Dirt

by Bill Buford

  In 1532, when Catherine was thirteen, the medical doctor, poet, narrative impresario, and gourmandizing raconteur François Rabelais arrived in the city and published his first book, Pantagruel. It was a hymn to eating—you could call it “variations on a theme of excess”—documenting the original Lyonnais menu: pork, chicken, saucisson, including the new “rosette,” and lots and lots of red wine.

  In 1541, when Catherine dei Medici was twenty-two and now a French princess (now Catherine de’ Médici), another cookbook was translated from the Italian: Bastiment de receptes, nouvellement traduict de italien en langue françoyse. Lyon—where the interest in food was, well, Rabelaisian—was by now the capital of books about cuisine.

  In 1547, Rabelais, at the invitation of French Cardinal Jean du Bellay, attended a celebration of a prince’s birth in Rome and wrote about the feast he witnessed—with multiple courses and flamboyant presentations—unlike anything that he had seen in France.

  In 1548, that feast held to welcome Swiss ambassadors to Lyon was unusual enough in its ambition and its scope (the multi-courses, the flamboyance, the wit) that a record of the meal was made and published.

  And it was also in 1548, on September 23 (just months after yet another “improved” edition of Platina was published), that Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici first entered Lyon. Is it possible that, amid all this, Catherine’s entourage, floating majestically down the Saône, included a boat of Italian cooks? Is it likely that, along the quai, a pack of donkeys marched in tandem, bearing panniers of the vegetables and cheeses and cured meats that Italians have alleged that she introduced to France?

  No. Because they were already there.

  * * *

  —

  BLOIS. On another trip to the Loire, I uncovered a secret possession of Catherine de’ Medici.

  We were in the Royal Castle in Blois for an unusually specific exhibit, “Les Festins de la Renaissance,” about eating and drinking in the sixteenth century, the very period when the French kitchen was about to be born. A festin is a celebratory banquet or gala, a feast. Blois was the royal home of, among others, Catherine de’ Medici and her sons. The exhibit was in the castle and gathered up two hundred years of kitchen artifacts, mainly from Italy and France: books, tools, dishes, menus. They illustrated how the French ate at the beginning of the period, with a tranche, a piece of bread for scooping, and then a knife for cutting (guests arrived with their own blades), and at the end, with early ornate examples of forks acquired from Italy, including one that could be kept in your pocket (you brought it with you when invited to dinner). The exhibition included a long kitchen scroll, on which Niccolò Alamanni, Catherine de’ Medici’s chef, wrote out family meals. It could almost be seen as “the smoking gun”—the chef (an Italian) writing out instructions (in Italian) of (Italian) dishes for the sons of an Italian mother and the future kings of France. The parchment was a wonder to come upon, the rich vellum, the care of the presentation, its flamboyant script, this act of feeding France.

  We met the historian of the castle’s museum, joined him at a Renaissance re-enactment lunch (guinea hen in a pot, carp in a sauce, fava beans in saffron, marzipan according to a recipe by Nostradamus), and were told that the exhibit was just a pretense. The real excitement was the conference occasioned by it. It would be the first time that historians gathered to discuss who had invented French cuisine: The French? The Italians? Or the French and the Italians?

  “There will be no resolution,” he promised. “The French don’t listen to the Italians. The Italians won’t listen to the French.”

  After lunch, I drove with my family downriver to Amboise to show them Leonardo da Vinci’s home, where the boys ran in the gardens among the re-creations of his inventions. Seeing the two exhibits on the same visit—the treasures, largely Italian, of the French sixteenth-century kitchen, and the treasures, entirely Italian, of a Renaissance genius—was powerfully affecting. There were three paintings, historical reimaginings, of the king holding the hand of a weakened Leonardo in his last days. Leonardo, the almost incomprehensibly brilliant embodiment of the Italian Renaissance, died in a bed that François Premier had given him.

