The Cook's Last Tables: Rome, 1527 - The Spicekeeper's Almanac — Issue Three

michel1492
Jun 24
14 min read

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

The Swiss Guard, the cooks who fed them, and the city that fell around them both

I. ARRIVAL

The first time I cooked for the Swiss, I did not know what they were.

They came up the via in January, the year the world still called 1506, and the cold came with them. Men the size of doorframes, smelling of wet wool and the mountains, speaking a German so hard and high it sounded like stones knocking together. A hundred and fifty of them, sent for by the Pope himself. Julius wanted soldiers who would not run. He had heard the Swiss did not run.

I was young then, and the kitchen near the Apostolic Palace was not yet mine. I was told only: feed them, they have crossed the Alps in the dead of winter. So I did the thing a Roman cook does when he wants to say welcome without words. I made them meat with warm spices of cinnamon, clove, ginger, a little nutmeg, and the orange peel I kept back for special occations, all of it bloomed in fat until the whole kitchen smelled like feast day at the cardinal's house.

I thought it would be strange to them. It was not. One of the big men closed his eyes over the bowl and said something to the others, and they laughed, and he pointed at the dish and then at his own chest, far away, north. I understood him. They had this too, up in their mountains: the sweet spice on meat, the prestige of it, the smell that means someone cared enough to spend. We did not share a tongue. We shared a chord.

Why the Swiss

The papal alliance with the Swiss did not begin on a whim. As early as 1478, Pope Sixtus IV had struck an arrangement with the Swiss Confederacy to hire its soldiers when the need arose. The Swiss had a continent-wide reputation. They were disciplined, fearless in the pike square, and, crucially, loyal to whoever had lawfully hired them. They were considered the finest infantry in Europe.

Pope Julius II wanted that reliability not occasionally but permanently, at his own door. In September 1505 the first contingent of 150 men set out from Switzerland under the command of Kaspar von Silenen, and on 22 January 1506 they marched into Rome. That date is still honored as the founding of the Pontifical Swiss Guard. Julius later granted them a title they have never relinquished: Defenders of the Church's freedom.

They were recruited from the Catholic cantons, Zürich, Lucerne, Uri and their neighbors, unmarried young men who had already learned soldiering in the hard school of Swiss mercenary service. They arrived in a Rome that was, at that very moment, tearing itself down and building itself back up.

A city under scaffolding

Here is the strange thing a visitor to the Vatican in those years had to hold in mind: the most important church in Christendom was a building site.

That same year, 1506, Julius II laid the foundation stone for a new St. Peter's Basilica, and the ancient church that had stood since the time of Constantine was being demolished around the work. The architect Bramante raised piers as thick as towers; for decades the basilica stood half-old, half-new, open in places to the sky. The dome the world now pictures did not yet exist. The Swiss Guard had sworn to defend a church that was, quite literally, unfinished.

The art, though, was already astonishing. In January 1506, the very month the Guard first arrived, workmen digging in a Roman vineyard unearthed the Laocoön, the writhing ancient marble that Julius promptly installed in the Belvedere garden. It became the seed crystal of what would, centuries later, grow into the Vatican Museums. In 1506 there was no museum: only a pope, a garden, and a few impossible statues. By the 1520s a cook crossing the courtyards would pass Michelangelo's finished Sistine ceiling (1512), and the rooms freshly painted by Raphael, who had died, young and mourned, in 1520. The altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was still bare plaster. The Last Judgment had not been painted, and would not be until after the catastrophe this issue is leading toward.

THE FIRST TABLE: Warm-Spiced Welcome Meat

Bloom Classification - Medium Bloom (Butter or Olive Oil)

Why the Bloom Works

Cinnamon, clove, ginger, cardamom, and orange peel contain aromatic compounds that dissolve readily in fat. A brief bloom releases those oils before they ever touch the meat, creating the warm sweet spice profile that marked honored guests throughout Renaissance Europe.

Ingredients

2 lbs pork shoulder or lamb, cubed (907 g)
1½ Tbsp 14th Century Franconia Sweet Blend (12 g)
1 tsp sea salt (6 g)
1 Tbsp olive oil or butter (15 ml)
¼ cup white wine (60 ml)
Zest of 1 orange

Method

Warm the oil or butter over medium-low heat.
Add the Franconia Sweet Blend and bloom for 30 seconds until fragrant.
Toss the cubed meat with the bloomed spice mixture and salt.
Transfer to a roasting pan or Dutch oven and add the wine.
Cover and cook at 325°F until tender, approximately 2 to 2½ hours.
Finish with fresh orange zest and a light sprinkle of additional blend before serving.

