Now we've all heard the phrase to eat like a king but today I've decided to up the stakes
and feast like a pope on "Torta d'herbe communi", or common herb pie. Bartolomeo Scappi, personal chef
to the papacy and pioneer of Italian Renaissance cuisine leaves us this recipe which is so rich
that I might have to sell some indulgences just to pay for it. This time on Tasting History.
Today's recipe comes from Bartolomeo Scappi's seminal work the "Opera dellarte del Cucinare"
of 1570. "Per fare torta d'herbe communi" To prepare common herb pie, and it's the herbs that are common
not the pie. Get tender chard greens, spinach tops, mint and marjoram, cut them up small,
wash them and let them drain by themselves. Then get two pounds of fresh ricotta, a pound and a half
of grated Parmesan cheese, six ounces of fat cheese, six ounces of fresh butter, half an ounce of pepper,
three quarters of an ounce of cinnamon, a quarter ounce of cloves, six fresh eggs
beaten and 6 ounces of sugar, with all those things make up a filling. Have a tort pan ready,
lined with a sheet of royal dough and with its flaky-pastry twist around it. Put the filling into
it and cover it with a rippled sheet of pastry. Bake it in an oven or braise it. Serve it hot
it is optional whether you make it deep or shallow." Ilove that he calls this a common herb tort it,
makes it sound so light and healthy and then you read what's actually in it and put your
cardiologist on standby. Despite the cavalcade of coronary clogging constituents it really is
the perfect autumnal dish. I mean why procrastinate on that winter body.
But despite that, it is going to be huge if we use the amounts that Scappi prescribes so I'm going
to halve everything and it's still going to make a massive pie. So for this recipe you will need chard,
spinach, mint and marjoram. Now the amount of those greens that you use in the pie is really up to you,
but i would steer away from using too much mint, and too much margarine because they will definitely
overpower the chard and the spinach. One pound or 450 grams of ricotta cheese, three quarters of
a pound or 340 grams of grated parmesan, 3 ounces or 85 grams of a high-fat cheese. Now he doesn't
specify what fat cheese to use he just says a fat cheese so I ended up using marscapone because it
was becoming popular around that time in Italy and it's a little sweet and you'll see Bartolomeo Scappi
loves sweet things in his food so that's what I'm using, but go ahead and use whatever you like.
Six tablespoons or 85 grams of softened butter, one tablespoon of pepper, four and a half teaspoons of
cinnamon, one half teaspoon of cloves, one half cup of sugar. Now you're probably thinking that I
said the wrong amount of some of those spices. I mean four and a half teaspoons of cinnamon,
and a tablespoon of pepper that's a lot, that's a lot of both of those things and you are right.
We'll get into it but Scappi uses a lot of spices and a lot of sugar. Three medium eggs,
and two portions of flaky pastry dough now when it comes to the dough you can pretty much use
whatever you want he says royal dough, but he's not terribly specific in the book of exactly what that
is. There are multiple versions throughout but it is going to be like a flaky pastry so just make
any kind of flaky pastry. Now he also mentions a flaky pastry twist that was a really complex
leavened pastry that was made with butter,eggs and rose water and then it was sprinkled with
clove, and cinnamon, and sugar, and nutmeg and then it was rolled with either hard-boiled egg yolks,
or bone marrow and then pine nuts and raisins, so really, really complex. Really, really interesting
and something that we're not going to be making today because it was only added as decoration and
then it was actually removed and eaten completely separately. So it's not really part of the dish,
it's just there to kind of bake along with the pie but I would love to someday do an entire episode
just making it because it sounds really weird. So first we are going to blind bake the bottom crust
of our tort and that is because it does tend to get a soggy bottom if you don't. And if you don't,
roll the dough thin enough like I did not it also tends to get a little bit of a soggy bottom so
make sure to roll it nice and thin. So go ahead and preheat your oven to 450 degrees fahrenheit
or 230 celsius. Then line either a deep pie tin or a cake pan with half of your dough,
prick the dough with a fork and then fill it with pie weights. I can't find my pie weights so
I ended up using rice and it works great but you can use beans or whatever you want. Once the oven
is heated set the crust on the lower rack of the oven and bake for about 12 to 15 minutes, or until
it's fairly dried out. Then take it out and let it cool completely. Also go ahead and lower the
oven temperature to 350 fahrenheit or 180 celsius which is what we will bake our tort at. Then wash
and dry your greens, and chop them up nice and fine. Then in a large bowl mix the ricotta, the parmesan
which Scappi calls the greatest of the cheeses, the mascarpone or whatever fat cheese you're using,
and mix them all together until fairly smooth. Then add in the eggs and beat until incorporated .
Then add in the butter and the sugar, and mix together and your spices and mix those in as well.
