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The Renaissance of Cookery

"Le malheur de toutes les cuisines excepté de la cuisine française, c'est d'avoir l'air d'une cuisine de hasard. La cuisine française est seule raisonnée, savante, chimique." - ALEXANDRE DUMAS: Le Caucase. T is not unnatural that cookery as an art should finally have been resumed in the land where it had once attained its greatest development. First among Italian treatises on the subject was the volume of Bartolomeo Platina, "De Honesta Voluptate et Valitudine," which was written in Latin and printed at Venice in 1474, a year or two after the introduction of printing into that city. Many editions of this appeared subsequently, as also translations in French and German. Other Italian treatises of the sixteenth century were Rosselli's "Opera Nova chiamata Epulario" (Venice, 1516); a work by Christoforo di Messisbugo, chef to the Cardinal of Ferrara (Ferrara, 1549); a manual by Bartolomeo Scappi, privy cook to Pope Pius V (Venice, 1570); and works by Vincenzo Cervio, Domenico Romoli, and Gio. Battista Rossetti-Cervio and Romoli having been respectively carver and cook to Cardinal Farnese. The two most important Italian culinary publications of the seventeenth century were those of Vittorio Lancioletti (Rome, 1627) and Antonio Frugoli (Rome, 1632). In addition to these was the old Roman treatise "De re Culinaria" of Cœlius Apicius, published in 1498, as well as many works relating to wines and the hygiene of gastronomy.