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25

To prepare a thick broth called zabaglione

1570

AUTHOR: Bartolomeo Scappi

FROM: Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi: Maestro dell’arte del cucinare

(The Works of Bartolomeo Scappi: Master of the Art of Cooking)

Get six uncooked fresh egg yolks without the whites, six ounces of sweet malmsey [fortified sweet wine], three ounces of sugar, a quarter ounce of ground cinnamon and four ounces of pure water; mix everything together. Put it through a sieve or a colander. Cook in a small kettle with boiling water – that is, get a copper cooking basin – containing enough water that the kettle is sitting in three fingers of it; boil the water until the zabaglione thickens like a thick broth. You can put a little fresh butter with that zabaglione and, instead of the malmsey, a trebbiano from Pistoia or else some other sweet wine. If you do not want the preparation so fumy, use less wine and more water. In Milan that preparation is given to pregnant women. Although it can be made with whites and yolks, you have to put it through a strainer because of the eggs’ tread [sic]. It is served hot.

When the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici married a similar-aged French teenager, one Henri, Duc d’Orléans, in Marseilles at a service conducted by her uncle, Pope Clement VII, what consequences did the French foresee? Possibly not that as a result of this Italian/French union future generations would enjoy an enhanced tradition of gastronomy embodied in the likes of richly sweet and yellow zabaglione. The foodie consequences of Catherine’s life and her influence on France for generations to come were overshadowed at the time by rather more dramatic happenings. It wasn’t until many years after her death that historians picked through the turmoil in her life to assess her legacy in areas such as pastry and cake baking.

Cruel, frightening and short, Catherine’s childhood was not what most of us today would regard as regular. She may have been born into the rich Medici family of Florence – the wealthiest and most powerful of what was once a city-state – but her parents died when she was just months old and she became a political pawn. First passed to a grandmother, then after the latter’s death a year later, to an aunt, she lived for a time at the family home, the grand Palazzo Medici in Florence. There she was thrown into the usual rounds of court dances and banquets until rampaging Spaniards, and Italian attempts to appease them, put the ten-year-old Medici in danger and led to her being exiled.

The McEwan Collection, National Trust Photographic Library / Derrick E. Witty

Catherine de Medici brought Italian food to France and is widely regarded as the mother of French gastronomy.

She was placed in a convent for her safety until the Pope, her uncle, decided to move her to Rome. There, barely into her teens, she was eyed by Italian nobility as suitable marriage fodder. Foreign royalty cast their eyes over her too, with the winning hand played by the French court. Not showing much potential as a beauty, she was paired with the French king’s second son. Her uncle structured the deal, helping to seal it by marrying the couple himself.

That Henri was also a teenager offered little comfort. His father insisted on watching the consummation and, whatever psychological effects this would have had on the girl, she didn’t manage to conceive for ten years. To compound the misery, her young husband took up with his nanny, Diane de Poitiers, who became his mistress, and in the ensuing years had his ’n’ her double ‘D’s emblazoned on monuments and buildings across the city.

And if Catherine thought marrying the second son might at least ensure a relatively quiet life, any such ideas were quashed when she was thrust into the limelight after her husband’s elder brother died aged eighteen. Soon her husband became king, she queen, and while she failed to produce heirs, her husband was siring several illegitimate children, courtesy of his mistress. Catherine didn’t find much solace with the public either, who rather sniffed at her background. She may have been born of rich bankers but she was not noble by birth. Her detractors called her the Italian ‘grocer’.

Yet she never complained, and was always courteous and charming. She did finally manage to bear children, ten in fact, of which a few survived and, as was the way in those tumultuous times, three became king. Not able to succeed to the throne as a woman, she remained regent. After her husband’s death (he was poked in the eye by a lance during a joust to celebrate the marriage of one of their children), she had his mistress removed from the scene and became the adept, Machiavellian even, power-broker behind the throne. All of which history is important to recount before turning our attention back to zabaglione.

As Catherine’s power grew, so did her influence. She inspired fashions – from thinner waists to higher heels – encouraged the arts, invested in books, erected buildings and added to them, introduced new dancing, tailoring and perfumes. She may not have been a beauty herself – ‘her mouth is too large and her eyes too prominent’ said a contemporary – but she gathered together a glamorous entourage. ‘The court of Catherine de Medici was a veritable paradise and a school for all the chivalry and flower of France,’ recorded one sixteenth-century historian. ‘Ladies shone there like stars in the sky on a fine night.’

