Peter Elbling

I hope you get the chance.

Have you ever been there? I havent, but Ive heard that its rugged untamed country. In his youth, Ugo drove flocks of sheep across the Abruzzo plains as shepherds had been done for years before him and would for years after. His brother Vittore makes mention of that in the book. Apparently you can still see the marks in the terrain even now. There were wolves in the mountains, maybe still are, and many years ago bears too.

Where is Sulmona?

Are you kidding???? You spell it exactly the same way? Well, I'll be...I chose the name for a variety of reasons. Ugo because the simplicity symbolized his low stature in the community.Fonte because originally the village where he came from was close to some springs -- fonte means spring. 'From' can be spelled either as di or de or da. I chose di because it seemed the least popular. Now if you tell me your ancestors come from Corsoli, I'll be really suspicious.

A. We had table manners but we did not have etiquette. Is that a French dish? It sounds French. Everybody always says the French invented cooking. Potta! It was in what is now Italy that everything to do with cooking and table manners was invented. We were the first people to wash out hands before the meal. Even in Corsoli we washed our hands, though that was not so much because we wanted them to be clean but because Duke Federico thought that someone might have put poison on them. The duke instructed Septivus, the teacher of the court, to read books about table manners to us. He told us that if you blow your nose at the table, you should use a handkerchief and when you had finished you should not look into the handkerchief as if you expected to find the crown jewels there. Most of us still blew our noses the old way, holding it between the thumb and forefinger and then turning away from the table and blowing the snot on the floor. We were also told to eat with our mouths closed although, potta! that was hard to do because how can you talk when your mouth is closed? Nor did we lift our sleeves up so that they would not get caught in the sauce bowls, because it was unfashionable to lift up the sleeves of our jackets. Many of these suggestions, and hundreds of others, came from a book by Erasmus, a Dutchman. But if you knew how plain the Dutch meals were you would not be surprised they could do these things. As for the way food is wasted today. I think most of it should be wasted for it is not food at all. In Corsoli we never wasted food. Bur when I was a boy I heard about a banquet in Roma where a lot of food was wasted. I cannot remember what it was for, but I know that they set up tables in the middle of a piazza for all the cardinals and dignitaries. Then they put seats up so that the citizens of Roma could watch them eat. There was so much food that when the diners had finished they passed the dishes to those who were watching. There was still so much food left over that the people started throwing it at one another. The cardinals and the dignitaries joined in until the whole piazza, the buildings and all the people were covered in food. I do not know if they always did this but I know it happened at least once.

I think I was at that shoot for all of an hour or two and hardly remember it at all. I do remember that the studio, I think it was Paramount, was grooming Steve to make feature films so no expense was spared. I did act in a film of his called The Man with Two Brains. Steve also participated in a photo shoot I arranged for a parody of the National Enquirer, in which he played an obnoxious movie star.

Thank you. Im so glad you enjoyed it.

Outside fork? What are you talking about? Outside of where? We only had one fork. Why did you need more than one fork? For a long time people did not use a fork at all. In fact, it was at the last banquest in Corsoli that a fork was used for the first time in Romagna. And then by mistake. Forks were just used to fish the meat out of a bowl and put in on a trencher. It was only because that dwarf, Giovanni was showing off, telling everyone to hold the meat down with the fork and then cut it with the knife, that the fork is used the way it is now. But many things have come about by accident. It was only because Miranda did not wish to show that she had made a mistake that she told Tommaso to serve some prosciutto with melon. Now people eat it like that all the time.

Thanks so much for the kind words. I hope you still feel the same at the end. Diced chicken was good huh? Great!

To be honest I dont remember if he mentioned any scrolls. He talked about so many different things. I do remember he said he had a couple of sketches an artist had done on a napkin at Max's one night and which he claimed were now worth a fortune, but he never showed them to me. He said he had other manscripts and 'important papers' stored in a safe somewhere but again he never told me where. Did he ever show you the scars from his operations?

I never saw any deaths due to spoiled food. Although the lords and ladies ate very well most of the servants did not and so they grabbed whatever leftovers they could. That sometimes included food that had been cooked too much or not enough as well as beaks and claws and hooves and other parts which were not served at the main table. These sometimes caused sickness, but I never saw any food around long enough to get spoiled.

