Gone Medieval - Medieval Origins of Italian Food

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

For a thousand years, Italy’s cities have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money and power. Italian food is city food, and telling its story means telling the story of the Italians as a people of city dwellers.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets John Dickie, author of Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and their Food, in which he traces how the evolution of cities and trade in the Middle Ages, as well as taste and creativity, combined to make the world’s favourite cuisine.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here >You can take part in our listener survey here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Food has always been everywhere. But my guest today has a book for us that explores the emergence of Italian cuisine during the medieval period. And you better believe I'm going to try and claim that at least some of my favorite dishes and perhaps yours are medieval culinary creations. John Dickey is professor of Italian studies at university college. London. John's previous books include Cozenostra, Mafia Brotherhoods and Mafia Republic, so I'm definitely going to show him some respect. John joins us today to talk about Delizia,

the epic history of Italians and their food, which has a cover endorsement by Stanley Tucci, no less, which is very, very cool. You can also find an accompanying series on Amazon Prime called Eating History, the Story of Italy, on a plate. Welcome to God Medieval, John. Hi, very nice to be here, Matt. It's wonderful to have you. I can't tell you how excited I am to talk about pizza and pasta and some of my favourite foods. The question to start off with, something that you deal within the book, kind of head on, is whether Italian food even exists or not? Yes and no is the only answer. Not if you think of Italian food as a sort of single set, classic menu of dishes. Italy is very regionally diverse, as everybody knows. It only became

a nation state in 1861, formerly. That really... regional and geographical diversity has imprinted itself on the Italian way of eating. But I'm also not one of those people who thinks that Italian food doesn't exist in the sense that it's just a sort of collection of micro-quizines that aren't in contact with another. Certainly there are certain common elements like the way of structuring a menu, even though for some Italians pasta is a relatively recently acquired taste, it nonetheless does suggest it is a common thread in the history and reality of Italian food. Above all, what we're talking about is a kind of dialogue,

a dialogue between Italian cities that really gives Italian food its imprint. That's the kind of motor of the long history of Italian food. Italian food is city food. We often mistake it for being about peasants and stuff like that. And that dialogue between the Italian cities really began in the Middle Ages when the Italian cities emerged through trade and acquired a degree of autonomy and started to shape their own history. And that's when this dialogue between the Italian cities

that makes up Italian food culture begins. It's difficult to talk about Italian food at a time when Italy didn't really exist as a single unit. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody at the time would have said, hey, I'm going to eat Italian today. That's completely anachronistic. Yeah. Why do Italians and Italy as a whole then have such a deep connection to their food? To what extent is that affected by their position in the Mediterranean at this kind of hub of trade in the medieval period? Italians today have a deep connection for their food, I think because it's part of the way that good eating over time developed, as part of the sort of art of living, the urban art of living in Italy's cities, a sign of wealth

and sophistication, albeit the simplest dishes, still a sense of this refinement that emerges and of local belonging. But of course, going into what Italians ate and into that diversity of Italian food that I talked about is the position of Italy and the Mediterranean. You're quite right. better to start in a way with the geography of Italy itself, because Italy is really split down the middle geographically by the Apennines, by this mountain chain that curves round from the sort of Alps in Piedmont right down the middle and then out even into Sicily.

And that makes Italy not a kind of naturally prosperous and agricultural land a lot of it. It makes it an outward-facing geographical sense. space because the mountain barrier down the middle of the country. And in the Middle Ages, and for a lot of the rest of Italian history, it was actually far easier to travel by water than it was to travel by land. So that outward facing trading nature of those medieval Italian cities is where we get this important dynamic beginning. And then, of course, the Mediterranean places close to the Arab world. It places you firstly close.

to the spice route. Spices were crucial to elite medieval cuisine in the Middle Ages, and Venice in particular became the absolute entrepaux in the Middle Ages for the spice trade. Sicily was ruled by Islamic culture in the early Middle Ages. It places you close to some of the important influential aspects, in terms of ingredients like lemons and pistachio nuts and almonds and that kind of thing, but also close to sophisticated agriculture that developed under Islamic culture. And of course, the key ingredient of pasta, because that is where we first see pasta, if we mean by pasta, the sort of dried boxes of stuff that we find on all our supermarket shelves. That's how it gets into the Italian peninsula.

