[Sca-cooks] From Today's NY Times

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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>November 30, 2002
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>A Neoplatonic Feast (It's Ideal Soul Food)
>By EMILY EAKIN
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>"Not best for the wealthy," advised a hand-lettered sign next to the
>pumpkin ravioli. "Dangerously cold and wet," cautioned another,
>planted near a dish of oregano-strewn eggplant. The sign in front of
>the braised sausage skewers said simply: "Dangerous."
>
>It was perilous dining last week at the Pierpont Morgan Library in
>Manhattan, where men in doublets and plumed caps and women in
>brocade bodices and swishing silks (along with numerous couples in
>decidedly more contemporary black tie) convened for a sumptuous
>neoplatonist feast. In the library's soaring atrium, some sat at
>candlelit tables sipping spiced wine laced with gold dust. Others
>stood listening as delicate Renaissance melodies wafted down from a
>balcony. With tiny silver seafood forks, they picked at plates
>heaped high with tempting morsels, valiantly trying not to incur a
>debilitating humoral imbalance.
>
>"Not one dish suits everybody," Carolin C. Young, a dining historian
>and the evening's scholarly M.C., had warned during a talk in the
>library's lecture hall that preceded the meal.
>
>Resplendent in a russet silk and gold brocade ensemble custom made
>for the occasion, she conducted the eager but untutored guests on a
>crash course in the art of 15th-century dining. "If you're feeling
>choleric, your body has become warm and dry, and you need cold and
>wet," she said. "If you're melancholic, that's cold and dry. You
>need more warm and wet."
>
>Ms. Young, 33, is one of a new breed of food studies scholars who
>view meals not as ephemeral events of passing biological
>significance but rather as windows onto a culture's most pressing
>concerns. While food historians have tended to focus on broad
>dietary trends and culinary historians have studied recipes, Ms.
>Young zeros in on a single repast, extracting from it a wealth of
>social meaning. As she summed up the approach in her opening
>remarks: "To dine is not merely to eat."
>
>Clearly, the evening at the Morgan, which was sponsored by the
>Italian Cultural Foundation of America and Sotheby's Institute of
>Art, was intended as a vivid illustration of that point. Drawing on
>a chapter from her new book, "Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver:
>Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art" (Simon & Schuster), and
>employing the library's stately interiors as atmospheric backdrop,
>Ms. Young turned a feast originally staged by nine 15th-century
>Italian humanists in a villa outside Florence into an edible history
>lesson in Renaissance thought.
>
>Held at the Villa Careggi on Nov. 7, 1468, the banquet, Ms. Young
>argued, was a revolutionary event. While no complete record of it
>survives (the menu was never written down), it was an experiment in
>Neoplatonist ideals of friendship and harmony that, she insisted,
>"really did change the way Western civilization thought about the
>meal." In some ways, she said, it was the first modern meal.
>
>Its host was 19-year-old Lorenzo de' Medici, scion of the powerful
>Medici banking family. Legendary patrons of the arts, the Medicis
>departed from convention by treating those they supported as equals
>‹ including the teenage Michelangelo, who ate with the family. "At
>Careggi people gathered as friends," Ms. Young said.
>
>But it was the banquet's chronicler and guiding spirit, Marsilio
>Ficino, who gave that novel behavior a grand, philosophical
>rationale. A founding member of Florence's Neoplatonist Academy and
>a translator of Plato, Ficino helped spark Italian interest in
>ancient Greece, promoting a synthesis of classical philosophy and
>Christian theology that became a hallmark of Renaissance humanism.
>In particular, Ms. Young said, Ficino was inspired by Plato's
>concept of friendship as a mirror of divine love.
>
>From the gathering's date (supposedly the anniversary of Plato's
>birth, the same day on which, 81 years later, he is thought to have
>died) to the participants (nine like-minded poets and scholars) and
>the lofty discussion of the Symposium, Plato's treatise on love,
>that followed the feast, Ficino conceived the evening as a tribute
>to the philosopher. Later, he commemorated the evening in his own
>book on love, "De Amore."
>
>He was also inspired by other ancient thinkers and came up with a
>few scandalous ideas of his own. From the Roman writer Varro, Ficino
>took the rule that the number of guests at a banquet should range
>between three, the number of the Graces, and nine, the number of the
>Muses. (At the Morgan, tables were set for three.)
>
>More radically, he advocated the pursuit of sensual pleasure. At the
>time, such a view was considered almost heretical. Ms. Young cited
>Ficino's friend Platina, who was arrested by the pope and tortured
>for daring to include the word pleasure in the title of his
>cookbook. But for Ficino, she said, stimulating all five senses was
>a means of perfecting mind and body and coming closer to God.
>
>Though it's not clear where at Careggi his banquet was held ‹ there
>were no dining rooms at the time, and a table could well have been
>set up outside ‹ Ms. Young said it doubtless included multiple
>sources of sensual delight: spotless white tablecloths and napkins,
>Flemish tapestries, ewers of perfumed water, citrus-scented candles,
>and music. A talented lyre player, Ficino believed "music was key to
>bringing the soul into flight," Ms. Young said. (The banquet might
>or might not have included forks, she added. Just beginning to catch
>on in 15th-century Florence, forks were considered personal
>accessories, more apt to be carried in a pocket than doled out with
>the other utensils at mealtime.)
>
>Still, Ms. Young stressed, Ficino was no hedonist. A celibate who
>eventually became a priest, he was inspired by classical ideas of
>balance and harmony, most obviously in his elaborate dietary theory.
>
>According to Aristotle and Galen, a physician of the second century
>A.D., the body was composed of four humors: blood, red bile
>(choler), black bile (melancholy) and phlegm. Each humor was in turn
>ascribed properties drawn from the four elements. Blood, for
>example, was associated with the air and considered warm and wet,
>while melancholy was associated with the earth and considered cold
>and dry. When the humors were in equilibrium, a body was healthy.
>Whenever an imbalance occurred, illness was the likely result. Only
>through careful diet could equilibrium be restored.
>
>Ficino was a staunch believer in the humoral science, adapting it
>for a scholarly lifestyle manual he published in 1489. In a section
>titled "The Special Enemies of Scholars Are Five: Phlegm, Black
>Bile, Sexual Intercourse, Gluttony and Sleeping in the Morning," he
>laid out strict guidelines for a long and healthy intellectual life.
>Eggplant was off limits (too much black bile), as were heavy wines.
>Vegetables were categorically denounced, in addition, Ms. Young
>said, to all food that was "burnt, dark, roasted, fried, hard, dry
>or stale." As for pork, she added, Ficino thought it suitable only
>for "bodies that are piglike, such as rustics."
>
>"To cook for these humanists must have been quite a task," Ms. Young
>observed. After her lecture, one could wonder whether the guests on
>that momentous night at Careggi were served any food at all. But Ms.
>Young knew better. "Ficino believed that `only the meal embraces all
>parts of man,' " she said. "It was about feeding our ideas and the
>exchange of friendship as well as about feeding the body."
>
>"Shall we feast?" she concluded. There were no objections.
>
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