A Dinner in the Alban Hills, 1463 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac, Issue Two

michel1492
2 days ago
19 min read

From the private library of The Spicekeeper Oak City Spice Blends · History in Every Seasoning

The road up from Rome climbs all afternoon. By the time our party reaches the cardinal's villa above Albano, the worst of the city heat has fallen away behind us, and the air off Lake Albano carries a coolness that the whole of Rome would envy in June. I am here as the least of Cardinal Gonzaga's people, which is to say I am here to carry things, to stand where I am told, and to keep my eyes open. Tonight that last duty will repay me more than I know. At the table I am seated near two men I have been told to remember: a sharp-tongued scholar lately raised out of poverty, and a cook the whole peninsula calls a prince.

The Year

In 1463, Italy was not yet a country but a contest. The peninsula was divided among rival powers who spent as much on display as on armies, because in this world the two were nearly the same thing. A great household's table was a theater of power, and the men who could stage the finest performance of abundance held a kind of authority that no treaty could grant them.

This issue sets a single summer supper on that stage, at the country villa of one of the most powerful and luxurious churchmen in Rome. It is the meal, or very near to it, where the first printed cookbook of the Western tradition quietly began. Two men met at this table. One had spent his life perfecting the art of cooking. The other was about to do something no one had done before: take that art, wrap it in the learning of the ancient world, and hand it to a printing press.

What follows is what a guest at that table might have seen, eaten, and overheard, reconstructed from the people who were genuinely there and the food they genuinely made.

The Hills Above Rome

A great Roman household did not stay in Rome through high summer if it could help it. The city in July was hot, crowded, and unhealthy, and so the cardinals withdrew to the hills for what they called ricreatione, a season of rest in cooler country air. The Alban Hills southeast of the city, studded with lakes that fill the craters of dead volcanoes, were the favored retreat, and Albano was at the heart of them.

Our host kept a villa there, and a villa in this period was not a farmhouse but a statement. It was where a powerful man went to be powerful at leisure, to receive guests, conduct quiet business, and set a table away from the formal weight of the city. The coolness was real and the comfort was real, but so was the message: a man who could maintain a second great household in the hills, staffed and provisioned and ready to feast visitors at a day's notice, was a man of serious means.

I had expected a country house. What I found was a court that had simply moved uphill for the summer. The same silver, the same servants, the same careful order of who stands where, only now with a view of the lake and a breeze that smells of pine instead of the river.

The Host They Called Lucullus

The villa belonged to Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, and to understand the table you must first understand the man who set it.

Trevisan was born in Padua around 1401, the son of a doctor of medicine, and trained in medicine himself before the Church and the battlefield claimed him. He rose to become Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church, the official who managed the papacy's property and finances, and Patriarch of Aquileia, and he commanded the papal army and navy in the field. He was, by every account, more soldier than priest, a war-cardinal who had brought thousands of men to the great Battle of Anghiari decades earlier.

By the 1460s he was famous across Rome for three things: his fortune, his luxury, and his splendor. His contemporaries nicknamed him Lucullus, after the ancient Roman general whose banquets were so extravagant that his name became a byword for luxurious dining that has survived into our own word, lucullan. The nickname was not entirely a compliment, but Trevisan seems not to have minded.

His Roman residence gives the measure of him. He kept a private menagerie of curiosities, white asses, Indian hens, lapdogs, and goldfinches among them, and cultivated rare varieties of fruit obtained through a network of friends and specialist suppliers. One modern historian compared his household to a Renaissance Hearst Castle, a private kingdom of collected wonders. This was the man who decided what arrived on the table the night our party came up from Rome, and he was not a man who did anything by halves.

The cardinal carries himself like a general who has been told he may now relax, which is to say not very much. He misses nothing. When a dish arrives he looks at it the way I have seen captains look at troops on review, judging whether it does him credit. Mostly, tonight, it does.

The Prince of Cooks

The food itself came from a man whose name almost no one outside a few kitchens would have known a generation earlier, and whom much of Europe would know within a decade: Maestro Martino.

Martino was born around 1430 in the Blenio Valley, a mountain valley in what is now the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland but was then within the orbit of Milan. He learned his craft, by one account, cooking for travelers at a mountain hospice, feeding the pilgrims and merchants and minor nobles who passed through on the road between north and south. From those modest beginnings he rose to cook for the Sforza court in Milan, the ruling family of one of Italy's great powers, and from there he came to Rome to run the kitchens of Cardinal Trevisan

His peers called him the prince of cooks, and he has one of the strongest claims to being the first celebrity chef of the Western culinary tradition, a cook famous as himself, for his own skill, rather than merely as the anonymous hand behind a great lord's table. What set him apart was not only taste but clarity. In an age when recipes were often vague, assuming you already knew what you were doing, Martino actually named his ingredients and explained his techniques in a way a reader could follow. He had written these down in a manuscript, the Libro de arte coquinaria, the Book on the Art of Cooking.