It's fascinating. I'd never considered before how similar the story of Italy, after the first millennium, I guess, is similar to the story of the Vikings just before it, that they're looking outward because their home territory isn't the greatest, most fertile land. So they rely on trade and travel and water in particular to get them around. It's an interesting, almost a repeat in southern Europe. Yeah, I think so. Remember, of course, that these cities also dominate the countryside immediately around them. And very often, because of Italy's geography, that countryside around them is actually very

diverse in its elevation and sea and mountains and that sort of thing. And so they grow by essentially dominating the countryside and hogging those ingredients and bringing them into the city. Italian cities becoming increasingly populous and therefore life becoming increasingly political and you've got to keep people happy and you don't really care about the poor old peasants if they starve. You bring those ingredients and that well. into the city. You mentioned pasta, so I'm just going to go straight in hard with the question. Is pasta a medieval invention? Can I claim it?

Yeah, I think so. That's certainly when the Italian pasta habit really kicks off. But then, of course, as always in these things, there's a bit of terminological confusion to clear out of the way. Because if you'd asked Dante or Boccaccio or Chima Buoy, one of these people, do you fancy some pasta for supper tonight? They're going, what are you talking about? They didn't use the term in that sense.

Pastor, even today, it just means dough or paste or something. And it's only much later that it becomes a kind of umbrella term. For what in its origins is a very diverse genealogy of different things. You've got, for example, Nyoki, which are today often made with potato, which of course didn't exist in Europe in the Middle Ages, had yet to arrive from the new world. But they're just dumplings. And dumplings appear everywhere.

That's not an Italian specialty. Ditto pies, Mrs. Miggins pie shop, is everywhere in medieval cities. But pies, of course, the Italian thing is you cook these little pies, which is what the word tortellini means, in water and broth, actually, more often at the time. Yoli similarly. And then the sheets of dough that you then cut and similarly boil. So there are all of these different families of things that actually don't naturally belong together. But the most recognisably

Italian of all of these things is that dried pasta I talked about, the kind of packet of spaghetti that is everywhere around the world now. And that is distinctively Italian, even though it comes to Italy, very clearly, during the Middle Ages. And we know that because its origins are in the Eastern Mediterranean, I think called Eitria, which we find, thanks to some very fascinating medieval documents that I talk about, medieval map in Arabic, we find being made in a factory, no less, a kind of mass production in a place called Trabiya, which is near Palermo. the Sicilian capital. And the Matt dates from the reign of Roger the second, the great Norman monarch of Sicily. The Normans have conquered Sicily more or less the same time they've moved into Britain.

And they bring with them their agriculture and so on. And among the things they bring with them is this dried pasta made with Sicily's typical durham wheat, which is the kind of special wheat that you really need to make pasta successfully. and from places like Trabier where this stuff is made, the map tells us, it's exported right up and down the Italian coast. This is where we begin in these port cities that are becoming so prosperous. This is where we start to find traces of this stuff. The Italian term for it is Trille or Vermicelli.

That's what the Italian sources talk about it. It's dried stuff which is very tradable. are very portable, and you begin to find it in places like Genoa and Siena and these trading hubs. So I use that as my sort of moment when the starting gun for the history of Italian food is fired. I mean, that makes me very happy. I always try to claim that anything good in the world is medieval. So the idea that pasta, I mean, nochi and pesto is one of my favorite things. I would just demolish a bowl of nocky and pesto.

