[Sca-cooks] Meats Pizziola

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jul 5, 2005, at 11:19 PM, Adam N Bratcher wrote:

> Hello all,  The local shire i play with is planning a picnic in the  
> park shortly and the requested main dish is to be late 16th century  
> Italy cooking.  After doing a bit of searching, I found most of the  
> cookbooks i need are in Italian.  Now being of the non Italian  
> speakig group, i have a distinct disadvantage.  A dish i know of  
> coming from that time period is a dish called Meats Pizziola.  Does  
> anyone know where i might find a reciepe for this?  I would be very  
> grateful for any help in this quest.
>                                                              Thank  
> you,  Adam

If you want a modern recipe, they're all over the Web, if you do a  
search for steak pizzaiola (try that spelling; it seems to be the  
most consistently used). Also look for chicken pizzaiola, veal  
pizzaiola, etc. Basically in its current incarnation (no pun  
intended), it's a dish of sauteed cutlets or other small meat slices  
lightly braised in a sauce made from plum tomatoes, wine, garlic,  
parsley and oregano. There doesn't seem to be too much information  
available as to why it is called pizzaiola, although the ingredients  
are among those you'd probably find in any pizzeria. And in an  
interesting example of form following name rather than function, some  
(but by no means all) pizzaiola recipes do involve melting mozzarella  
cheese on top of the finished dish.

I have no idea if the dish is period, unless one simply works on the  
assumption that all dishes calling for tomatoes are a possibility  
after 1492 CE. Depending on how important adherence to periodicity is  
to you, you could either A) cook a modern dish of pizzaiola, and  
present it as a modern dish, B) find a period recipe for pizzaiola in  
one of the period Italian sources, some of which are available in  
English (Scappi has been mentioned, and Platina also has some recipes  
for little meat slices, although that source is 15th-century and  
doesn't include tomatoes in any of its recipes), C) find and use  
another period recipe for meat slices (or anything else) that  
probably won't be recognizable as pizzaiola, or D) cook any of the  
period dishes of meat slices (usually grilled, but there may be some  
sauteed dishes out there), and then serve it with a tomato sauce like  
the one Gerard describes in his English-language Herbal of the late  
16th century as a Spanish sauce. The result would be a more or less  
conjectural dish of [dish name, i.e. scaloppini, carne, whatever] in  
salsa Espagnola.

That last one would be a bit of a stretch, but I've seen worse. If it  
were me, I'd prepare one of the period meat-slice dishes from Scappi,  
Platina, or another source, and consider serving the tomato sauce on  
the side, or simply not bother with the sauce, or choose a known  
period-and-place-specific sauce from the same source to go with the  
meat, such as a green sauce made from herbs and vinegar.

After all, isn't a great part of the SCA experience doing the things  
we wouldn't be doing in a mundane setting? We dress differently, do  
different things for fun, listen to different music, etc. Why not eat  
something different, too?

Adamantius



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04