  * * *

  —

  At the conference, I learned about the fifteenth-century Italian obsession with lemons. I learned, to my surprise, that Catherine de’ Medici, during her ascendancy, introduced a breed of Italian cows to France and implemented innovations in animal care. Timothy Tomasik read another paper, on the many French translations of Platina. Marjorie Meiss-Even, a scholar at the University of Lille, read her findings from a kitchen inventory that she had discovered among the archives of the powerful Guise family, in which, bit by bit, Italian ingredients began appearing around the 1550s, some acquired at the foires in Lyon, some via travelers—asparagus, artichokes, shallots, citrus, even Parmigiano, so-called fromage de Milan—until, finally, they became essentials in the French diet. It was a stunning piece of research, and the room was reverentially still through the reading of it.

  At some point, I found myself wondering how many “preuves incontestables” do you need before the proof is, in fact, incontestable.

  In many respects, the conference was insistently about one figure: Scappi. Scappi was the ghost. He was there, and he wasn’t.

  Bartolomeo Scappi is—owing to a multi-volume book written in 1570, at the end of his working life (called simply Opera, the Works, of the Private Cook to the Pope)—universally recognized to be the greatest chef of the European Renaissance. It is nine hundred pages long and meticulously detailed—it is, in fact, the first known illustrated cookbook in history, an evocative celebration of what a grand sixteenth-century kitchen looked like—and has become a reference for how the food was cooked in it, and with what tools. It includes menus for three-day feasts, weeklong feasts, flamboyant no-meat feasts on fish-only Fridays, and a two-month-plus feast that began on November 29, 1549, on the death of Paul III, and ended on February 7, on the announcement of a new pope. Scappi’s range includes cow udders in their many variations, testicles (stuffed and roasted), and peacocks (boned, reconstructed, re-“plumed,” and served in slices, anticipating the now more modest-seeming Lyonnais volaille à Noelle that Daniel Boulud would teach me). Many of the sauces that are now the fundamentals of the French kitchen (such as Béarnaise and Hollandaise) and many of the techniques (such as pâte feuilletée) appeared in print, first, written by Scappi. What Scappi represented, more vividly than any other chef of the era, was dinner as spectacle, and the meal as an expression of high culture.

  But he was never translated into French. There is no evidence the book even reached France, and for Florent Quellier, cochair of the conference, that lack of evidence was telling.

  Quellier delivered the conference’s opening remarks. He didn’t give a speech. He delivered a tirade. It was like starting a prayer meeting by setting alight a pile of gunpowder. It was exhilarating. Among its several themes was the refrain, Where is Scappi? The assumption: If Italy really influenced the cuisine of France, then surely its most famous book should be an obvious influence. In fact, the argument puts rather a lot of weight on a book that was pretty late in the long queue of texts that had already made an appearance in French. But it was curious.

  Quellier, from the University of Tours, was about fifty, looked about thirty, had cropped hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, and wore white cotton short-sleeve shirts, a tightly knotted narrow black tie, and a look of uncompromising purposefulness. For the duration of the conference, Quellier spoke to no one. He took notes. (He doesn’t do chitchat, a colleague told me; he does mission statements.) In appearance and manner, he could have been an engineer or a mathematician. You don’t look at him and think: Hey, why don’t we have dinner and knock back a couple bottles? You think: Wow! Angry!

  Barbara Ketcham Wheaton had dealt with the Catherine de’ Medici myth by making fun of it. But she didn’t have
access to the cartoon version, an item in Quellier’s presentation, a 1950s comic strip of Donald Duck as a fat, pizza-making Italian chef, his toque falling off his head, his belly slopping over his belt, instructing bewildered Goofy dog figures, standing upright and attentive in their French way, how to cook. The French dogs are baffled but grateful. It was the climax of Quellier’s speech. It was very funny.

  Quellier was a member of the anti-Italian faction. I’m not sure I’ll ever find anyone as outspokenly or aggressively pro-French. His basic position is, yes, until the advent of La Varenne’s book in 1651—Le Cuisinier françois, the text that changed everything—French cooking was still medieval. And, yes, it was influenced by the Italians—a little, he can’t deny it—but it was also influenced by the Spanish, in table manners, for instance, and by the Belgians, and even the Germans. What he can’t find, he said, is “preuves incontestables”—his recurrent phrase—that the Italian influence mattered more than anyone else’s.