You've got to wait quite a long time for pesto to really. take shape, I'm afraid. The first orthodox recipes for pesto date from, I'm afraid, after the Second World War, even though the vaguely similar sources were being made for a long time. Yeah. Oh, well, never mind. Nothing's perfect. How else do we see Italian food then, in as far as Italian food exists, developing through the medieval period? You mentioned ravioli. Do we see pasta starting to develop into these other things too? Yeah, absolutely. Certainly in the Po Valley, you get places like that. The dried pasture that I talked about, even still today, tends to be associated with places like Sicily, with Naples,

with that coast right around to Genoa, that coast of Italy, the left-hand side, if you look at a map, rather than with the what we call fresh pasta regions in the Poe Valley, places like typically Emilia Romagna. So, yeah, again, the city's a key to driving what will become medieval cuisine and what you start to get first of all is a pride in the abundance of Italian cities. Italy in this period has few rivals for generating big cities. The sheer size of these cities is important and their ability to bring ingredients in even before the medieval period. The great sign of prosperity was your ability to conquer time and space. at table, to be able to bring ingredients from afar, and to be able to eat things that were really

great out of season, or at least to stretch those seasons. You know, in a world without refrigeration, preservation is absolutely key. And that's why so many Italian food traditions actually come out of preservation techniques. We talked about the dried pasta, but also pickling, salting. oil, drying, a lot of these things. Italians are, even in the Middle Ages, are eating a lot of dried salt cod that is coming all the way from Norway because it's easy to transport because it can be dried and so on and so forth. And then, of course, spices. This is when the spice trade really kicks off with Venice in the forefront. I'm going to ask one more specific before we move on to some of the things that you talk about more in the book. Yeah.

Parmesan cheese. When does that become married to pasta? Can we have pasta and cheese as a medieval creation? The first evidence of this actually comes from two Florentine writers, and there are various other sources too, but the most famous of them is Giovanni Boccaccio, who is the author of the De Cameron, this fabulous book written in the middle of the 14th century where basically this party of wealthy people, a mixture of men and women, flee Florence during the plague of the mid-1300s, and spend time in the countryside telling stories in around. these are the stories that are reproduced in the decamara. And one of those stories talks about a land of plenty called Benghadi, where you have a mountain of parmesan cheese, and you roll macaroni down it, eat as much as you like. And it talks explicitly of parmesan cheese, and it talks explicitly about macaroni at the time.

Now, macaroni is another deceptive term, because it's not quite clear in this source as in others, whether it means something more like dumpling, because it comes from the Italian word just to crush, pound things, or whether it means those tubes of pasta, which were also being eaten at the time. You made them by rolling the dough round a wire. But Parmesan cheese, and it's important that the name comes from the city of Parma.

This is where we get the first signs of, yes, this combination of pasta and parma. Amazon cheese. But just importantly, what we're seeing is the birth of a kind of urban branding for Italian food. So many Italian dishes today carry the names of cities, like Parmigiano, like parma ham, like Bisteka la Fiorentina, like Cotoletta la Milanese. They go on and on pizza, Napolitana, and so on. And that process, that thing of identifying foods with cities gets underway in the Middle Ages. Why? Because you've got wealthy cities trading with each other, wealthy people wanting the best cheese they can get. And so the people producing that cheese, they form guilds, they form organisations, try and maintain quality to keep the price up and so on and so forth. And the name is the best branding they have.

It's almost imposed from outside. You can imagine if you start making cheese in Parma, you don't call it Parma cheese. You just call it cheese. But if you're in Florence and it's coming from Parma, it makes sense to call it Parma cheese. So that starts to happen with things like hams from Bologna, Mortadella, is an early champion of this urban branding process. So this is what I meant early on in the discussion when I started to talk about a dialogue in food and dishes and food culture between the Italian cities. So if we think about a couple of the specific cities then, if we start in Milan,

you talk about a wonderful account by Bonnevizan from 1288, late 13th century. What part does food play in his view and his description of his city? Bolivar like lots of the inhabitants of medieval city, these newly wealthy, newly socially diversified and dynamic Italian cities, is very proud and being. Milanese and his book, The Marbles of Milan, it's called, is a giant advert for how amazing Milan is. And Bonvisin is in a very good place to give us this extraordinarily well-documented portrait of Milan because he was a lay member of a fraternity monks called the Umiliati, who until not long before he wrote this book had acted as a kind of civil service for this.

city. So they'd had a finger everywhere, public works and hospitals and all sorts of stuff. So he's got the numbers at his fingertips and he can tell us how many barrels of prawns are pulled from the canals and lakes and so on. And for Bonavazar, food is important again as this sort of symbol of divinely sanctioned providential plenty in the city of Milan. He begins by telling us that Milan is round in shape, as it still is today, just like the city of Jerusalem. So this plenty that the city is able to bring in is a symptom of divine approval of Milan's preeminence among cities. And he documents it ad nauseum, listing all the kind of different ingredients and other things that the city's able to pull in.

