Fifteenth Century Pasta!!

Renaissance dinner!  This is what happens when I'm not allowed
to go to restaurants to try new things...

I write this blog because I'm curious not just about the major events of history, but about what life was like in the past.  Honestly, I care less about who was on which European throne in a given year than about how people lived.  Obviously, this covers a wide range of topics, and the one that interests me most is generally fashion, but I also really love food, so I decided to investigate some historical cooking!

I've been as bored as everyone else in quarantine, so I recently subscribed to The Great Courses, because what else is a housebound amature historian to do, and watched a lecture series on the history of food by Dr. Ken Albala.  One of the recipes from Renaissance Italy featured in this series is for pasta with pancetta (Italian bacon- you can use regular bacon instead), sugar, cinnamon, and cheese, and I was intrigued, so I tried it.  And it was really good!  And easy!  I would definitely do it again, and even my very picky brother liked it!

If you've delved into medieval and renaissance cuisine at all, you're probably aware that sugar and spices were used all the time, on or in practically every dish on upper-class tables.  This is because these ingredients came from far away (Asia and the Indian subcontinent, mostly), making them both exotic and very expensive.  This was a cuisine based around conspicuous consumption, and the spice trade was the main source of Venice's wealth in the Renaissance.  In fact, the spice trade was so lucrative in this period that the age of exploration was sparked in large part by Portugal trying to break Venice's monopoly on spices!  And no, despite what you may have been told in school, the spices were not needed to mask the taste of rotting meat.  Gross!  If that were the case, we probably wouldn't have survived the middle ages because everyone would have died of food borne illnesses! 

This particular dish is pretty typical of fifteenth century Italian cooking in its use of spices and sugar.  Keep in mind that what we today think of as traditionally Italian tomato sauce isn't available yet, since tomatoes are a new world plant, and weren't really seen in European cooking until the late sixteenth century.  It's weird to think about, isn't it?

This dish was really easy to prepare.  Dr. Albala made his own fresh pasta for this dish, but I didn't feel like taking the time to do that this time, so I used store bought fettuccine.  I cooked and drained my pasta.  Then I cooked some cubed pancetta in a saucepan, adding a bit of sugar (I was cooking for just me, and used maybe a tablespoon?  I just grabbed a small handful and didn't measure) and a generous amount of cinnamon, plus a dash of nutmeg when it was nearly done.  I did cheat a little by adding the nutmeg and using a tiny splash of heavy cream when I thought it needed a little more moisture, but both those ingredients are seen in these sorts of dishes in period, so I'm ok with it!  Finally when the pancetta was cooked, I added a generous amount of grated parmesan cheese and then mixed in my pasta.  I served it with more grated cheese and cinnamon on top.  

I know this sounds weird to modern tastes, but it was really good!  The sugar and spices glaze the pancetta, and the sweetness goes really nicely with the creamy, salty cheese.  I would definitely recommend trying this if you're at all curious about Renaissance dining!  I also highly recommend the lecture series I got the recipe from, Cooking Across the Ages, from The Great Courses, if you're quarantined and looking for something cool to watch.  He covers everything from ancient Rome to the 1980's, giving cooking demos from each period.  It's a really interesting look into one of the most basic human activities through history.