7 - Dispatch From the Last Supper

Dateline Pisa:

Medieval Fair - Volterra 1398 AD

As we ponder our last long menu at our last historic site, we return to the conversation that mixes the two - Italian food and ancient history.  

Pizza in 1398?  With what?

It has become clear that food was not always so nice here.  Most of Italy’s ancient old sons (and old daughters) never tasted “Italian cooking.” 

Medieval Fare

Left to their own devices, the choices of the Italian cook would be about as varied as salt, olives, bread, and wine - plus what they could kill.

Spaghetti, as a major example, was a relatively recent import, not from Marco Polo’s visit to a noodle shop - but from the Moslems bringing in the durum wheat from Persia that would make hard pasta.  

Europe sent a few waves of Crusaders down south, and up came coffee, sugar, rice, dates, mulberries, almonds, coconuts, watermelon, bananas and citrus fruits (oranges, limes and tangerines) into today’s menus.

Modern Delivery to
Medieval Streets

Europeans were once so hungry for flavor that major wars popped up over the few boatloads of cloves, cinnamon and a couple of other items that started to leak in from the “Spice Islands” of Asia.  Those spices, I note, are mostly absent in Italy’s recipes. I imagine after a few months at sea in a boatload of the stuff, no Genoese, Venetian or any Italian sailor wanted to smell it ever again.

You want some sauce on that Spaghetti?  No tomatoes or peppers until Columbus “discovered” them while looking for water buffalo milk to make mozzarella.  Europe exported plague, cholera, syphilis, smallpox and the cross to the Americas - in exchange for corn, potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, chili peppers, vanilla, beans, pumpkins, tapioca, avocados, peanuts, pecans, cashews, pineapples, blueberries, sunflowers, squash, wild rice, quinine, vanilla and chocolate.  Oh, and tobacco - perhaps Montezuma’s real revenge.

As we plop down in a restaurant in an old palazzo on a piazza in Pisa. We ponder our plates.  

If we reject all pre-Columbus items on the menu, Bill’s pepperoni-peperoncini-parmigiano pizza pomodoro would be out.  My panini of pancetta and pecorino, gone too. Eleanor’s plate of panzanella and Jean’s polenta and penne pasta con pesto - nope. Chris couldn’t even sneak in the pile of pastrami much less a panacotta.

All that would be left is the bottle of prosecco and a couple of cold Peroni beers.  So while the piazza pulses Pavarotti’s Puccini from the nearby palazzo, we are happy to be eating our last supper in Italy today, and not way back then.

- Supping Stew

Pisa? Pizza? (Shrug)