The scholar seated near me that night would later describe Martino in print, in terms a cook is rarely given. He called him the prince of cooks, the man from whom he had learned everything about cooking, and compared his ability to improvise on a culinary theme to the work of a Greek philosopher. High praise, from a man who did not hand out praise freely, as the Pope would one day learn.

The cook does not sit as we do. He comes and goes from the kitchen, and when he appears at the edge of the room he watches the faces at the table rather than the food, reading whether the thing has landed. Once, when a dish drew a murmur, I saw him allow himself the smallest nod, the way a craftsman does when the joint fits.

The Scholar

The third man at the heart of this story was the one I had been told most particularly to remember, though in 1463 he was not yet famous and not yet in danger.

Bartolomeo Sacchi, called Platina after Piadena, the town near Cremona where he was born in 1421, had not had an easy road to this table. He was born poor, into a family that regarded scholarly ambition as a kind of madness, and so as a young man he had done the practical thing and become a soldier, a mercenary in the pay of the warlords who fought Italy's endless small wars. He may well have been present at that same Battle of Anghiari, on the field somewhere below the cardinal who now hosted him.

But Platina wanted the life of the mind, and step by step he got it. He tutored the sons of the powerful Gonzaga family, studied Greek in Florence, fell in with the humanists, the scholars devoted to reviving the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, and through the patronage of Cardinal Gonzaga he was carried into the orbit of the greatest households in Rome, including this one. He had recently purchased a prestigious post among the papal writers. In the summer of 1463 he was a man on the rise, hopeful, well-connected, and as yet untouched by the catastrophe waiting a few years ahead.

Many historians believe it was during Trevisan's circle, and possibly during a gathering much like this one, that Martino placed his manuscript in Platina's hands. That single act, a working cook handing his life's knowledge to a scholar with connections and ambition, is the hinge on which this entire issue turns.

The scholar talks more than the cardinal and listens harder than either. He asks the cook questions that the rest of us would never think to ask, not whether a dish is good but why it is made the way it is made, what the ancients would have said of it, what it does to the body of the man who eats it. The cook answers plainly. I have the sense of watching two trades meet and recognize one another.

The Book That Was Beginning

What Platina did with Martino's manuscript would change the history of the kitchen.

Within two years, by about 1465, he had written a book of his own called De honesta voluptate et valetudine, On Right Pleasure and Good Health. Around 1474 it came off a printing press, only about two decades after the Gutenberg Bible had shown Europe what printing could do. It is generally recognized as the first printed cookbook of the Western tradition, and the first cookbook ever set in movable type.

That phrasing is deliberate, because the fuller truth is more interesting than the headline. Platina's book was not the first printed cookbook anywhere on earth. Half a world away, in Song dynasty China, woodblock printing was already advanced enough by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that even minor scholars could publish small works, and recipe collections were among them. A Chinese cook's notes could be printed and circulated roughly two centuries before an Italian one. What Platina's book holds is a narrower and still remarkable distinction: the first cookbook of the European tradition to escape the hand-copied manuscript and enter print, carried by the new movable-type press that would soon reshape the whole of Western knowledge.

The distinction matters more than it might seem. Before printing, a cookbook was a manuscript, copied by hand, expensive, and locked inside the household wealthy enough to own it.

Knowledge of how the great tables of Italy actually cooked was a closely held thing. Printing broke that open. Platina's book ran into dozens of editions and was translated into Italian, French, and German, carrying Roman and Italian ideas about fine dining out across the whole of Europe. For the first time, the way a cardinal's kitchen worked could sit on a shelf in a city the cardinal had never visited.

Here we should be honest about what kind of book it was, because the honest version is the better story. The great majority of the recipes in Platina's book were Martino's, taken more or less directly from the manuscript he had been given. Some scholars have put the figure as high as ninety-five percent and called it, bluntly, a cannibalization of the earlier work. But Platina did something a true plagiarist does not do: he named Martino in the text, and praised him lavishly, in the passages quoted above. What Platina added was not the cooking but the frame around it, the classical learning, the philosophy, the theory of health, the argument for why any of this deserved a thinking person's attention. Martino supplied the hands. Platina supplied the voice that could carry those hands into print and into history.

It is fairer, then, to call it a partnership than a theft, even if it was an unequal one. The prince of cooks made the food. The scholar made the food matter to people who would never taste it.