  The proof, evidently, isn’t in the many cookbooks translated from the Italian, or in the fact that the Italians had their Renaissance before the French one, or in the protocol of a meal’s presentation—linens, the fork—that the Italians had first and the French imitated, or in the texts by Rabelais and the translations of Platina, or in the Italian chefs in the kitchens of both Catherine de’ Medici and Henri IV, or in the popularizing of Italian ingredients at the foires of Lyon, or in the nearby Italian-built châteaux on the very river where we found ourselves, or in the fact that Leonardo lived nearby or that Italian was spoken at François Premier’s table. The missing proof incontrovertible was in the one text: Scappi’s Opera, the greatest book of Italian cooking, which was never translated into French.

  La Varenne, the forefather of the French kitchen, is not Italian, Quellier said. Has anyone found a passage in La Varenne that acknowledges Scappi? A Scappi recipe, perhaps? An expression of gratitude to my dear friend Monsieur Scappi?

  A Belgian scholar objected, which I found brave and rather risky. “There is Lancelot de Casteau’s Ouverture de cuisine! The text is full of Scappi recipes!”

  Quellier ignored him.

  (The Belgian scholar is correct. The text, published in 1604 in Brussels, is among the first comprehensive attempts to codify a new French cuisine and includes the first description, in French, of pâte feuilletée. And, yes, there are a lot of Scappi recipes. In fact, there are also early versions of French preparations with Italian names: like pâte Poupelin, after the Italian pastry chef Popelini, or fèves de Roma, for the green beans now called haricots verts, or the tourte genoise for what might otherwise be called a “spinach tart.”)

  Quellier pressed on.

  “Is there a translation of Scappi? Did anyone, in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century, have a copy? Where is the Scappi? Where is the Scappi?” Où est le Scappi?

  In fact, there was a pertinent book in the exhibit—in a room that Quellier appeared not yet to have visited—elegantly bound in white leather, a unique, handmade presentation copy. It was dedicated to Catherine de’ Medici. It came from her private library. The title was Il cuoco segreto di Papa Pio V, and the author was Bartolomeo Scappi.

  Even I had been stunned to find it, having come to believe (incorrectly) that Catherine de’ Medici was, in effect, a metaphor of the Italian Renaissance, and that the lessons of the Italian kitchen had been spread to France in the way that any culinary movement crosses borders, not in translation, but by the word-of-mouth of cooks, and by the dishes they learn, bit by bit, in the conversation among people who make food. But then to see the very volume: Wow. It seemed like some kind of message.

  To be fair to Quellier, it is curious that Scappi wasn’t translated into French, whereas so many other, lesser texts had been. But Scappi was also scarcely translated into other languages. It now appears that, in 1570, his famous book was published as an era was nearing its end: as was the Italian Renaissance. The end of the Italian culinary Renaissance is often marked by historians with the publication, a hundred years later, of Antonio Latini (he who persuaded his readers that the tomato wasn’t poisonous), but there were few texts of note published in the seventeenth century. When Scappi sat down to write his book, he was describing a kitchen that no longer existed. The book was a work of retrospection.

  In fact, the Italian dominance of the kitchen was in decline just as the French kitchen was being born.

  VIII

  France (Finally)

  Young people today no longer have gout, but mope around on diets: noodles without butter, butter without bread, bread without sauce, sauce without meat, meat without truffles, truffles without scent, scent without bouquet, bouquet without wine, wine without drunkenness, drunkenness without gaiety….Saints of Paradise! I would rather have gout than deprive myself of all of life’s charms.

