At the Stupor Mundi banquets, the exotic music, the spicy scents, the seductive dances and the appetizing dishes were intended to stimulate all five senses
From blancmange (with chicken and lard) to roast pigeons smeared with honey, passing through aschipescia and arriving at healthy fasting…this is how they ate at the court of Stupor Mundi.
Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, endowed with a multifaceted and fascinating personality, was King of Sicily and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. His reign was characterized by a strong push for multicultural artistic innovation opposed by the Papacy (whose temporal power the sovereign questioned).
Frederick was born in 1194 from the last Norman queen, Constance of Hauteville and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI Hohenstaufen, son of Frederick Barbarossa. Orphaned early, he was educated at court, in a multi-ethnic and multicultural Palermo, without ever managing to quench his inexhaustible thirst for new knowledge and new experiences.
As an adult he was also a man of letters, protector of artists and scholars: his court in Sicily was a meeting place between Greek, Latin, Germanic, Arab and Jewish cultures.
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The sovereign had many passions such as falcon hunting, art, poetry, cabala… and even gastronomy.
Between 1230 and 1250, he was the inspiring mind of two cookbooks “Il Meridionale” and the most famous cookbook “Liber de coquina”, the first collection of southern Italy of 172 plates in which the cultural diversity of the kingdom is well represented, the Latin-German tradition, the Sicilian-Muslim one, the Sicilian-Jewish one: 43 vegetable dishes, 71 meat dishes, 18 egg and pie dishes, 26 fish dishes as well as 14 elaborations gastronomic dishes of complex preparation.
It is a cooking manual scientific in nature; in fact, all preparations are classified according to the raw materials and are divided into five chapters on the model of medical treatises: vegetables, meat, eggs and milk, fish, compound foods.
Through the recipe books, the gastronomic world of Frederick’s Sicily opens up where the emperor, surrounded by scientists, men of letters and poets, used to offer sumptuous banquets.
Musicians and singers, poets, expert jugglers, sensual dancers knew how to entertain and amaze the sovereign and his guests and between one tasting and another, the conversation flowed. The literate king Frederick (in whose court the Sicilian poetic school was born) recreated in his court the cultured and sumptuous cenacles of the caliphs of Baghdad, where in addition to poetry, good food also became the object of erudite disquisitions.
At the sovereign’s banquets, exotic music, spicy scents, seductive dances and appetizing dishes were intended to stimulate all five senses: the table was set with brightly colored fabrics (golden yellow, pomegranate red) and precious furnishings.
The dishes were beautifully presented very choreographic, in particular game: the animals were recomposed for example, as if they were still alive and brought to the table; the birds were presented with their rich plumage.
The gastronomic taste in force at the time favored large quantities of meat: deer with pepper, chickens with lard, hares, doves smeared with honey, peacocks, swans and herons; ducks, pheasants, capons.
The birds were often captured by the falcons that Federico himself trained to hunt. In the preparation of the dishes, the emperor replaced the excessive use of spicy sauces, which served to hide the smell of meat that was not perfectly preserved, with aromatic herbs (basil, sage, parsley, thyme, mint), imposing the exclusive consumption of fresh meat .
The tasty dishes of Federico’s cuisine, prepared with rare culinary expertise by Berardo, court cook since the time of the Crusade, they were served with grace and elegance by supple Saracen girls. Dinner began with the consumption of salad and fruit (especially citrus fruits and grapes) to prepare the stomach for the subsequent delicacies.
This was followed by soups (cooked with vegetables or with spelled or cereals) or “biancomangiare” which at the time was a cream prepared only with “white” ingredients such as highly cooked rice, chicken fillets, almonds, milk, sugar, lard.
The game was then served, cooked on a spit and seasoned with the refined sauces of Frederick’s cuisine, based on wine, oil, garlic, breadcrumbs, unripe grapes and onions. The chicken was usually accompanied by “agliata”, a garlic sauce with wine and vinegar.
No less than meat, Federico loved fresh fish, enriched with a green sauce based on sage, parsley, thyme, garlic and pepper. Aschipescia, his favorite dish, was prepared with fat eels from Lake Lesina (in the province of Foggia) cut into chunks, fried and still steaming, drowned in strong white wine vinegar.
Boiled vegetables and wild herbs (borage, fennel, chicory), mushrooms (cooked seasoned with oil, garlic, chopped parsley, anchovies and lemon juice) could not be missing.
In Frederick’s cuisine, bread was not used, but crunchy and light rusks, made with molds and made with a mixture of wheat flour, milk, honey and butter, and then cooked in a wood oven. Finally, the dish most awaited by the diners at the end of the rich dinner was the choreographic triumphal roast: the wild boar.
Dessert followed: spiced bread and honey cakes, including the famous imperial pancakes made with cow’s cheese, egg white, flour, pine nuts and raisins. To balance the consumption of so much roast meat that the sovereign ate during banquets, Federico often only ate biscuits and honey to detoxify his body.
In fact, the passion for gastronomy did not prevent the emperor from having a health-conscious approach, probably inspired by the Salerno medical school: after hunting the emperor nibbled on candied violets, which he considered rich in therapeutic powers and also used to eat only one meal a day (a forerunner of current dietary trends that apply fasting as a healthy practice).
The scientific attitude of the sovereign’s mentality is therefore also reflected in the attention to dietetics and in the consequent choice to follow a strict dietary regime every day, to the great scandal of his detractors, who accused the pro-Islamic pleasure-seeker Federico who will be condemned by Dante among the epicureans, to give up food only for health reasons and not to conquer Paradise!
The culinary journey through the recipe books linked to the court of Frederick II therefore allows the reader to rediscover the sumptuous cuisine of the Palermo court, rich in Arab, Jewish, Norman and Swabian influences.
It must be remembered that already at the beginning of the fourteenth century, through Tuscan mediation, this first form of Italian gastronomic culture, born together with Sicilian poetry, established itself from one end of the Peninsula to the other.
Source: A. Grasso, The banquet at the Court of Frederick II.
