The Italian Renaissance has always amazed the spectator for the magnificence of its banquets, for the refinement of the furnishings and for the sumptuousness of the foods that were served to give prestige and vent to the wealth of the landlord. All the images that come to us represent stately banquets where the placement of the guests followed a ritual not unlike the medieval one or the Roman triclinium. The consumption of the dishes was a real show, where even the food became the protagonist through the cutting of the meat which was performed "on the fly" by the carver, a figure whose role was closely linked to the "carver".
The carver was the true protagonist of the Renaissance banquet since he summarized in himself the functions of today's maître di sala, but also of the wedding planner, having every ample power to organize the menu, the number of courses, the furnishings of the room and the roles of the dining room and kitchen staff as well as the shows that accompanied the moment of the meal.
The information on our Renaissance in the kitchen comes not only from a large literature, but also from a compulsive pictorial activity that has not only given us back paintings of real life, but also through the development of the whole line of still lifes whose elective object was just the food.
The painter J. Beuchelaer is undoubtedly among the most significant of this period as he aimed at representing the opulence of stately homes and the wide availability of food. In his paintings it is possible to find every type of food in the shapes and colors similar to those available in a modern kitchen. In any case, the paintings of this period betray the excessive consumption of meat and more generally of proteins of animal origin, which are no longer limited to the lowly court and the results of hunting, but flaunt a wide availability of fishery products and beef, at a time when cattle were the animal engine of the farm.
The sacrifice of cattle for food constituted itself the ostentation of an unusual abundance, being able to subtract the animal from the life cycle of the farm. In the paintings, the size of the fruits and vegetables also arouse considerable wonder, significant of a highly evolved agriculture with a high biodiversity. The recipes we have show the use of dozens of ingredients with preparation sequences that require kitchen staff and large spaces for preparing the dishes.
Most of the recipes that have come down to us thanks to the work of Cristoforo da Messisbugo or Bartolomeo Scappi provide for a methodical use of sugar and not just on desserts. The high cost of sugar and its white colour, a symbol of purity, define a status symbol of the Renaissance banquet. It is known that sugar had been imported from the East for centuries, but probably many are unaware that Sicily and part of Calabria, after 1300, were producers of cane sugar.
In fact, the Arabs had already introduced in the XNUMXth century AD not only the cultivation of sugar cane, but also the technology for the extraction and crystallization of sugar in conical blocks. In fact, the vegetable tissues of the cane were crushed inside a real oil mill and the juice obtained underwent three firings. The thick liquid thus obtained was poured into conical clay vessels, with the typical shape of an inverted funnel so that the liquid fraction, containing non-crystallizable residual sugars, could come out of the basal hole, while the residual mass with a high consistency, slowly crystallized inside the conical container.