Honest Pleasure

The title of Platina's book contains a small revolution, and it sits in one word: voluptate, pleasure.

In a culture still deeply medieval in its instincts, bodily pleasure was suspect, something to be disciplined rather than enjoyed. To put pleasure in the title of a book and call it honorable, honesta, was to make a quietly radical claim: that taking real delight in good food was not a sin to be confessed but a legitimate part of a well-lived life. Platina was careful, and his care is the whole point. The pleasure he defended was not gluttony. It was pleasure bound to moderation, to temperance, to health. Eating well, in his argument, meant eating in a way that delighted you and sustained you at once, and the two were not enemies.

This is almost the opposite of how we use the word pleasure now. For Platina, the pleasure of the table was inseparable from good health and right living. A meal taken with knowledge and restraint was a kind of philosophy you could chew. It is an idea that would have sounded strange to a stern medieval moralist and sounds surprisingly modern to us, and it is the reason a book of recipes became, in its own century, something close to a bestseller.

Listening to the scholar, I begin to understand that to him this supper is not indulgence. He would call it the opposite. A man who knows what he eats, and why, and stops at the right point, is to his mind a better man than one who fasts out of fear or gorges out of appetite. I am not sure the cardinal has ever thought about it so hard. But I notice the cardinal does stop at the right point.

Food as Medicine

If pleasure was the soul of Platina's book, the body of it was medicine, and the medicine of 1463 ran on a theory that had governed European and Mediterranean thinking for well over a thousand years.

The idea was the four humors. Health was understood as a balance among four fluids in the body, blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, and illness was what happened when that balance was disturbed. Every food, in turn, was classified by its qualities along two axes, hot or cold and wet or dry. Pepper was hot and dry. Lettuce was cold and wet. A skilled cook, in this understanding, was doing something very close to a physician's work: choosing and combining ingredients to keep the diner's humors in balance, and adjusting the seasoning of a dish partly to correct its own nature.

This is why a Renaissance cookbook reads, to modern eyes, like a strange blend of kitchen and pharmacy. When Platina recommends an ingredient he very often tells you what it does to the body, drawing on Greek, Roman, and Arabic dietary medicine, including the principle of the great Persian physician known to the West as Rhazes, that one should heal with food before reaching for medicine. He warns, for instance, that sugar can stir up choler, the hot and volatile humor, in people already inclined that way, and so should be balanced with cooling and moistening things rather than piled on without thought.

It is easy to smile at the four humors now, and the specific theory was wrong. But the instinct underneath it was not foolish at all. The cook who asks why this spice belongs with this food, what it does once it is inside you, and how to keep a rich dish from overwhelming the person eating it, is asking exactly the questions a thoughtful cook still asks. The framework has changed. The discipline of pairing with a reason, rather than by habit, is the same one a good kitchen runs on today.

The cook and the scholar do not always agree. The scholar speaks of what the ancients wrote; the cook speaks of what happens in the pan. When they differ, the cook usually wins, and the scholar, to his credit, lets him. I get the feeling the book forming in the scholar's mind will carry both voices, the old authorities and the working kitchen, and that this is exactly why it will be worth reading.

The Gathering Storm

What gives this supper its particular poignancy is something none of us at the table could fully see: how little time was left for this exact gathering of people and fortunes.

In the summer of 1463, the humanists were riding high. The reigning pope, Pius II, was himself a man of humanist sympathies, and scholars like Platina could expect their learning to be a path to advancement. But Pius was old, and would die the following year. His successor, Paul II, had no patience for humanist culture at all. He regarded the learned circle Platina belonged to with suspicion bordering on contempt, viewing such men as little better than reborn pagans and moral degenerates. One of his early acts would be to abolish the College of Abbreviators, the body of papal writers Platina had paid to join, stripping him of his post and his income at a stroke.

Worse was coming. Within five years Platina would be arrested, imprisoned in the fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo, and interrogated under torture, swept up with the rest of his humanist circle on charges that the group had plotted to assassinate Paul II. The conspiracy charge was eventually dropped for lack of evidence, but the message had been delivered: in this Rome, scholarship could put you on the rack.

And our host? Cardinal Trevisan, Lucullus of the hills, master of this table, would be dead by March of 1465, less than two years after the night we share his food. The cook would move on to other patrons. The scholar would survive his imprisonment and, years later, take his revenge in the most lasting way a writer can, by composing a history of the popes that painted his tormentor Paul II as a cruel enemy of learning, a portrait that shaped the dead pope's reputation for centuries. Platina would end his days as the first librarian of the Vatican Library, his fortunes restored by a friendlier pope.

