Food Fit for a King: Exploring Royal Recipes in Francisco Martínez Montiño’s 1611 Cookbook

Abstract

This article analyses data drawn from the 508 recipes published in Francisco Martínez Montiño’s 1611 cookbook, Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería, to gain a deeper understanding of culinary identity in early modern Spain. For the first time, scholars are given access to the primary and secondary food categories and ingredients that fill the pages of this culinary masterpiece. In his very recipes Martínez Montiño attends to both kitchen production and, through the narrative he weaves into the recipes, to an intellectual and aesthetic understanding of food practices of the early modern period. This essay delves into Martínez Montiño’s work and creates a map of selective tastes that define cooking and cuisine in the early modern Spanish court.

Key words:

• Francisco Martínez Montiño
• Arte de cocina
• pastelería
• vizcochería y conservería
• early modern cookbook
• Spanish cooking
• culinary identity

Notes

1 Francisco Martínez Montiño, Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611). Further references are given within parentheses in the main text.

2 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de autoridades, 6 vols (Madrid: en la Imprenta de la Real Academia Española, por los Herederos de Francisco del Hierro, 1726–1739), IV, ‘Gusto’; <http://web.frl.es/DA.html> (accessed 29 August 2019).  

3 Thomé Pinheiro da Veiga, Fastiginia: o fastos geniales, trad. Narciso Alonso Cortés, prólogo de José Pereir de Sampaio (Valladolid: Imp. del Colegio de Santiago, 1916), 83–84; available at Hathi Trust Digital Library, <http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101073400978;view=1up;seq=5> (accessed 27 Sept 2016).

4 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 21.

5 When Martínez Montiño published this work, consuming couscous had long been a recognized sign of Islamism and a practice that ecclesiastical authorities sought to eliminate. For more on this, see Antonio Gallego Burín & Alfonso Gámir Sandoval, Los moriscos del reino de Granada según el sínodo de Guadix de 1554 (Granada: Univ. de Granada, 1996), 73. For further information on the connection between couscous and Muslim/Morisco identity as seen in Inquisitional records, see Louis Cardaillac, Moriscos y cristianos: un enfrentamiento polémico, 1492–1640 (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979), 27. And, for more on the use of cultural practices ascribed to Moriscos in the work of the seventeenth-century apologists, see Katherine Bartels, ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Spain: Nationalism and the Rejection of the Morisco “Other” ’, Doctoral dissertation (Catholic University of America, 2013). Similar recipes do not appear again until 1817 with the publication of the anonymous New World cookbook, Libro de cocina de la gesta de independencia (see the modern edition edited by José Luis Curiel Monteagudo [México D.F.: Conculta, Dirección General de Culturas Populares e Indígenas, 2002]). My thanks to Rachel Lauden for pointing out this cookbook to me. The first two recipes, ‘Alcuscuz de trigo’ and ‘Modo de guisarlo’, have clear ties with Martínez Montiño’s cookbook while the third, ‘Alcuscuz de maíz’, brings together New World and Old World food tastes (90–91). The first couscous recipe in Spain since Martínez Montiño is ‘alcuzcuz moro', which appears in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La cocina española antigua (Madrid: Sociedad Anónima Renacimiento, 1913), 522. In this work, Pardo Bazán selects several recipes from Martínez Montiño.

6 For more on the history of instrumentation in the early modern kitchen, see Carmen Abad Zardoya, ‘Herramientas curiosas para cosas particulares y extraordinarias: tecnología, espacios y utillaje en la cocina histórica española’, in La cocina en su tinta (Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Biblioteca Nacional de España, 2010), 85–117 (p. 89).

7 In reading several recipes, astute readers may surmise that the king had a sensitive or perhaps even bland palate, as Martínez Montiño makes several comments about his food preferences throughout the cookbook. For example, readers learn that Philip III regularly ate roast pheasant with an egg-oil emulsion (230^v–231^r), that he preferred meatballs made from poultry (53^r–53^v), that he liked his chicken pinwheels—which are normally filled with hard-boiled egg yolk seasoned with mint, pepper, nutmeg, ginger and a little lemon juice—on the sweeter side and, as seen here, that he liked his biscuits without any strong anise flavour (255^r).

8 While we commonly think of sopa as soup, it is generally understood in this cookbook and in general in seventeenth-century Spain and beforehand, as ‘sop’, a piece of bread placed on the bottom of a dish that soaks up the juices of the dish or a piece of bread that has some type of liquid—usually, stock, broth, wine or cream—poured on top of it. 

9 In this context, ‘coriander’ refers to the green leaf of the plant, not the seed. In the US, the term ‘cilantro’ is used.

10 The amacena is another name for damascena (‘from Damascus’). Today the fruit is called damson plums. They are dark purple, oval and have a slightly sour flavour. They are primarily used for jams and jellies.

11 María Ángeles Pérez Samper, Mesas y cocinas en la España del siglo XVIII (Gijón: Trea, 2011), 106.

12 In early modern Spain and up until the early twentieth century, manteca de vaca was the accepted term for butter, while the broader manteca was used contextually to refer to both butter and lard. Manteca de vaca was still the dominant term used at the close of the nineteenth century as evidenced in Antonio Usero Torrente’s 1899 dissertation of the defence of butter. He begins with its definition: ‘La manteca de vaca es un producto graso extraído de la leche en la que se encuentra en suspensión’. It is in the early twentieth century when a certain ‘manteca dulce de Soria’ which was called mantequilla, began to replace the term manteca de vacas as the common referent for butter (Juan Gutiérrez Cuadro & Francesc Rodríguez, ‘El campo léxico de “grasa” en el español del siglo XIX’, Revista de Investigación Lingüística, 11 [2008], 137–63 [p. 159]).

13 Gutiérrez Cuadro & Rodríguez, ‘El campo léxico de “grasa” en el español del siglo XIX’, 144.

14 In recreating recipes from Arte de cocina, I have refined the spice blend to the following proportions: four parts black pepper and ginger to two parts nutmeg, to one part clove. For each tablespoon of this mixture, I add several strands of saffron. Of course, both now and then, these proportions could vary slightly from recipe to recipe and according to individual taste.

15 In her cookbook, Sunday Suppers, Karen Mordechai unknowingly recreates Martínez Montiño’s famous green sauce and provides a 1:1:2 proportion of mint, coriander and parsley (Karen Mordechai, Sunday Suppers [New York: Clarkson Potter, 2014], 94).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.