  ÉDOUARD DE POMIANE, VINGT PLATS QUI DONNENT LA GOUTTE (TWENTY DISHES THAT GIVE YOU GOUT), 1938, TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  I bought a facsimile edition of La Varenne and sat down to read it—an early-seventeenth-century script, an obscure diction—and didn’t get past the second page. I could read French—and found an early-nineteenth-century text (like Carême) to be as accessible as a book printed today—but the seventeenth-century page was too obscure. There were also so many words that aren’t words anymore, like the ten terms that describe “duck”—not the same kind of duck, evidently, but ten different ducks. A modern English translation by Terence Scully was valuable for its research and its notes, but seemed oddly flat, as if the rough original had suffered by being distorted into intelligibility. (What I should have read, I now know, was the translation that appeared in London two years after Le Cuisinier françois was published in France, a heroic piece of labor that captures the struggle and ingenuity of the original.)

  I came upon a reference to a La Varenne text that I hadn’t known about, L’École des ragoûts (The School of Ragùs), published in Lyon in 1668. I needed a copy. The title alone seemed to mesh into one word the two cultures of my study, Italy and France. In Italian, the word is written ragù, and there are few words that convey more resoundingly la cucina italiana. The Bolognese on your spaghetti: a ragù. Any meat slow-braised until it’s a sauce to dress your pasta: a ragù. The founder of French cooking promoting a school of ragù? Even if the title had nothing to do with the text inside, it was at least a cultural testament: It was what the printer believed would sell.

  But I couldn’t find it. Even Gallica, the digital collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale, didn’t have a copy. (It now does.)

  Then I came upon it on eBay.fr, not prohibitively expensive, and bought it. I was thrilled by my copy when it arrived, a miracle in an ordinary envelope, delivered in the normal manner into our apartment mailbox. It was small, three inches by five, but thick, 425 pages, bound in a patterned, cracking cowhide leather, frayed along the edges, with some tunnels left by bookworms. It was the fourteenth edition. Was that possible? Or just a title-page sales pitch?

  On the inside flap, one of the book’s owners had written, in that flawlessly flowing fountain-pen hand that my children had been taught to do in school, an account of a day’s food shopping, spending 6 francs and 60 centimes for sultanas, cod, a chicken, green beans, sausage, lard, and salad. The cod was 1.20 francs, the chicken 2.78 francs, about what people were paying in Paris around 1890 (which I knew because I had a decade’s worth of the fortnightly publication Pot au Feu, a very seasonal how-to of French cooking for the French housewife, which included price updates on what could be found in the market).

  The first recipe I opened to was three pages long and perfectly easy to read: a pâté in the Italian style encased in puff pastry, filled with veal, three partridges, and ingredients of the Italian Renaissance (raisins, chestnuts, pine nuts, cinnamon, sugar, and a piece of cured lemon). I held the book in my hand, this early specimen of the early printing press, a treasure then, a treasure
now, produced more than five decades before the American Declaration of Independence, and closed my eyes and just imagined—well, everything.

  Only later did I discover that it was a fraud. The text inside wasn’t even by La Varenne. No one knows who wrote it. (A good writer, however.)

  I was now fully intrigued. I could feel the beginnings of what was probably going to become an obsession. Who was La Varenne, and why don’t we know more about him? He was the French kitchen’s equivalent of Shakespeare. It all started with him.

  * * *

  —

  He was the chef for a grand figure, a military man, a marquis, Louis Chalon du Blé.

  Du Blé was governor of Châlon, on the Saône, roughly midway between Lyon and Mâcon, and resided in a grand château, Cormatin. It had been in the family since it was built by his grandfather who was patronized (coincidentally, of course) by Maria de’ Medici. Du Blé had been born at Cormatin, as had his father, and as was du Blé’s first son, whose birth is recorded in the local church records, in the winter of 1652, the year after Le Cuisinier françois was published. Terence Scully points out that it seems likely that La Varenne cooked at the château, although, unfortunately, his kitchen has since burned down and been rebuilt. The château, which was open to the public, was less than an hour away from our home, on our very river. It seemed fitting that the godfather of French cooking would be, in effect, Lyonnais. On a summer Saturday, I took the family on a day trip to see what we might find—a letter, an artifact, some unexpected buried treasure.