The Renaissance Cookbook by Berengario delle Cinqueterre

The Renaissance Cookbook

by Berengario delle Cinqueterre

1975

Pre-Owned Hardcover

108 Pages

Condition:  Fine

Here is a cookbook that soars far beyond the kitchen and above the banquet board. It uses recipes and cookery as a platform to raise the reader to a marvelous new perspective on a fabulous age. The author, a broad scholar of the Renaissance period (as well as a noted cook), takes us behind the recipes to reveal Renaissance attitudes toward food, eating, and living; attitudes which "come as close to defining a civilization's essence as any record of battles fought or policies pursued."

Bounding exuberantly from saucepan to salon, Mr. delle Cinqueterre sprinkles his carefully researched recipes with Medici, Francois I, Borgia and Cellini like so many emblematic pine nuts. Machiavelli's miracle-working meat, Dante's excessive eel, Titian's game, Lorenzo il Magnifico's obscene sweets, and eccentric uses of the egg all find places in this rampant (and very witty) narrative.