But all of that is still to come. Tonight the cardinal is alive and expansive, the cook is at the height of his art, the scholar is hopeful and unbroken, and the lake breeze is cool. We are sitting, though we do not know it, in the last of a particular kind of sunlight.

I will think of this evening often in the years after, when the news from Rome turns dark. The scholar in a cell. The old cardinal in his tomb. But on this night the candles are lit, the dishes keep coming up from the kitchen, and the three of them talk late, a soldier-turned-scholar, a mountain boy turned prince of cooks, and a churchman who feasts like an emperor, none of them yet undone.

The Table

What did we actually eat?

The honest answer is that no one wrote down the menu of this particular supper. But we know a great deal about what Maestro Martino cooked, because his recipes survive in his own manuscript and in Platina's book, and we know what the season and the region offered. Two dishes below are reconstructions in that spirit: not transcriptions of one recorded meal, but faithful representatives of the food this cook made for this kind of table, in this corner of Italy, at this time of year.

Editor's Note: The blancmange below carries Platina's authentic Latin title, Cibarium album, with the recipe itself given in English translation from his De honesta voluptate et valetudine, Book VI. We have not reproduced the full Latin passage here, since we would rather give you the verified translation than an unverified transcription. The herb torte is a faithful representative of the period's green-torte tradition rather than a single transcribed recipe. Neither is presented as the recorded menu of this particular supper, which was never written down; both reflect genuine fifteenth-century Italian dishes from Martino's and Platina's kitchens.

The Showpiece: Biancomangiare

If Martino had a signature, this was it. Biancomangiare, literally white dish, was the prestige centerpiece of fifteenth-century Italian cooking, and Martino was famous for it. Platina gives it under its Latin name, Cibarium album, the white dish, noting that it could also be called by the Greek-derived leucophagum, white food. It was prized above almost everything else, partly for its delicacy and partly for the sheer labor and cost it advertised.

Here is Platina's recipe, translated from the Latin of his own book:

The white dish, which is more properly called leucophagum, you prepare this way for twelve guests. Soak two pounds of almonds overnight in water, skin them, and pound them well in a mortar, sprinkling in a little water so they do not turn to oil. Then grind in the boned breast of a capon, and add bread crust first softened in verjuice. Besides this, put in an ounce of ginger and half a pound of sugar. Mix it all together, pass it through a sifter into a clean pot, and let it cook gently over a low fire, stirring often so it does not stick to the pot. Platina, De honesta voluptate et valetudine, Book VI

It was, above all, an exercise in whiteness, and the whiteness itself was the luxury. White ingredients were costly, and a cook who could produce a dish of flawless pallor was showing off both his pantry and his control. A cook might tint half the batch gold with saffron and serve it beside the white, turning the plate into a small theater of status. Sugar, here as in our first issue's London, was treated as a spice and a marker of wealth rather than a mere sweetener. Platina himself made the point plainly: no meat, he wrote, is spoiled by sugar.

It is in praising this very dish that Platina pays his most generous debt to the cook at our table, setting Martino's cooking above the kitchens of antiquity and naming him, in print, as the master from whom he learned. The signature dish and the open acknowledgment of where it came from belong to the same part of the book.

The Counterpoint: A Renaissance Herb Torte

Against the pale richness of the biancomangiare, the cook would have set something brighter and greener. Martino and Platina both devote real attention to vegetable and herb dishes, and Platina's interest in vegetables was one of the genuinely original threads of his book, reflecting the humanist admiration for simple, healthful country food.

A savory herb torte, a baked tart of greens and fresh herbs bound with eggs and cheese, belongs squarely to this tradition. Unlike the blancmange above, this is not a single recipe we can quote from one passage of Platina's book. It is a faithful representative of a whole family of green tortes and herb dishes found across Martino's and Platina's pages, rather than a transcription of one named entry, and we present it in that spirit. Where the white dish was an aristocrat's showpiece, the herb torte spoke to the other half of Platina's philosophy: that good health came as much from the green, growing things of the garden as from the luxury of the spice chest. On a hot June evening in the Alban Hills, with the cardinal's own cultivated produce close at hand, a fragrant herb torte would have been exactly the kind of dish to balance the table, in flavor and, to the fifteenth-century mind, in the humors of the men eating it.

Cook It Tonight

Two modern versions of dishes from this table, built around Oak City Spice Blends that echo the same flavor logic as the originals.

Renaissance White Almond Chicken (Biancomangiare)

Inspired by Maestro Martino's signature dish

A modern, dinner-friendly take on the prince of cooks' most famous creation. The historical dish was closer to a thick, spiced almond-and-capon pudding; this version keeps its soul, almond, chicken, ginger, and warm sweet spice, in a form built for a weeknight table.