Finally add in your greens and mix until evenly distributed. Everything before the greens can
be mixed together using an electric mixer, but once you add the greens mix that part by hand
otherwise the greens will get all beat up. Then pour the filling into the crust and smooth the
top.Then place the other half of your dough on to. Now Scappi says it should be rippled which I
thought was really weird because when I put my dough on and rippled it just kind of looked odd,
but then i realized it's because the insides are going to expand a little bit and this will allow
for the dough to expand with it, so then at the end the dough is pretty much flat kind of magical.
Now you can put the tort in the oven right now, but if you want to give the top a little bit of
color while you're in there go ahead and put an egg wash on top. Then set the tort in the oven
on the lowest rack for one hour, or until the top is nice and golden. Now while our tort bakes I am
going to subscribe to a glass of wine and ask that you subscribe to Tasting History and make sure to
hit that notification bell so you never miss your weekly dose of food history. Also that reminds me
let us look at what else signore Scappi's opera prescribes when feeding a pope.
Pope Pius V was consecrated in 1566 and almost immediately started to reform the vatican
from what he saw as overindulgent. Kinda looks like a sneaky Santa Claus in that image, right? One
of his first actions was a papal bull prohibiting bullfighting an anti-bull bull but that was
followed by a number of less endearing decrees such as the banishment of Jews from most of the
papal states in 1569. But in his fervor to reform the Church he also did away with many of the
lavish state dinners that had become so popular under his predecessors. So that left Bartholomeo
Scappi while not out of a job, but with a lot more time on his hands. So just like I have that YA
fantasy novel kicking around in my head, and one day i'm gonna put it down on paper and ship it
off to a publisher, Scappi had one thousand recipes in his head which he finally had time to put down
for us in a book. So in 1570 Scappi published the Opera dellarte del Cucinare, more often referred to
as Scappi's opera and that means "Scappi's work". It doesn't actually mean like an opera like we talk
about it today, there is no singing unfortunately in this book. The opera is actually broken up into
six books: the first being an imagined conversation with his apprentice Giovanni kind of telling
him how best to run a kitchen and what's really interesting is you get a glimpse into the mindset
of a chef of the Italian Renaissance. "He must be alert, patient and modest in everything he does, and
as sober as possible because whoever is without a good deal of sobriety loses patience as well
as a natural taste of things." Though I find a glass of wine in the kitchen actually aids in patience.
"He should place his patron's honor, along with his own, above all else, and his usefulness to his
patron above everything else. First and foremost he should endeavor to understand the nature
and quality of the princes and other lords whom he will serve so as to accommodate them as much as
he can. He should not rely upon nor have complete faith in his assistants, nor any other subordinate
keeping in mind the old saying that he who places great trust will end up greatly deceived."
Good advice I suppose not just a little cynical for my taste, but Scappi's lack of trust in his
subordinates is illustrated by something actually in the kitchen which he mentions later in book one.
"On one side of the room should be a cabinet ten hands high and six wide, with several compartments
that can all be locked holding sugars, spices and other things used daily in the personal food of
the Prince." Now the cabinets needed to be able to be locked because the spices were incredibly
precious at the time so he didn't want you know people wandering in and stealing his spices.
Also Scappi loved his spices basically he kind of set the tone for renaissance cuisine
being just filled with spice and sugar. Sugar was his favorite. Out of the thousand recipes
in the opera fully 900 of them have sugar as an ingredient. So while we see recipes for dishes that
are reminiscent of something that we would eat today like an early form of pizza or lobster
or even chicken soup, the amount of sugar and spices in them would definitely give your palette
a bit of a whirl, and so he deals with those recipes over the next five books, and in the
second book he talks about quadrupeds and foul, and has one of the first recipes in Europe
for turkey. Though while Scappi calls it turkey he also says that many people are still calling
it the Indian peacock which I think is kind of a cool name. Now just like the turkey there are other
birds and meats that he mentions that you would find on a modern day menu like a roast duck with
black grape sauce that sounds really good, but then there are also some animals that you might have
trouble getting down at the market like hedgehog, piglet, or porcupine, or bear. There are also
recipes for every part of a cow imaginable from parboiled calves eyes with fennel and cinnamon, to
a sweet sugared bull testicle so if you're still wondering what to hand out for Halloween this year...
Moving on to book three he discusses the nature and season of fish. And fish and seafood were a
vital component of the vatican diet because much of the year were considered lean days where you
couldn't have any meat and I cover this in depth during the episode where I touch on lenten foods
from the Middle ages so go ahead and watch that if you're wondering how a beaver is actually a fish.
Now book four takes a lot of the recipes from the previous two books and puts them into menus and he
basically goes through the entire year month by month creating menus for both meat and lean days.