Best With

Roasted root vegetables
White beans
Rustic bread

Blooming Notes

This is a classic medieval sweet-spice application where the seasoning belongs in the fat before it reaches the meat.

II. THE EVERYDAY BOARD

That was the welcome. What I remember more is the years.

You do not feed men for twenty years and stay strangers. I learned their names, the ones I could say. I learned that the big ones ate like the harvest might not come again, and that they grew quiet and homesick in the spring when the snow would have been melting in their valleys. I fed them the food a working man eats, not the Pope's table, but mine. Beans and chickpeas. Eggs beaten with herbs. Bread, always bread. And meatballs, polpette, the way every Roman cook stretches a little meat into enough for many: bound with bread and cheese, green with garlic and sage and marjoram and rosemary, fried until the crust went dark.

This was not feast food. This was Tuesday. This was the food of men who stood all night at a door and were hungry by morning. I made it ten thousand times and never thought it was worth remembering, which is exactly why I remember it now.

The market was my newspaper

A cook learns the state of the world before the cardinals do, because a cook goes to market.

In those years the Roman markets were the crossroads of Europe. At Campo de' Fiori and along the quays of the Tiber I bought what the whole continent sent south: pepper that had passed through Venice from places I will never see, cinnamon the Arabs carried before the Portuguese learned the sea road, dried cod from the cold northern oceans, eels from the river, herbs from the kitchen gardens beyond the walls. German merchants, Spanish clerks, a Florentine who sold me oranges and lied about the price. The Pope's table was the center of the world, and the market was the table's beating heart.

So I felt the war coming through my basket before I understood it with my head. The politics, if you want them, were these: our Pope, Clement VII, a Medici, was caught between two giants, Francis, King of France, and Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor, and could not decide which to lean against. He chose France, then wavered, then joined a league against the Emperor. I knew none of this as treaty or council. I knew it as a fishmonger muttering that the German traders had stopped coming. I knew it as the price of saffron climbing week on week. I knew it as Spanish faces in the market turning wary, then absent. The stalls grew thinner. The war was coming, and it announced itself to me as empty baskets and rising prices, long before it announced itself as fire.

Two worlds at prayer

There was another thing the Swiss and I did not share, and then, oddly, did.

In my kitchen I prayed to Santa Marta, Martha of Bethany, who cooked and served and is the patron of all of us who work the fire while others sit at the table. The Swiss prayed to their own: Brother Klaus, Nicholas of Flüe, the holy hermit of their mountains, dead not thirty years and already half a saint to them. (He would not be formally canonized until 1947, but the Swiss venerated him in their own country long before Rome made it official.) Two kitchens of prayer, his and mine, the mountain hermit and the serving-woman of Bethany, and somehow the same wish underneath: keep these people safe, let there be enough, let the door hold.

THE SOLDIER'S BOARD: Herbed Polpette

Bloom Classification - No Bloom Required

Why the Blend Works

The herb profile reflects the kitchen gardens of Renaissance Rome. Sage, rosemary, marjoram, parsley, and thyme create layers of savory flavor that stretch a small amount of meat into a satisfying meal.

Ingredients

1 lb ground pork or beef (454 g)
½ cup bread soaked in milk and squeezed dry (60 g)
1 egg
¼ cup grated Pecorino or Parmesan (25 g)
1½ Tbsp Michel's Meatballs (9 g)
2 Tbsp olive oil for frying (30 ml)

Method

Combine all ingredients except the oil.
Mix gently until evenly distributed.
Form into 1½-inch meatballs.
Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium heat.
Fry until browned on all sides and cooked through, about 10 minutes.
Serve immediately with bread or alongside beans.

Best With

Crusty bread
White beans
Brothy soups

Blooming Notes

The herbs are carried directly into the meat mixture, where moisture and cooking fat release their flavor during cooking.

III. THE LAST TABLE

I did not know it was the last supper. That is the cruelty of it. If I had known, I do not know what I would have done differently. Made it grander, maybe, or maybe just stood in the doorway longer and looked at them.

It was the first week of May, 1527. The Emperor's army had come down through Italy like a fever, thousands of them, German and Spanish and Italian all mixed together, unpaid and starving and past the reach of any commander. Everyone in Rome knew they were close. The market was half-shuttered. I spent what I had.

Because it was a fast week in spirit if not in law, and because the cod was what I could still get, I made baccalà, the salt cod from the northern seas, the humble fish that a cook makes worthy only by patience. I had soaked it for days, changing the water, coaxing the salt and the years out of it. I dressed it simply: good oil, garlic, and the green herbs, basil and marjoram, parsley and thyme, sage and the old monastery herbs, hyssop and winter savory, the ones my grandmother grew. I wanted it to taste like care. I think it did.