It seems from the descriptions as well that meat was maybe less important on the Milanese menu than we might have thought it should be perhaps. It was important. Remember, in cities at that time, the animals are brought in, into the city, slaughtered in the city street, just there and then. And the meat is by and large eaten fresh because there's no preservation. A nose to tail eating is absolutely the norm. So meat was almost banal in a way, in terms. city eating. What offers itself as a better symbol to him of nature's bounty and God's bounty in Milan are fruit and vegetables and fish, strangely enough. But for the wealthy at least, there was no particular shortage of meat in normal times in the cities. As you mentioned, seafood comes across

as being quite important, which is interesting because Milan is so landlocked. Is that again about saying we have access to this stuff because we're so important? Remember, seafood is a modern term, in the Middle Ages, you don't talk about seafood because actually the fish that actually comes from the sea is regarded with a bit of distaste. The fish that people really like is freshwater fish. And Milan is certainly not short of freshwater fish, because Milan has already got a well-developed system of canals, the navilli. These have been slowly developing since sort of late Roman times when rivers begin to be diverted. But they connect Milan these canals to the great lakes, Lake Garda, Lake Como and so on,

that are fed from the Alps. And that's what gives Milan this abundance. The canals are also there for military purposes, for moving troops around and stuff like that. So that's the sign of plenty. I think we also have to put a word in for the eel. eels are massively important in medieval cuisine, not just in Italy but particularly in Italy in the Po Valley and elsewhere in the Tiber and other Italian rivers.

Why eels? Firstly, they're a fish that's very easy to transport. You can bung a load of eels in a barrel with just a bit of water and they'll stay fresh for ages. They don't need much room. So you can cram a lot of them into a barrel and keep them for use. And then, of course, the massively important thing is the religious restrictions on eating.

A lot of this stuff is common, again, to eating across Europe in the Middle Ages. You know, it was only in 1963 that the Pope did away with the obligation to eat fish on Fridays and so on. All but the dimest of echoes of those medieval rules about when. you couldn't eat meat disappeared, but they were very important in the Middle Ages. Lean days and fat days. This begins with the sort of development of monastic rules and stuff like that. Days of self-denial. They were dozens of them in the medieval calendar.

And people argued about what you could and couldn't eat on lean days. Could you eat eggs? Was milk okay? Or was that too, animal? Could you get around by classifying? beaver as a fish, something like that. So there's a lot of argument about this and a hunt for alternatives. But with eel you were absolutely on safe ground. It was a fish so you could eat it on all those lean days. And that's why fish is so important as a source of pride for the

Milanese diet, among other reasons. It's part of the importance of fruit and vegetable to do with that idea that Italy wasn't great for growing all of its own stuff. So again, it talks to the reach of somewhere like Milan that they're able to bring in fruit and vegetable they might not be able to grow. Remember this is about dominating the countryside. In most of Italy, different to most of the rest of Europe, the wealthy aren't stuck on great estates or whatever it might be. They move into the cities where their political destiny is decided, where they can compete for social prestige. And yes, they own the land. Gradually, they suck up ownership of all of the land around, but that's where they can source the provisions and so on and so forth. The contado,

they call it in Italian, the sort of dependent countryside around. It's a symbol of that contado and the wealth of the contado that is reflected in the status of the city. One of the other cities that you visit is Venice. So in the early 14th century, it's a city that Marco Polo returned to, who we looked at on the podcast before. How had Venice grown to that level of international importance and particularly what relationship did that have with the food that it was able to access? The short answer is trade, but also military power. Venice goes out there and conquers its trading stations. dominates the Adriatic coast and will also dominate the Veneto, as it's called, the country hinterland of the city. So it's trade in things like timber, slaves, very importantly, but the one most relevant to diet is of course spices. And the Venetian spice market is a crucial hub for distributing spices around Europe. That's why Marco Polo goes off to the east.

