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17

Party planning

1420

AUTHOR: Chiquart Amiczo, FROM: Du Fait de Cuisine

And in order to do things properly and cleanly, and in order to serve and accomplish it more quickly, there should be provided such a large quantity of vessels of gold, of silver, of pewter, and of wood, that is four thousand or more, that when one has served the first course one should have enough for serving the second and still have some left over, and in the mean time one can wash and clean the vessels used during the said first course.

The history of food sees a lot of talk about feasting. Down through the centuries we come across roll-calls of grandiose banqueting, of decadent dinners on an improbable-sounding scale. There are lists of huge numbers of oxen, fowl, poultry and other birds, each more extravagant than the next.

Each master cook seems determined to outshine his rivals – contemporary or historical – in his bid to go down as the most extravagant party giver. Frenchman Chiquart Amiczo is no exception. Here again we have a master cook who worked his way up through the ranks. He did his scullery time. He scrubbed, chopped, served as an apprentice and gradually edged his way up the gastronomic pole. Finally, he came to the notice of the Duke of Savoy who employed his services and then, after many successful years, nudged him into writing a cookbook.

And thus another great tome appears, listing colossal feasts in all their vulgar detail. Except this one was different. Chiquart was a party planner: he doesn’t just say ‘fetch 400 oxen and serve them with a parsley sauce’. He tells you how; he is big on logistics. While it’s true to say, on the minutiae of recipes, we’re not yet into the era of providing cooking times and temperatures, he does actually give quantities – 6 pounds of this herb, 8 pounds of that. Which is a revolution when you consider the vagaries of what went before. He was a more practical recipe writer than his predecessors and had an eye for the bigger picture.

Meanwhile, his boss the Duke of Savoy, also known as Amadeus VIII, was a serial schmoozer. He mixed in the highest social and religious circles and had married the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, said to be the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe. It was Chiquart’s job to feed Amadeus’s friends and contacts and feed them well, which he did. Indeed, so impressed was his employer that (as with previous master cooks across the world) he persuaded him to record his knowledge of cooking, and the planning of it, for posterity.

Chiquart dictated the work and it has lasted in its long, lugubrious, detailed and fabulously un-subbed entirety. There is, for example, a recipe for Parma tarts. It’s a big dish. The recipe itself consists of one long paragraph of 1,415 words. One can almost picture Chiquart, the ageing, self-glorifying and rather vain chef, reclining on his chaise-longue dictating the recipe to a cowering minion. ‘Again, Parma tarts,’ he starts with an air of nonchalance, ‘for the said Parma tarts which are ordered to be made, to give you understanding, take three or four large pigs and, if the feast should be larger than I think, let one take more.’

This is a recipe that you should definitely not try at home. The ingredients, in addition to the four large pigs, include 300 pigeons, 200 baby chickens, 100 capons and 600 small birds, although the object of the exercise is actually a very large quantity of small tarts filled with a spicy, herby mixture of the above animals and birds. The presentation of the dish ends with a flourish: ‘And when one serves it,’ declares Chiquart, ‘let on each tart be put a little banner with the arms of each lord who is served these Parma tarts.’

Before Chiquart gets stuck into delivering his party-planning advice, he devotes some time to flattering his boss. This must be one of the most oleaginous genuflections in history. He prostrates himself in front of his patron. ‘To you, the very high, very renowned, and very powerful prince and lord, Monseigneur Ayme, first duke of Savoy, honour and reverence, with the prompt desire to obey your commands, I offer my very humble and devoted respects,’ he begins, before uttering that he is ‘no more than the least of your humble subjects’. He continues: ‘I have a low standing and know and have learned too little because through ignorance and negligence I have never sufficiently improved my understanding.’ This, then, is the introduction to a work that was written onto 236 folio pages, including recipes totalling around 35,000 words – some were, as with his Parma tarts, long, overbearing, unwieldy and rambling.

As humble as he was to his master, he was surely harsh to those who worked for him in order to achieve such spectacular results. And his false modesty cannot disguise his formidable talent for organisation. A feast lasting for two days needs four months of planning, he says. Having detailed, at great length, exactly the dishes to be presented for a wedding party, he then considers what might happen if the event has to take place during a religious period – if, for example, there are limitations on what fish, meat or dairy products you can serve. He then goes through the entire menu substituting ingredients with those that would be acceptable. He provides detailed lists of exactly the number of utensils needed for catering a big do; he says how much firewood and charcoal might be needed, and he reminds the reader to make sure there’s plenty of money to pay for everything:

And so that the workers are not idle, and so that they do not lack for anything, there should be delivered funds in great abundance to the said kitchen masters to get salt, pot-vegetables and other necessary things which might be needed, which do not occur to me at present.

Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Paris / Kharbine-Tapabor / Coll. Jean Vigne

Medieval banquets were large and sumptuous affairs, sometimes lasting for a couple of days.

He reminds cooks to invest in enough candles and how to prepare a meal in a kitchen other than your own. He was more than able to plan a Chiquart Amiczo pop-up supper club at the castle of a friend of the duke, for instance. He was mindful too of how visiting nobles brought their own servants. They were not just to be welcomed but afforded every bit of help: ‘quickly, amply, in great abundance and promptly [supply] everything for which he asks’.

As for the crockery and cutlery (part of the instructions that constitutes this chapter’s ‘recipe’), 4,000 plates of gold, silver, pewter and wood suggests there was quite a party planned, not to mention a record-breaking amount of washing up. Today’s party planners to the rich and famous don’t know they’re born …