The Refinement of the Dish; Piero Camporesi Breaks it Down

I just completed a small and fascinating volume that I accidentally stumbled across in the library a few weeks ago. The works of Italian historian Piero Camporesi have slowly become more and more readily available in English translations, and he's released a series of works exploring the ways cuisine and food evolved within European society. Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment might sound like a rather dull topic of study, but I was surprised at how lively, bizarre and humorous Camporesi's style proved to be. As European society (and in this book, that largely means Italy and France) moved away from the Dark Ages and into the glare of the Enlightenment, a radical shift in diet and food preparation followed, with portions changing, new ingredients flooding kitchens, and "strong" spices deemed utterly barbaric. Camporesi details the oddities of fleeting food fads, such as an earlier mania for "chickens fed on viper meat" being left behind in the mid-18th century, or the wholesale gluttony devoted to dark cocoa, in which rumors flew that the Cardinal of York drank 30 pounds of melted chocolate every morning.

Camporesi's research is stunning, and he seems to have considered every cookbook or recipe collection worth noting, along with poems and anecdotes from writers both high and low, while conducting research for this book. The recipes themselves are wonderful, if rather impractical - whimsical and poetic, such as Lorenzo Magalotti's 1762 recipe for crested peacock:

A young plump peacock caught in the wild,
dancing rings round thrushes and buntings:
Take a thick chunk of fresh lard
whose rind is dyed Brazil-wood red
and was reared on the slopes of the Alps
making the lard thick and plentiful.

With a knife cut the lard into strips
quite as fine as vermicelli:
for the finer you slice it
the tastier your lard strips will be.

Having carefully plucked the bird clean,
now sit down and, trapping it beneath you, begin,
with needle poised, to stuff this multicoloured
marvel both trousers and doublet.

Other recipes and dinner suggestions are even more outlandish. My favorite detail involved the cultural struggle as the nobility shifted away from the consumption of "large quadrupeds" such as wild boar and fallow deer - those "heavy and viscous meats," as Camporesi calls them. Apparently, old habits died hard, as an amusing digression on Grand Duke and chief physician Francesco Redi makes clear. Hard at work in the dissection lab, his head filled with higher notions of investigative science, he apparently could not ignore the fallow-deer brain lying in the laboratory, and "cast it sizzling into a frying pan." While his compatriots might have been horrified at the consumption of such a variety meat (dubbed "Lutheran villainy,") Redi writes with pride that the brains were brought to him "piping hot and well roasted" by his "ashamed" servant, and "after repeating this safe and careful experiment many times over," he proclaimed the fallow brain "a noble thing indeed," much better than even dolphin brains, which he had previously considered the finest in all the cerebral land, "considering that one can eat them during Lent and other compulsory fasts."

I'll leave Redi to his fallow-deer brains. But I couldn't sign off without citing my favorite passage from the entire book, a sentence as richly decadent as the food it describes (although I'll bet it sounded even better in Italian) :

A new taste, a new poetics and a new style were introducing order, measure and moderation into areas where the excesses and extravagances of the baroque imagination had created bulky, majestic and bombastic cascades of main dishes, marvels of decoration, cream-syringed rhetoric, multiple roasts a surprise, batter-gilded meats, monstrous amber-scented pies, sumptuous glace emblems, ornamented apotheoses and gelatinous tapestries of liquified lard.

"Gelatinous tapestries of liquified lard".... I don't know whether to binge or purge.