The Court of Ferrara (1529)

Let's jump right into the Renaissance dining and the court of Ferrara! For this particular court feast, we will be aided by John Dickie and a section of his book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food. The feast that took place in 1529, was recorded in extreme detail by the court administrator and steward to the Dukes of Ferrara, Cristoforo da Messisbugo (79). The feast was to celebrate a crucial rite of passage for Alfonso I, the Duke of Ferrara (80). What Dickie notes for this feast is the overindulgence of food and just the simple sense of excess. A sense of excess that is still overdone, even if the number of guests reaches 104! What I found extremely interesting about this section of Dickie's book, is the amount of detail taken to record not only the amount of dishes made, but details on how each dish was prepared.

Ah, but first I think it would do well to understand the structure of a traditional Italian meal before we get to the number of courses throughout the feast. Messisbugo has a starter and four courses written down (five courses total!). This may seem as a substantial amount of food, but it is not so much considering how the Italians structured their meals.

• The Antipasto: something small to nibble on before the actual meal
• The Primo (or Primi Piatti): usually consist of starches, like pasta or risotto or so
• The Secondo (or Secondi Piatti): the main meat of the course, ranging from fish to lamb or pork or beef
• The Contorno: a side dish of vegetables that compliments the main meat dish, tends to bring out the simplistic flavours of the vegetables
• The Dolce: a sweet or dessert that ends off the meal

Yet we must keep in mind, the feast at Ferrara does not display how all the courts throughout the city-states of Italy dined on feast days, or on any given day. As Dickie mentions, "grand court dinners offered the chance for a steward, as well as his master, to put all his capabilities on show" (80). And so, "Messisbugo's meal was given its real savor by a mix of power and spectacle" (80). As such, we can grasp a better understanding of why Messisbugo went to such great lengths to present the guests with all these lavish dishes. The feast not only allowed Messisbugo to parade the wealth, and power, of his Duke but to also show how well off the city-state of Ferrara was as a whole.

It would be too much to put the entirety of the menu up onto this one post, but I will show a dish or two from each course. And, as you will see, just a few examples will show the extravagance of such a grand feast!

STARTERS
104 small cream pies dusted with sugar
15 large salted eels, in 104 cylindrical cuts. 25 plates
       Eels were the king of Italian fish in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. They could be kept alive a long time in freshwater reservoirs in the cities, and responded well to salting and smoking.
50 large, skinned, smoked grey mullet in 25 pies with sweet sauce

FIRST COURSE
104 quails. 104 tomaselle. 104 roasted capon lives in caul. With accompaniments. 25 plates
       Tomaselle were liver rissoles made with raisins, sugar, bone marrow, spices, and hard cheese, then wrapped in caul or omentum -- a double folded fatty membrane from an animal's lower abdomen that was often used as sausage skin
52 roast pheasant with 100 oranges in segments. 25 plates.

SECOND COURSE - Dickie makes a note of how the dishes begin to increase with sophistication (89)
25 fried white sausages. 104 fried sweetbreads, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. 25 plates.
       Cervalleti (white sausages) contained a stuffing of milk, egg whites, fatty cheese, starch, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, and pepper. They were boiled and then fried in fat. 
257 large pigeons in puff pastry. 25 plates.
104 friend Lake Garda trout, sprinkled with sesame seeds. 

THIRD COURSE
104 roast, boned partridges in a "royal sauce" of sugar, vinegar, and spices. 25 plates.
23 rabbits. 104 doves. Thickly sliced large yellow sausages. 25 plates.
      The yellow sausages were made with pork, Piacenza cheese (a variety of Parmesan) and spices. About eleven pounds of sausage were divided between the 25 plates. 
25 plates of large, fresh, roasted eel with sugar and cinnamon.

FOURTH COURSE
150 large fried pilchards covered with orange slices and sugar. 25 plates.
25 bean tarts
       The filling was a pulp of beans, hard cheese, butter, sugar, cinnamon, pepper, ginger, and egg. In this case the tart was made to look like a pie by adding a caul "lid."
104 fried marzipan pastries filled with Turkish-style rice
       Cooking rice Turkish-style involved simmering it in cow's milk and sugar with butter and a little rose water. More sugar was added at the end.

Now, these were three examples in each course that had roughly six-eight dishes per course. How indulgent!
I also want to bring the use of sugar to our attention. I do not have a source for this fact, I'll see if I can add a source later on but! Sugar was an imported good and it was quite costly. A way that people showed wealth was by the amount of sugar they had to use as well! Neat, eh?




Dickie, John. Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food. New York: Free Press, 2008. pp.77-99. Print.

"Anatomy of an Italian Meal." Huffpost Taste. 2 June 2013. The Huffington Post. Web. 26 Nov. 2015.