RECIPES ARE (HI)STORIES

Look at the modern day recipe and notice how it’s just like the script of any theater piece.

You’ve got the dramatis personae: the list, one by one, of the ingredients. They’re to be the players upon the stage. You’ll soon follow as they interact with each other.

The recipe’s directions are Act One, Act Two, and so forth. Some plays are short and sweet; others, long and involved.

The curtain goes down at the recipe’s ta-da. “Serve.”

As such, recipes always have told their own internal stories. But, looked at over time, they also tell the story of how we humans have cooked. You can read recipes as history, from the earliest Babylonian cuneiform to today’s Pinterest or Instagram posts.

Ancient recipes are short, with minimal measurement (or none at all). Run-on sentences weren’t the thing when pushing out words on a small piece of wet clay with a reed stylus. (Neither were spaces nor punctuation, neither of which had been thought of yet.)

Plus, even after the invention of the printing press and books, there wasn’t much point in writing down a recipe. There weren’t readers to read them.

Early recipes were for the benefit of a super select audience of people: the few who could read and the fewer who already knew how to cook. You easily can see how older recipes simply assumed that the cook knew what to do with, for example, “blossoms moistened with wine” in Apicius’s first century A.D. directions for “Another Sauce for Fowl.”

What sort of blossoms? How much wine? The cook knew; it didn’t need stating.

Humans are the only animals who cook their food. For a long time, we didn’t even do that and ate paleo, like all the other monkeys.

But when we started to cook—which simply meant, tamed and used fire—you will read about how we came to be even more human, that is to say, how we increased the nutritive value of foodstuffs. Wheat, potatoes, or rice, for instance, aren’t palatable or usable as food unless subject to fire.

Recipes for bread and congee, therefore, are stories about the history of being human.

Recipes also tell how we learned to preserve our food, hence our nutrition and our energy, by smoking, salting, pickling, and fermenting it.

Recipes tell how some of us were wealthier and more powerful than others, by dint of social status or position or mobility or birth, because some of us could afford or obtain certain foodstuffs that others of us could not.

Today, I read every recipe as a story, whether one from the past or a new posting on a cooking site. It always tells me about itself—it is its own story—and it often tells me about us, about how we came to be who and how we are.

Photo by Yoav Aziz on Unsplash.

Today’s two recipes are for the same thing, ravioli, pockets of pasta stuffed with meat and cheese. The older recipe is from “Libro de arte coquinaria,” published in 1475 by Martino de Rossi, commonly known by his nickname, Platina. Its form is narrative, as recipes were written in that day, with no stand-alone list of ingredients and minimal measurement.

Precise measures for ingredients in recipes did not come about until the late 1800s, in the cookbooks of Britain’s Isabella Beeton (1861) and America’s Fanny Merritt Farmer (1896).

In Platina’s recipe, “libra” refers to an ancient Roman measurement of weight, about a third of a kilogram, or 12 ounces. The libra was the forerunner to the British and American pound, the abbreviation for which—“lb.”—derives from “libra.” And, as for cooking time for the ravioli, which would have been for fresh, not dried, pasta, it takes about a full minute to recite “two Lord’s Prayers” in Latin.

Domenica Marchetti’s recipe for “Meat Ravioli” is of the sort anyone cooking today would recognize and appreciate for its precision and careful direction.

RECIPE: Ravioli for Non-Lenten Times
From Platina, 1475.

To make ten servings: take a half libra of aged cheese, and a little fatty cheese and a libra of fatty pork belly or veal teat, and boil until it comes apart easily; then chop well and take some good, well-chopped herbs, and pepper, cloves, and ginger: and it would be even better if you added some ground capon breast; incorporate all these things together. Then take a thin sheet of pasta and encase the mixture in the pasta, as for other ravioli. These ravioli should not be larger than half a chestnut; cook them in capon broth, or good meat broth that you have made yellow with saffron when it boils. Let the ravioli simmer for the time it takes to say two Lord’s Prayers.

RECIPE: Filling for Meat Ravioli
From foodandwine.com, by Domenica Marchetti

Ingredients
2 teaspoons unsalted butter
2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 pound ground pork, veal, turkey or chicken (or a mixture of all four)
1/2 small onion, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1 ounce mortadella, finely chopped
1 ounce prosciutto, finely chopped
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
1 large egg, lightly beaten

Directions
In a skillet, melt the butter in the oil. Add the ground meat, onion and garlic and season with salt and pepper. Cook over moderate heat, stirring to break up lumps, until the meat is cooked and the onion is tender, 10 minutes. Add the wine and cook over moderately high heat until evaporated, 4 minutes.

Scrape the mixture into a food processor and pulse until the meat is finely chopped. Scrape the ravioli filling into a bowl and let cool. Stir in the Parmigiano, mortadella, prosciutto and nutmeg and season with salt and pepper. Stir in the beaten egg.