ON HONEST INDULGENCE AND GOOD HEALTH by Bartolomeo Sacchi – 1474
Academia Barilla - Gastronomic Library
Did you know that the work of Bartolomeo Sacchi, appointed in the fifteenth century by Pope Sixtus IV as the first director of the Vatican Library, contributed to the development in Italian cuisine of the taste for sweetness and sugar, the “new spice” alongside the traditional ones?
Insieme con il Libro de arte coquinaria di Maestro Martino, il volume di Bartolomeo Sacchi è una delle colonne porTogether with Maestro Martino’s “Libro de arte coquinaria”, Bartolomeo Sacchi’s volume is one of the cornerstones of fifteenth-century gastronomic literature.
Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421–1481), nicknamed “Platina” because he was from Piadena (CR), is one of the great names of Italian humanism.
Appointed by Pope Sixtus IV as the first director of the Vatican Library, he had the chance to meet Maestro Martino da Como, personal chef to the Patriarch of Aquileia in Rome, from whom he collected 240 recipes.
To what can we attribute the great success of Platina’s “De honesta voluptate et valetudine” (“On honest pleasure and good health”)? To its systematic treatment of the art of cooking, dietetics, food hygiene, the ethics of eating, and the pleasures of the table, alternating practical and moral instructions about food and eating.
The proposed recipes, as in the aforementioned book by Martino da Como, record the emergence in Italian cuisine of a taste for sweetness and for sugar, the “new spice” which, since the fourteenth century, tended to accompany or overlap the traditional ones. And they follow the principles of Galenic medicine, according to which foods should restore the equilibrium of the primary elements (air, fire, water, earth) composing the human body, with their respective qualities of cold, hot, moist, and dry.
The work - more a treatise on the nutritive and curative power of foods than a mere cookbook - is important because it advocates a new must: frugality. And it does so at a time when the middle and upper classes, to whom the text is addressed, though still fond of lavishly laden tables, are ready to consider moderation a virtue. At the table as in life.
Moderation in eating is highly topical. Both for the impact many products have on the environment and the planet, and for attention to the well-being of body and mind that only a balanced diet assures. Why not, then, take inspiration from Platina’s gastronomic principles?