Micrologus; Recipe for a Banquet

82-16 RECIPE FOR A BANQUET

How many times have you given a dinner party and agonized over the music you would serve your guests during each course—Gregorian chant with the hors d'oeuvres, perhaps—little knowing that there was a book which could help you with that very subject, provided, of course, that you have the budget of a Duke and are accustomed to entertaining 50-odd guests, each one with the appetite of a blue whale!

In 1549, Cristoforo da Messisbugo, a steward of the d’Este family of Ferrara, published detailed descriptions of ten banquets, three lunches, and a soiree which he himself had organized over the preceding 20 years. He prints these not merely as documents glorifying the events (which they do), but as guides for equally ambitious hosts, and one of his messages is that appropriate music must be chosen for each course of the dinner. Messisbugo must have convinced somebody, because his book went through 15 editions, the last edition in the third decade of the 17th century. On today's Micrologus, I will be reading some of the dishes which comprise just a few of the courses which Messisbugo describes. Almost all are from a single event:

A banquet given on Saturday, May 20, 1529, by Ippolito d’Este, Archbishop of Milan, for his brother Ercole d’Este, Duke of Chartres (later Duke of Ferrara), his brother's wife, Renée de France, Francesco d'Este, and various other lords, ladies, and gentlemen, fifty-four in all.

Some of the dishes may sound unpalatable to us today, but I expect that others will send the more adventurous cooks scurrying to the kitchen, inspired to an act of mouth-watering recreation:

When the guests had gathered, they went into the garden, where an elaborately decorated table had been prepared. On the left side of the garden was a bower under which the musicians sat and played throughout the meal. They began, naturally, with:

Hors d'oeuvres

Marzipan biscuits

Asparagas salad

Anchovy salad

Pastries filled with caviar

Tuna stomachs, pickled in brine

Marinated catfish

Then came the real first course:

100 hard-boiled eggs, split and stuffed and served with a french sauce

Sturgeon's milk, pike's spleen and other seafood delicacies, fried and garnished with orange, cinnamon and sugar

A white soup, called diamond soup

Fluffy Catalan pancakes

Small fried fish from the Po river

and during this first course trombones and cornetti played.

[MUSIC]

During the sixth course, there was:

Loin of veal, roasted, with cherry sauce

Peacocks roasted on a spit

Deer meat, covered with lemons and with red sauce in honor of the Most Reverend Archbishop

Wild boar in dark broth sprinkled with almond slivers

Little pastries stuffed with meringue, eggs, cheese and sugar

Marinated lake trout, served hot

104 Mediterranean Bream fish, grilled, with leeks and small onions, sauteed in butter, and topped with spices

And during this sixth course, Rozanti and five companions and two ladies sang songs and madrigals and they went around the table debating in dialect about rustic things.

[MUSIC]

During the seventh course there were:

Fat kidneys in dark wine broth, with almond pieces

Pike fried In Spanish sauce

Fried shad-fish, covered with sugar and cinnamon

Raisin soup

Marinated giant catfish, served hot

Omelettes with fresh caviar

Various kinds of German pastry, filled with marzipan and fried

Pies made with vegetables, eggs, sugar and white wine

And during this seventh course, a pipe and tabor player of Renée de France came out of the bower with couples who danced around the table.

[MUSIC]

During the eleventh course, there were:

Giant trout tails, fried

Sturgeon boiled, German style, in white wine and orange juice

Florentine egg pies, filled with raisins and pine-nuts, and dusted with sugar and cinnamon

Venetian cuttlefish stew

French-style eggs

Fried sparrows with oranges

And during this eleventh course, from out of the bower came a richly dressed young lady who played and sang to the lute superbly well.

[MUSIC]

During the thirteenth course, there were:

French-style pastries with carp

60 stuffed pastries, 30 with cracked wheat and 30 with eggs and cheese in meringue

Fish from the fountains, and lobster, shelled and fried

Creamed spinach over slices of bread

A fine ragout

Little cakes with cream

Turtle, lightly fried with a special sauce

And during this thirteenth course viols played.

[MUSIC]

During the sixteenth course, there were:

Little pastries made with large cherries

Italian cream pies

Pastries made with large dates

Clear gelatin in the french style

500 oysters, fried with a twist of lemon

Fresh bean pastries, with egg yolks and fresh cheese cut into curls

Sweet pastry in the form of stuffed ring cakes

Stewed prunes

And during this sixteenth course, four French singers sang embellished chansons.

[MUSIC]

During the seventeenth course, there were:

Fresh beans

Piacenza and Marzolino cheeses

Cherries

60 artichokes

Chestnuts in roses

Buttermilk and herbs, with candied aniseed and whipped cream

And during this seventeenth and last course, and while the guests washed their hands with perfumed water, Alfonso della Viola conducted a composition with voices, viols, lutes, trombone, recorder and many other instruments. It was very well concerted and thought by everyone to have been the best thing they had yet heard.

[MUSIC]

After this last official course there was dessert, including one confection of cinnamon pine-nuts, pistachio nuts, melon seeds, and aniseed, all mixed together and coated with white sugar.

The very last dish was indeed a useful one: 100 perfumed toothpicks, with white napkins.

The Archbishop then gave a gift to each of his guests, and while the gifts were being distributed, four flutes played.

[MUSIC]

After the Archbishop had given gifts to all his guests, and as the clock struck five, the shawms started up and twenty-four musicians came out of the bower and danced a most beautiful Moresca, after which the guests went home.

[MUSIC]

The inspiration for this program came from an article by Howard Mayer Brown, entitled: “A Cook's Tour of Ferrara in 1529.” More information on the pageantry of Medieval and Renaissance banquets, along with a few recipes, can be found in the book Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony by Madeline Pelner Cosman. Actual cookbooks with recipes for many of these delicacies include: To the King’s Taste and To the Queen’s Taste, both available from Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Pleyn Delight: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, from the University of Toronto Press.