[Sca-cooks] Re: meat pizziola

[Louise Smithson]

Adam, I doubt very much that your source was accurate.  Fiction writers rarely need to check their facts the way that cooks should.  It will probably be a very tasty dish, a fact that is hard to argue with. But it certainly isn't a period Italian one.  There are braised meats in sauce in many of the Italian cookbooks but the recipe rarely starts with browning the meat in a pan.  Roasting it and then cooking it a little further yes.  There is a recipe from the libro novo where thin slices of veal meat are pounded flat, seasoned with vinegar and salt.  A stuffing of herbs, fennel, garlic, lard, eggs, is made, rolled up in the meat and then they are cooked on the spit, before being stewed with bitter orange.  They can also be filled with cheese. There is also a recipe for sausages which are cooked on the spit and then stewed with sugar, cinnamon and bitter orange. 

Recipe 87A is most similar to the pizaolla. (Taken from Master Basillius translation of the libro novo). 

Meat slices fried in the frying pan

Take the meat and make thin slices, like in the others it is named (recipe 98B) and pound them well with the back ofthe knife, and put them in a pot with salt, pepper and pounded fennel and vinegar, and if you shall want a little crushed garlic, (it is) nothing to leave it out. And leave them for a quarter-hour, and then dip them in flour and fry in lard, and when they are cooked put over them bitter oranges or royal sauce, or brown sauce or others.

Royal sauce for ten platters: Take a terra cotta pot of new earth (i.e. a new pot) and put inside it two pounds of good sugar, and flour glassfulss (about 28 ounces) of strong white vinegar, and twelve whole cloves, and a piece of good cinnamon stick cut very finely. then put it to the fire over the coals and make it to boil so much that should thicken it and skim it well, and watch that it does not get too thick, and a small amount of ground nutmeg shall be good. 

To make a brown sauce for ten platters: Take a pound of seeded raisins and the crumb of three toasted breads, and soak in strong vinegar and pound everything well together. Then take a carafe (~0.979 liters) of good red wine and two glassfuls (~14 ounces) of good strong vinegar and dilute everything together and pass through the cloth filter. Then add a pound of honey, more or less, if in your judgement it has enough sweetness and sourness, an ounce of ground cinnamon, a half-ounce of pepper, a half-ounce of ginger, a quarter-ounce of cloves. And you shall put it in a pot, with a pound of seeded raisins and you shall make it to boil until it is thick, always stirring it, and make it to cook very slowly.  Then you shall place it in the small platters, in there place, or over fowls or roasted meats, or fried fishes, or where you like, and sauces of this kind can also be made with breadcrumbs. 

Use these recipes if you would like. They are not meat pizziola, but then pizza wasn't pizza until much later (check http://www.geocities.com/helewyse/pizza.html ) for examples of period "pizza" it basically meant flat flaky bread. 

Helewyse

 

Some one ask about where i heard about this Meats Pizziola dish.  I 
read it in a book i read some years ago called Shogun.  I recall one of the characters wishing he was back home in Italy where he could eat Meats Pizziola and some other dish.  Here is one reciepe i have found so far.  www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1926,152182-245204,00.html Just for giggles i am going to try it out on sunday.  I'll let you all know how it turns out.                                                              Adam



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