And if one wonders how Catherine coped with the apparent isolation of those early wedded teen years, there is a very clear answer: food. When she came to Paris, she was not alone. She brought cooks, and her cooks brought ingredients and know-how.

At the time of her marriage, on 28 October 1533, gastronomy was reaching a high point in Florence. Knowledge had been accumulating since Apicius was writing recipes back in AD 10. And now new ingredients were arriving, thanks to the Spanish conquistadors. The court menus from the time show considerable Italian influence too. There is macaroni, along with sweetbreads, truffles, sherbets, even ices (records exist of her bringing a Sicilian to Paris to make granitas for a wedding party). Her cooks brought their techniques with them, so that along with deep-frying we see the introduction of béchamel sauce, crêpes and cooking with a bain-marie. The latter crucial for that zabaglione, the device – a container of hot water in which a smaller container holding the food is inserted – enabling the cook to whisk the mixture while it warms gently without burning.

It was brought to France, some say, by Catherine who knew of it from the medieval Spanish alchemist Maria de Cleofa who wrote on medicine, magic and cookery. Although others claim the device was invented far earlier. Was it, for example, alchemist Miriam the Prophetess (also known as Mary the Jewess), the sister of Moses, who is mentioned in Exodus, who invented it? Or did Apicius come up with the idea, as he appears to have used one to keep food warm when his boss was vague about what time he should serve dinner.

Whoever originally thought up the bain-marie, the Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi didn’t appear to have a name for it, as is evident from his recipe for zabaglione. It was just this type of recipe, published in Italy – during the years that Catherine was the French Queen Mother – and then translated into other languages, that her chefs would have turned out in her kitchens along with her beloved artichoke. The latter ingredient which Scappi turns into soup and makes a nice tart with.

She often overdid it on the artichoke front, in fact, specifically on the day of the wedding of one Marquis de Loménie to Mademoiselle de Martigues in June 1576. The French diarist Pierre de L’Estoile records how ‘the Queen Mother ate so much she thought she would die, and was very ill with diarrhoea. They said it was from eating too many artichoke bottoms and the combs and kidney of cockerels, of which she was very fond.’

A great lover of food in general, Catherine kept her own personal recipes, from fish dishes to soups, while her chefs were keen to demonstrate to the French how herbs and spices could be used to enhance the flavour of meat and not just added to conceal the fact that it had gone off, a practice common since medieval times. Nearly eighty years later, in 1651, La Varenne’s definitive cookbook Le Cuisinier François reflects this influence. His spices are flavour-enhancers not foils, his touches are more delicate; he uses a roux as a sauce thickener, for instance, rather than just bread.

Likewise Catherine separated sweet dishes from savoury, and arranged courses with that in mind, the medieval way to still have plenty of courses, but the table still with an array of puddings (jellies or blancmanges, for example) alongside the meat. Thus, fully laden with olive oil, beans and good cooks, she was able to remain unfazed by her husband’s behaviour by getting stuck into the catering arrangements.

Her tastes and cooking did not just bring Italian food to France, but helped transform French cooking into a rich discipline, in which French cuisine actually enhanced the Italian contribution, with certain techniques, almost forgotten in Italy, given a new lease of life in France. In this respect, Catherine de Medici is regarded as the mother of French gastronomy. As the twentieth-century writer Jean Orieux has put it: ‘It was exactly a Florentine who reformed the antique French cooking of medieval tradition; and was reborn as the modern French cooking.’

Meanwhile, Catherine’s culinary ideas were disseminated across the country. Her cooks demonstrated professional cookery to the staff of other households. Visitors tasted her dishes at her frequent ‘magnificences’ or feasts and they saw her embroidered table-cloths, her porcelain plates and Venetian glass. They also saw her forks, an implement as yet unknown in France and one that still took some considerable time for the French to get used to. With her bread-making, pastries and cakes, Catherine set a new style that reached its zenith 200 years later during the reign of Louise XIV at Versailles. Outliving most of her children, and navigating her way through plots, assassinations and massacres, she had an instinct for survival that carried her through childhood and beyond and ensured that French gastronomy would be nothing if it weren’t for the Italians.