after his second release, he set about translating Martino’s work from Italian to Latin, organising the recipes into fast-day and feast-day dishes and adding the extra chapters and the Apicius recipes.
The book was a quick success, although Platina was not without his detractors. One contemporary writer, Giovanni Antonio Campano, commented how his ‘mouth was full of leeks and his breath reeked of onions’. At least it shows Platina took his food seriously.
Born into a poor family in 1421 in the humid Padanian plains of Italy, he had worked his way up to the higher echelons of Italian society. Without his work the world could have been bereft of the recipes of Maestro Martino, be it his exquisite veal cutlets which ‘should not be overcooked’ or his macaroni or ravioli dishes. The latter delicious, especially if you’re mindful not to cook the pasta any longer than a couple of Our Fathers. Platina might have pinched his food mentor’s recipes, but isn’t that what every good cook does?
1500
AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: This Boke of Cokery
To bake quinces take iii or iiii quinces and payre them pyke out their cores and fill them full of good syrup made of clarry or of wast pouders and sugre then lette them in coffins and hyle them and back them and serve them.
Now you might well think that one Boke of Kokery must be much like another Boke of Cokery. But there are fundamental differences and not just that a period of sixty