http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i46/46a03601.htm
From the issue dated July 22, 2005
NOTES FROM ACADEME
An Italian Scholar's 'Buon Appetito'
By PETER MONAGHAN
Los Angeles
Luigi Ballerini purses his lips in anticipation. Before him here at Il Grano, a toney restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, lies a table heavy with dishes drawn from recipes that date back 500 years. There's cervellatine – pork sausage – and zanzarelli soup, whose name, "little rags," refers to the beaten egg that streaks when dropped into it. There's risotto Napoletano, cooked in fatty broth, and Roman broccoli, a variant of what we today call cauliflower, here minced into a creamy paste.
Mr. Ballerini, an acclaimed poet, translator, art expert, and professor of Italian at the University of California at Los Angeles, also knows his way around the history of Italian cuisine. He peers at envelopes of beef pressed around coriander seeds and grilled, and mutters appreciatively, "Ah, coppiette."
He does add a dry comment about cuisine nouvelle when he notes the lack of enlivening lard within the coppiette's folds that made the appetizer popular in the 15th-century dining room of Cardinal Trevisan, patriarch of Aquileia.
The other dishes, too, deviate from the old recipes, which feature in Mr. Ballerini's latest book, The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book (University of California Press). Their original creator, Maestro Martino of Como, who worked for the cardinal and was very likely the West's first celebrity chef, might have been disappointed, but Mr. Ballerini is not. "Well," he proclaims to about 50 people gathered for this unusual dining experience arranged to celebrate his new book, "Salvatore Marino [who supervises the kitchen at Il Grano] is a chef."
"The past renews itself in the future," Mr. Ballerini elaborates, and then explains, as he does in the introduction to his new volume, the historical context from which cooks like Martino emerged. At a time when show meals had always taken the form of banquets of grandiose proportions, Martino came up with the idea of small, intimate dining soirées for his lofty boss.
Mr. Ballerini, for all the world the stately professor of Italian literature, poised and nattily attired, his graying hair still thick, explains this in – a cardinal's cap.
The headdress transforms him into a fairly convincing stand-in for Trevisan. "Occasionally," he boasts, "I invite a few people over – the pope, Michelangelo, Leonardo, some other humanists." Indeed, Martino's cuisine helped to usher in humanism by filling the bellies of its leading lights.
It did so by other means, too. The chef's De arte coquinaria, which existed in just a handful of manuscripts written in vernacular Italian, was picked up by Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421-81), who by his better-known name, Platina, was a leading figure in early humanism. He paid Martino the compliment of pinching, almost wholesale, all of his recipes, translating them into Italian, and reproducing them with a newfangled invention: the printing press. Platina's book, De honesta voluptare et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health), was distributed throughout Renaissance Europe, the first cookbook to earn the distinct honor of publication.
Although Martino's thunder was stolen, his legacy grew. He was the first chef to specify not just ingredients, but also their proportions, along with cooking times, techniques, and utensils, as he described how to make every sort of sauce, torte, fritter, egg dish, and fish.
He also encouraged the inclusion of fresh vegetables at a time when meat, and lots of it, was preferred. And he is credited with some innovations that became staples of Italian cooking, including battuto, a mixture of sautéed onion, carrot, and celery that serves as a base for savory dishes. Martino developed it to cope with the spice shortage that ensued after the Ottoman Empire took command of the Spice Route to Asia in the mid-15th century – a development that prompted the likes of Christopher Columbus to set sail in exploration.
Of course times, and cooking, have changed much since Martino's day. So, in Mr. Ballerini's edition of the recipes, the inquisitive chef finds not just a host of advice from Martino, but also 50 modernized versions, devised by Stefania Barzini, a cooking educator, food historian, and television journalist for an Italian food channel.
The modern recipes, it must be said, lack some of Martino's wit: "Octopus is a vile fish of little worth; cook it however you wish," is the sum total of his treatment of that foodstuff.
Absent, too, is the flare of the few Martino dishes that bowed to the style of spectacular dining that he sought to transform. To make "flying pie," for example, he instructed cooks to inert a small pie "filled with good stuff" into a much larger, cooked pie shell. Then, just before serving, "put some live birds, as many as it will hold," in the empty space around the small pie. In serving this, "remove the cover above, and the little birds will fly away."
Mr. Ballerini, who grew up in Milan, is something of an accidental food historian. After his father died in World War II his mother went to work, and rarely had time to cook. So, he says, "I grew up eating very bad food." With no culinary role model at home, Mr. Ballerini became the ultimate cooking know-nothing – even today, at 65, he admits that he can barely boil an egg.
Nonetheless, he has gained quite a reputation as an expert on cuisine. He edits a celebrated historical cookbook series in Milan, Cum grano salis (Guido Tommasi Editore). The seven volumes, to date, have included collections of the favorite dishes of Nostradamus and of Richard II, apparently a gourmand as well as possibly mad.
Mr. Ballerini also has served as host of a 12-part television series in Italy, A tavola con la storia (Dining With History), in which he plays an exaggerated, antic version of himself, and he is a contributing editor to the glossy periodical Gastronomica.
More than anything, however, he likes to be acknowledged as a poet. He is the prizewinning author of eight books of experimental verse. Now in production is his extended telling in verse of an infamous 1943 incident in which Italy, granted a truce, abandoned a squadron of troops on the island of Cefalonia to the depradations of far superior German soldiers bent on avenging the Italian surrender. Mr. Ballerini's father was among the many Italians slaughtered.
His next project for the Cum grano salis series, scheduled for next year, is an edition of menus from 10 banquets thrown by the Este family in the north Italian city of Ferrara during the Ren-aissance.
"I really enjoy the conversation that you can draw from the history of food," he says, as four delicious gelati arrive that are decidedly of more modern vintage than Maestro Martino.
Surprising facts, too – such as that Marco Polo did not bring pasta back from China. "I imagine cave people were making pasta in Italy," he says. "Fresh pasta, anyone can make. But dry pasta was the problem. How do you preserve it? That took several centuries. And it happened in Sicily when it was a great civilization with Jews, Muslims, and Christians all living on the island. A Muslim wrote a book for Roger, a Norman king, and there you find the first description of dried pasta. The Arabs had found a way to dry it to the core. Then, it would last forever. You could put it on a ship. That was a major change in the history of navigation and the history of food."
He pauses, licking his lips over a spoonful of saffron gelato. His face seems to say, Thank goodness, too, that the trade in spices flourished throughout the Middle Ages, and that gelato was later invented so that chefs like Marino could concoct delicacies like this.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
