Steak - Mark Schatzker [67]
There is a strong sense in Europe that all the food is as old as hills like Monte Tresino. (If you spend any time with Tilde Vecchio, it is almost literally true—she once made me a bean salad that is said to pre-date even the Greeks.) This is the reason why so many French and Italian wine or olive oil bottles have labels whose script appears to be older than the discovery of the New World, and why the packaging on fine cheeses and expensive butters habitually depicts bucolic landscapes or peasant maidens at the butter churn. In Europe, culinary heritage runs deep.
Most of the time, however, it’s a myth—Tilde Vecchio the food-obsessed archaeologist notwithstanding. What people think of as typical European cuisine—especially the fancy stuff known as haute cuisine—is roughly three hundred years old, if not younger. Look back in time much further than that, and the fancy dishes served at fancy occasions become increasingly unrecognizable. If you go back all the way to the medieval era—that long, dark hangover that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire—the food eaten by wealthy Europeans is so unusual as to seem verging on ethnic.
When a medieval king or lord invited important guests over for dinner, he didn’t serve veal in a wine and cream sauce, or plate seared tuna on a bed of kiwi and arugula with a perfect oval of red pepper- pomegranate coulis filling the white space. He likewise didn’t serve freshly curdled cow’s milk, however exquisite it may seem to the modern-day visitor to Italy, because that was what peasants ate.
The rich and powerful of the medieval period—like the rich and powerful in every other period—were out to impress their rich and powerful friends. The host of a big feast set dishes in front of his guests that were exotic, rarefied, colorful, richly spiced, unusually textured, massively flavored, and as unlike ordinary food as possible. Spices were extremely expensive—having arrived from far-off lands by way of long, often perilous, sea voyages—and so the more a chef used, the greater the display of his lord’s wealth.
Medieval chefs practiced what is known as a cuisine of mixture. Flavorings were blended together to create new flavors. A dish of chicken wasn’t about the taste or character of chicken so much as the sauce that accompanied it. Meats were stewed in thick and intense sauces and mixed with ingredients like ginger, sugar, vinegar, wine, raisins, mace, cloves, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, and honey. A typical dish of the era was called “mawmenny,” and to make it a chef would take ground beef, pork, or mutton, boil it in wine, and serve it in a wine-based sauce thickened with pounded chicken and pounded almonds, flavored with cloves, sugar, and fried almonds, and finally colored with an indigo or red dye. Dinner guests were smacked in the mouth with fantastic, never-before-tasted flavors, an assault of gustatory shock and awe.
Feasts were multicourse events, and a single one could feature five such dishes, a mode of service known as service à la française. In Europe a thousand years ago, a big feast wasn’t all that different from a meal at an Indian or Chinese restaurant today: lots of different highly flavored dishes all served at the same time.
Around the eighteenth century, for reasons that don’t appear altogether clear, food changed. Instead of carpet bombing guests with flavor, quantity, and variety, chefs began to worship at the throne of subtlety, their dishes taking a turn toward the delicate. The medieval cuisine of mixture was replaced by a new cuisine of essence. When preparing, for example, beef, the intention was now to celebrate the flavor of beef, not mask it. If steak was served in a sauce, the sauce was meant to complement the flavor of steak, perhaps even amplify it, but not cover it up. Food now tasted of what it was, and for the first time in European cuisine, less was more. Chefs reduced the number