They ate. They were quiet, soldiers are quiet before a thing they can see coming. Their commander, Kaspar Röist, a Zürich man whose father had led the Guard before him, did not eat much. I remember thinking I should say something to him and not finding it. Then they went out to their posts, and I cleaned my kitchen, and I went to bed in a city that had one night left.

The sixth of May

On the morning of 6 May 1527, the imperial army broke into Rome.

It was not, properly, an attack the Emperor had ordered. Charles V had sent the army to pressure the Pope, not to destroy his capital, but the troops, some fourteen thousand Germans (many of them Lutherans with their own grievances against Rome), six thousand Spaniards, and a number of Italians, had gone unpaid for too long. They had mutinied. Their commander, the Duke of Bourbon, was killed in the first moments of the assault, by legend by a shot the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini claimed to have fired, though no one can prove it. Leaderless and unleashed, the army poured over the walls.

Rome was barely defended: a few thousand militia under Renzo da Ceri, and the Swiss Guard. By the Guard's own reckoning, 189 men stood that day. They made their stand near the obelisk by the Campo Santo Teutonico, the German cemetery beside the half-built basilica. Commander Kaspar Röist led them. Their task was simple and impossible: hold long enough for the Pope to escape.

He did escape. While the Guard fought, a small group of survivors hurried Clement VII along the Passetto di Borgo, the raised passage that runs inside the city wall, to the fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo, where he would hold out until a ransom was paid. By the Guard's tradition, 147 of the 189 died so that he could reach it; only 42 survived, the men who had gone with the Pope. Röist was among the dead. (The most harrowing details of his death, repeated in later devotional accounts, are tradition rather than documented record, and need not be dwelt on here. What is certain is that he did not survive the day, and that the Guard was very nearly annihilated.)

The sack itself ground on for months. Rome was looted, burned, and emptied; plague and starvation finished what the soldiers began. The city would not recover its population for a generation. Many call it the end of the High Renaissance.

THE LAST TABLE: Salt Cod with Garden Herbs

Bloom Classification - Gentle Olive Oil Bloom

Why the Bloom Works

Garlic and the herbs in An Herb release their fragrance quickly in warm olive oil. Blooming them gently prevents bitterness while creating an aromatic dressing that transforms a humble piece of fish.

Ingredients

1 lb salt cod, soaked and desalted (454 g)
3 Tbsp olive oil (45 ml)
3 cloves garlic, sliced
1 Tbsp An Herb (6 g)
2 Tbsp chopped parsley (8 g)

Method

Soak the salt cod for 24 to 48 hours, changing the water several times.
Poach gently until the fish flakes easily.
Warm the olive oil over low heat.
Add the garlic and An Herb blend.
Bloom for 30 seconds, just until fragrant.
Spoon the herb oil over the fish.
Finish with parsley and serve.

Best With

White beans
Rustic bread
Braised greens

Blooming Notes

Keep the oil below frying temperature. The goal is aroma, not browning.

IV. THE EMPTY KITCHEN

After, there was the kitchen.

That is the part no one writes down. They write the last stand, the brave men, the Pope on the wall watching his Guard die. They do not write what comes the morning after, when a cook stands in a kitchen and there is no one to cook for. The big men did not come back. The bowls I had filled ten thousand times sat clean and stacked, and stayed clean. The door I had cooked beside for twenty years had no one at it.

They disbanded the Guard after that. For twenty years there was no Swiss Guard at all. Rome was too broken, the Pope too poor, the men too dead. It was not until 1548 that another pope, Paul III, called the mountain men back to the door. By then I was old. I do not think any of mine were among the new ones.

A body still has to eat, even in grief. So I did the only thing my hands knew. I made broth.

Whatever the ruined market could give me, a few roots, an onion, a little thyme, pepper, salt, a carrot if I was lucky, simmered long in water until it became something a person could live on. Not a feast. Not a welcome. Just enough to keep going. I made it for myself, at a table set for one, and I thought about all the times I had spent everything I had on men who would not live to thank me, and I did not regret a single jar of it.

That is what a cook is, in the end. You spend everything, on people who leave. And you would do it again.

THE LAST POT: Broth of Roots and Herbs

Bloom Classification - Low Simmer Extraction

Why the Blend Works

Barazki Zopa was built around traditional soup aromatics. Long simmering gradually extracts the flavors of carrot, celery, onion, thyme, and pepper into the broth.