Bloom Classification: Gentle Bloom (Low Heat, Almond Broth)

Why the Bloom Works: Warm spices release their aromatic oils differently in liquid than when simply sprinkled on top. Warming the Franconia blend in the almond and broth mixture allows those oils to disperse evenly throughout the dish rather than sitting on the surface, which is exactly the effect the original slow-cooked method achieved over a low fire.

Ingredients

1 lb boneless skinless chicken breast (450 g)
1 cup blanched almond flour (96 g)
1 cup unsweetened almond milk (240 ml)
1 cup chicken broth (240 ml)
2 tsp Oak City Spice Blends 14th c. Franconia Sweet Blend (4 g)
1 Tbsp honey (21 g)
1 Tbsp verjuice or white wine vinegar (15 ml)
1/2 tsp salt (3 g)
Pinch saffron threads, optional, for a golden half (0.1 g)

Method

Poach the chicken breast gently in the chicken broth over low heat until cooked through, about 15 minutes. Do not boil hard, since the goal is tender, pale meat.
Remove the chicken, reserve the broth, and either finely shred the meat or pulse it briefly in a food processor for a smoother, more historical texture.
In a saucepan over low heat, combine the almond flour, almond milk, and reserved broth. Whisk steadily until smooth and beginning to thicken.
Stir in the shredded chicken, honey, verjuice, salt, and the 14th c. Franconia Sweet Blend.
Simmer gently, stirring often so it does not catch, until the mixture is thick, creamy, and fragrant, about 10 to 15 minutes.
For the traditional two-color presentation, divide the dish and steep a pinch of saffron into one half until it turns gold, then serve the white and the gold side by side.
Serve warm, on its own or over plain rice.

Historical Note

The 14th c. Franconia Sweet Blend carries allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, coriander, ginger, nutmeg, and orange peel, the warm aromatic register at the heart of this style of cooking. Ginger is the spice Martino's biancomangiare names directly, and the blend's orange peel nods to the Mediterranean brightness of an Italian table rather than an English one. Where our first issue's London kitchen reached for Poudre Douce, Renaissance Rome reaches for Franconia: the same family of warm sweet spice, one country and one century along.

Renaissance Herb and Greens Torte

Inspired by the vegetable cookery Platina admired

A savory baked tart of greens, herbs, and cheese, the green counterpoint to the white dish, and a taste of the garden-forward cooking Platina championed as the healthful heart of a good table.

Ingredients

1 lb fresh spinach or chard, washed and chopped (450 g)
4 large eggs
1 cup ricotta cheese (250 g)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan (50 g)
1 Tbsp Oak City Spice Blends La Spezia Italy (6 g)
1/4 tsp salt (1.5 g)
1 prepared pie crust or pastry shell, optional
1 Tbsp olive oil (15 ml)

Method

Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C).
Wilt the greens in a large pan with the olive oil over medium heat until soft, then let cool and squeeze out excess moisture.
In a bowl, beat the eggs, then stir in the ricotta, Parmesan, salt, and the La Spezia Italy blend.
Fold the cooled greens into the egg and cheese mixture until evenly combined.
Pour into the prepared crust for a classic torte, or into a greased baking dish for a lighter, crustless version.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until set in the center and lightly golden on top.
Let rest for 10 minutes before slicing. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Historical Note

La Spezia Italy brings together basil, garlic, marjoram, oregano, rosemary, and thyme, the clean herbal backbone of Ligurian and Italian cooking. Fresh herbs and garden greens were exactly the foods Platina praised for their healthful simplicity, a deliberate contrast to the costly white showpiece. Served together, the two dishes stage the same balance Platina argued for in his book: luxury and restraint, richness and green freshness, pleasure and health on one table.

A Note from The Spicekeeper

Two issues in, I find myself drawn to the same quiet thing each time: the moment a piece of knowledge nearly slipped away and someone, almost by accident, saved it. In our first issue it was a working cook in Richard II's kitchen writing recipes down because he needed to remember them. Here it is a cook handing his life's work to a scholar in a cool villa above Rome, on a summer evening neither of them marked as important, and that scholar carrying it to a printing press that would outlast them both.

Maestro Martino made the food. Platina made it last. Between them they gave us the first cookbook that could travel, and the radical, sensible idea that eating well and living well are the same art practiced with attention. Five hundred and sixty years later, that is still the whole of it. Cook with knowledge. Stop at the right point. Take honest pleasure in it.

From the private library of The Spicekeeper Oak City Spice Blends · History in Every Seasoning