He also talks about different implements in the kitchen and goes into a wonderful description of
an actual event a conclave of cardinals which we will discuss later the fifth book where we
get our herb tort recipe from today deals with all sorts of pastries including many savory pastries
that include a lot of sugar of course but then some things that are definitely like
a modern day dessert like a cream pie and even a precursor to a modern pumpkin pie. Now the
last book is really a collection of soup and broth recipes because it was meant for the convalescing
and the sick. And while you'll see things like cauliflower soup or barley gruel there's also
a recipe for ferrous potion. Ferrous meaning iron and so you're thinking oh well some must have like
liver or beans or some other iron rich food,you'd be wrong. Nay nay, the recipe calls for "Pieces of steel
heated in the fire which you will dip into water. If you do not have any steel, get a worn-down iron
horseshoe and heat it up instead. Let the water sit for three hours, then filter through three layers
of a white cloth." I mean i guess that's not really that different from modern day iron pills, but
horseshoe? An old worn horseshoe with that, O kind of feel like he's Punking us.
So those are the six books of Scappi's opera, but there's also an appendix which was printed
separately. Almost as an afterthought, but is actually the reason that the opera is
seen as such an important work today because what it is is a bunch of pictures and and it's really
the first cookbook to have a lot of pictures so we get to see into what a renaissance kitchen
actually looked like. In the first room of the kitchen we see a massive hearth with a cauldron
suspended above it a little man sitting beside it shielding his face from the flame. In the next
room there are sinks with running water and cooks rolling out pasta dough on a huge table.
There's also a hippocratic sleeve in the center of the room which I talk about in the episode on
hippocras though this one is probably used for making jelly or butter. In the scullery which here
is an outside courtyard a man is washing pans and another behind him sharpens knives on a wheel with
water spouting from a barrel above. Then we have a cold room where they're churning butter and mixing
custard. Now sometimes if the pope had to travel he brought the kitchen with him and Scappi shows
what a field kitchen would look like along with a depiction of how the huge cauldrons made it on and
off the fires. Now most of the remaining images are of various kitchen implements including one page
devoted almost entirely to knives, though Scappi also includes the first printed image of a forcina,
or fork which had only recently become popular in Europe. He includes images of cauldrons and pots
for cooking and serving including several which he deems tortere one of which might have been
used to cook the torte that we're making today, but the most famous image in the book is actually not
of the kitchens but of the food being delivered for a meal and an actual meal it's based off of
a real event that I mentioned earlier the papal conclave where cardinals would gather together
to elect a new pope. This one began on November 29 1549 following the death of pope Paul III.
Stewards bring in hampers filled with hot and cold foods which were then given to church
officials to be inspected for secret messages to the cardinals that might sway their vote. Once
inspected the dishes would be placed on the ruota del conclave, or wheel of the conclave which would
spin and deliver the food into the sistine chapel on the other side of the wall. For over two months
this is how the cardinals got their food until on February 8th Julius III was elected pope. Now while
we don't know everything that was served every day at the conclave it's a pretty good bet that
our herb tort made its way around that conclave wheel at least once in those two months so while
you may not have your own conclave wheel at home, mine is being installed next week, you can go ahead
and give yourself a little spin as you take that tort out of the oven. So once you take the tort out
of the oven set it on a wire rack to cool just a bit but it should be served hot so don't let
it cool more than 10 minutes or so. And here we are: our torta d'herbe communi or common herb pie.
So it smells really great and it looks fine though it kind of looks like ground beef
which is odd you know I mean it's not a vegan meal but it is a vegetarian meal so maybe it's
like a mock ground beef pie because it really looks like ground beef, the color and everything
which I don't get. I thought it would be more green but it's almost brown and I think that's probably
because of the vast quantity of cinnamon and pepper in there, but let's give it a try regardless.
Hmm....hmmm.. oh that's weird... 0_o
Oh it's good, but oh that's so weird those herbs are are coming through,
along with the cheese and everything and those go together really well, but then
then it's kind of sweet and it's and it's the clove and the cinnamon...
That's weird but it's good like I'm gonna eat (not right now :P ), but I will eat most of this, it's really
like none of this is going to waste it's really delicious but oh it's so WEIRD. You should try this.
This is i mean it's a lot of work, there's a lot of ingredients in this one but it's really
worth trying even honestly even if you just made the inside, and didn't put it in a pastry just
make the inside and cook it like in a casserole dish, i think that would be really really, really
good but WEIRD. Definitely something that you're not going to find at a modern day restaurant,
wonderful though. So if you're interested in eating like a pope, and I mean who isn't,
go ahead and make this and enjoy it as much as I am and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
This is really good. :D