Ingredients

8 cups broth or water (1.9 L)
2 Tbsp Barazki Zopa (14 g)
2 carrots, sliced (120 g)
2 celery stalks, sliced (80 g)
1 onion, diced (150 g)
1 can white beans, drained (425 g can)
Additional salt to taste

Method

Combine all ingredients in a soup pot.
Bring to a gentle simmer.
Cook for 60 to 90 minutes.
Adjust seasoning before serving.
Serve with bread.

Best With

Crusty bread
Leftover roasted meat
A quiet evening

Blooming Notes

This recipe demonstrates that some blends are designed to bloom through time rather than fat.alt. Eat with bread, alone or with someone you are glad is still there.

A note on the arc

There is a story told entirely in the spice cabinet of this issue. It opens with nine spices, the lavish Franconia Sweet welcome, the orange peel saved for feast days, a young cook spending everything to say you are honored here. It ends with roots and salt and thyme, a broth for one. From abundance to grief, from a full market to a shuttered one, from a glittering construction-site Vatican to a half-built church under siege. The blends themselves trace the fall.

The Swiss Guard still stands at the Pope's door today, in the striped uniforms and the old colors, and every year on the sixth of May new recruits are sworn in on the anniversary of the day the Guard nearly died defending an unfinished church. They are honored, rightly, for their courage.

This issue is for the other people in the story. The ones who fed them. The ones who stood in the empty kitchen after. History in every seasoning, including the plain ones.

Further Reading

For readers who want to go deeper into the Guard, the city, and the catastrophe that ended an age, these are genuine scholarly sources rather than popular retellings.

Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome, 1527, Palgrave Macmillan, second edition. ISBN 978-1-4039-1769-6. The standard English-language account of the sack, its causes, and its aftermath, readable and thorough.
André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series). ISBN 978-0-691-09947-0. A study of the catastrophe as the end of the High Renaissance, by a major historian of Italian art and culture, for readers interested in what was lost beyond the lives.
Christine Shaw and Michael Mallett, The Italian Wars, 1494–1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, second edition. ISBN 978-1-138-73304-5. The wider context: the long contest between France and the Empire that pulled Clement VII apart and brought the army to Rome's walls.
Robert Hutchinson and the Pontifical Swiss Guard's own published histories, including The Pontifical Swiss Guard (Vatican publications). For the founding of 1506, the recruitment from the Catholic cantons, and the events of 6 May 1527 as the Guard itself records and commemorates them.
Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Bull, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0-14-044718-0. A firsthand voice from inside the siege, including the goldsmith's famous and unprovable claim about the shot that felled the Duke of Bourbon. To be read as a vivid witness, not a neutral one.

A note on the sources: the cook of this issue is a composite, a faithful representative of the Roman kitchens that fed the Guard across these twenty-one years rather than a named individual, since no such cook's record survives. The dates, the founding, the building of St. Peter's, the politics, and the events of the sack are all grounded in the scholarship above. The most harrowing details of Commander Röist's death are tradition rather than documented record, and we have left them where they belong. The voice is ours; the history is theirs.

A Note from The Spicekeeper

Three issues in, I keep returning to the same quiet thing, but this one cost me more than the others to write. In London it was a cook who saved his recipes by accident. In Rome, a generation later, it was a scholar who saved a cook's life's work by carrying it to a press. Here the thing nearly lost is not a recipe at all. It was the people themselves and the ones who fed them, and there was no manuscript to save any of them.

History remembered the last stand. It remembered the Pope on the wall, the hundred and forty-seven who died at the door, and the brave men in the striped colors who are honored rightly every sixth of May. It did not remember the cook who fed them for twenty years, who learned which of the big men ate like the harvest might not come, and who made them baccalà on the last night because the cod was what the shuttered market would still sell him. No one wrote down the welcome meat in 1506, or the ten thousand plates of Tuesday meatballs, or the broth for one in the empty kitchen after. That is the part that never gets written, and it is the part this issue is for.

I find I would rather keep that cook's company than the emperor's army's, or even the brave dead at the obelisk. He spent everything he had, every dear pinch of saved orange peel, every day at the market reading the war in the price of saffron, on men who would not live to thank him. And when they were gone, he stood in the clean, stacked, silent kitchen, and he made broth, because a cook does the only thing his hands know. You spend everything on people who leave. And you would do it again. History in every seasoning, including the plainest ones, was made for the people no one thought to write down.

The Spicekeeper's Almanac is a periodic publication of Oak City Spice Blends, drawn from a private library of more than 400 historical cookbooks. Seasoned by centuries. Made for tonight.