He's looking for sources of spices. That's what he's most interested in. And of course, he doesn't find pasta. He doesn't even mention pastor in any of the different versions of Marco Polo's narrative. As we know from other sources, pastors already in circulation in Italy a century and a half before Marco Polo goes to China. And the story that he brought spaghetti back is actually invented in the 1930s by an American patronage. a company as publicity. It's interesting that Venish choose to use their military power to drive trade, particularly in spices. So they're not looking at conquest. They're looking at getting hold

of some of those really, really expensive commodities rather than getting land and property. It's an interesting juxtaposition, I guess, for lots of other medieval states that are looking to expand their boundaries. Yeah, although they do conquer in due course, as I said. And I think, we need to spend a word on spices and why spices were so prized and so important and they really were the signature of good eating for the elite in the middle ages and part of the appeal of spices is simply the snob value they come a long way they're very expensive it's bling on the table for these thrusting new wealthy of italy and of course that very precious commodity that you can sell on then across Europe. But the other reason is medicinal. We are used to the idea, it's as old as food,

the idea that when you eat you are also looking after your health. There's never been a neat boundary between food and medicine. And in the Middle Ages, that overlap between food and medicine is all to do with Galenic theory. And the humours that reflect inside our body need to be kept in balance and spices are a particularly useful way and particularly healthful way of keeping those things in balance. Spices tended to be defined as hot and dry in elemental terms and that made them very good for counteracting the extremely dangerous wet and cold properties of foods like melon. There was a medieval popes thought to have died from eating too many melons, or at least that's what his critics said, which showed his lack of wisdom and understanding of good eating and what science prescribed. And that's in fact where, you know, we still get echoes of that sort of Galenic regulation of diet in things like when I was a kid, my mum would always serve melon with cinnamon on it, which was very nice, but it's also derived from that.

sort of combination it's thought. Similarly, when we go to an Italian restaurant and have a starter with prosciutto and melone, ham and melon, that's a classic sort of Galenic combination, balancing the properties of the foods in a way that makes them very digestible and very good for our health in medieval terms. Are we able to say what was perhaps the most prized spice for cooking in the medieval period? There's not a particular spice? It depends if you count sugar as a spice. Sugar was certainly enormously prestigious and much sought after. For many of the same reason of rarity value and all of that kind of thing and medicinal properties, sugar was also very useful for counteracting the really pervasive saltiness of

preserved food. Remembering, of course, preservation is absolutely key. And that means a lot of salt gets used to preserve things, and the sugar would counteract it. That's one of the many reasons why medieval menus are very promiscuous, in our terms, at mixing sweet and salt dishes. You don't get the sugary bits kept to the end. Prodigious amounts of sugar used sprinkled in pasta dishes and spices on top and so on in the medical ages, and that's perfectly normal. And of course, the wealthier you were, the more of this stuff you could put on.

So how much of what we call Italian food today? And I guess, you know, we're talking about pasta and cheese, macaroni cheese, Nochi and Pesto. We've talked about a bit pizza and things like that. How much of what we call Italian food today, might a medieval resident of Venice or Milan or Palermo or the other place you visit in the book, how much might they recognize? Would it all be completely alien or would they seek some roots in there?

I think they'd probably be shocked and determined. made and amazed at what Italians eat today. In the 1970s, once Italy had left its peasant past safely behind, because Italy industrialised very late compared to the standards of Northern Europe. And it's really only then that you start to get really pervasive food nostalgia and a sense that for something to be good, it had to be traditional. It had to go way back. ideally to some medieval peasants or artisans or something. And that made it good. That made it expressive of local identities,

expressive of Italian identity. But of course, that hunt for traditions makes for a very selective reading about the past. And it means that you forget all of this stuff about the need for preservation. You forget spices and Galenic medicine. and you forget the kind of cult of fresh fish. There's all sorts of things that you have to edit out of the picture.

So medieval Italians, I think they would also be astonished at the kind of our day-to-day abundance. They'd also be astonished, of course, they wouldn't know what the hell a tomato was or a banana or chocolate or anything like that. I think they would also be astonished at the kind of day-to-day abundance of our food and easy availability.

Alas, like all historians, when I hear the word tradition, I reach for my gun. And I'm afraid food is one of the classic cases. As I said, to really identify these long-term patterns in Italian cuisine, we've got to think about broader dynamics of city living and city pride and so on and so forth. To what extent do you think that kind of reaching for tradition back into the medieval period at a time when Italy didn't exist, so Italian food can hardly have existed when Italy didn't exist. How much of that is trying to almost project Italy back into the medieval world?

As a relatively modern state, was it looking to root itself in a more distant past, or was it just trying to amalgamate all of the various different traditions from around the city states? I don't think the sort of grammar of this is patriotic Italian. I think it's about what the Italians call Campanilismo, or pride in your local bell tower. It's about local pride.

A word that Italians use the whole time about their food, it's almost synonymous with good and delicious, is typical. The food is typical. It means it typifies a particular place, a particular territory, a particular sort of lifestyle, a particular ideally ancient way of life. So they're looking back for isolated traditions in,

local areas. When actually you're much better off looking, again, as I said in terms of a dialogue, the fork. Italians invent the fork, the four-pronged fork. And it's thought the need to eat macaroni is part of the reasons why we start to get all this evidence of fork use in the Middle Ages in Italy. And it's things like that suggest the common pattern. There's still tons of changes to come. Massive influence of France, much later in history. so many Italian food words derived from France, like the word menu is a French word, and so on and so forth. And then, of course, the other thing that we forget, looking back, is hunger and famine. The peasant diet was monotonous and precarious. That was the overwhelming pattern at the time.

Famine disappears from Italy, only really with the arrival. of foods from the new world and the modernisation of agriculture in kind of the 18th century, but even then wars and things could still massively disrupt the food system. Famine hunger were daily realities in the Middle Ages in a way that is just inconceivable to us. And that's why somebody like Bon Vazin, the medieval writer, is so proud of the abundance that the city of Milan offers. Just to end on, do you have a favourite medieval recipe or ingredient from the book? There are a couple of things that I really like.

One I haven't actually tried, I have to say, although I've read it in lots and lots of recipe books, which is a thing called Agresto or Vajus, it's called Elsewhere in Europe, which is made with sour grapes basically. In medieval Italian cookbooks, it's generally mixed with other ingredients like liver and spices, obviously, and sugar to make a kind of dipping sauce. And that sounds really nice. Probably deserves a revival. Maybe it's already been revived somewhere in the world it's bound to have been.

And the other thing which I have tried made by a very top Italian chef for me is a thing called Bianco Mangare, white eating, literally, which is where we get our word blamage from. But blamage in the Middle Ages was basically pounded capon, so a castrated cockerel. So cockrawls get very fat if you castrate them. So the white meat of the cockerel pounded into a smooth paste with almonds. And of course, almonds are very important in medieval cuisine as well

because they are okay to eat on lean days when you can't eat meat. And they're white, which is very prestigious. If you want to eat well, you eat white or yellow things in the Middle Ages. They're pure and almost. angelic and prestigious. And then of course you add loads of sugar and loads of spices to your Bianco Manjari. And for a long time well into the Renaissance, that's very popular. And it's actually really nice. You make this sort of kind of soupy gooey stuff out of it. And it's actually really good. It's baby food, but quite nice. Sounds very good. Thank you so much for joining us, John. It's been

fascinating to take a tour of Italian city states and their food and what it meant to them and what it means to Italy and Italians today. Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure. John's fantastic book, Delizia, the epic history of Italians and their food is out now in a new edition. And don't forget to also look out eating history, the story of Italy on a plate on Amazon Prime. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us

anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.