The Italians of the Renaissance -- There were no Italians in the Renaissance. Thank you, Ugo. What I meant was that the various little principalities– Some of them were not so little. Venezia was very big. So was Roma. Even Corsoli, where I came from -- All right, all right. You answer this. Grazie. As I lived during this time, and worked as the food taster for Duke Federico, I believe I know a little more about this than you do. Potta! Ha il cervello di una gallina! Growing up peasants on a farm we did not concern ourselves with being healthy. Just eating was being healthy. But that changed when I worked in the castello of Duke Federico because I learned that all foods affect the humors and organs of the body in one way or another. I should point out that from the time of Hippocrates, it was believed that the body’s health was governed by the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and – Yellow bile. Thank you Mr. Writer. Because of Duke Federico’s various conditions, the cooks, Cristoforo and Luigi, had to be very careful. Onions for example. All onions make one weep, although those which come from Tuscany are not so strong which is why we preferred them in Corsoli. Red onions are sharper than the white ones, the dried ones more so than the fresh ones and the raw ones more than those which have been cooked. Although they like to grow in cool places it is best to keep them near smoke which is why, in Duke Federico’s kitchen, they were hung up by the fires. Piero, Duke Federico’s doctor, forbade him to eat too many of them because he said they caused inflammations, Federico suffered from gout, and were bad for the brain. Piero said they also prevented him from sleeping. This last was true. Piero also claimed that they sometimes caused phlegmatic humors, and sometimes not. (He always said that when he was not sure about something.) However, when onions were mixed with other foods in moderate proportions, they loosened the bowels, which Federico needed, and stimulated the appetite, which he did not. Piero said that if onions were chopped up and placed against hemorrhoids it made them shrink, but he never told Federico this because he did not want to be the one to have to do it. So to answer your question... what was the question? Did you concern yourselves with matters of health? Yes we did. And as Duke Federico’s food taster I came to know about many things like this. People believed in humors until the middle of the 19th century, just about the time Italy came into being. Hmmm. What does that mean? Niente. Just hmmm.

I went to Italy twice during the writing of the book. The first time I had no idea what I was looking for. The second time I was a little over halfway through. Theyre a little confused in my mind now. Once I stayed in Lucca with some friends and while there, drove around Tuscany, Umbria and into the Marche visiting small towns like Ovieto, Gubbio, etc. I saw the palio in Sienna and a couple of other festivals. The second time, or maybe it was the first, I cant remember, I visited Venice and Viareggio to see the Carnival and again just drove around visiting old castles, museums, etc., The bulk of the research was done in the UCLA library which has everything youd ever want to know about Medeval and Renaissance history. What little I didnt find there I found at the main library in downtown LA. One book led to another and I began to despair that Id drown in research. Integrating it smoothly into the story was the most difficult problem. Visiting Italy was more to confirm what I had read, to eat truffes in Umbria, to catch the morning light on the on the hills in Tuscany, to get the sounds, sights and smells right.

My mother, God bless her soul, died when I was very young. All I remember is that we ate polenta, thank God for polenta or we would have starved, and soup made of beans, and bread. Sometimes, my mother made pies from chestnut flour and put apples inside. If we were lucky, my father caught a rabbit or a bird but that was not very often. We kept our chickens for the eggs and by the time we ate them they were old and stringy. On a feast day we sometimes might share a pig with our neighbors. My favorite recipe fom those days was stuffed goose cooked Lombardy style, that is with sliced almonds and served with cheese, sugar and cinammon. But I also liked kid cooked in garlic sauce and spit roasted quail. Peter here. I like the chicken fried with diced lemon and also spiced scaloppine.

This is Ugo. Yes, food tasters still exist tday, although not in the same numbers as they used to. If you have time please look at the essay I wrote on the Daily Gullet. I talk about President Ceausescu of Romania who had a foodtaster before he was shot. Fidel Castro still has one. I read somewhere that President George Bush was looking for a food taster because he was unfamiliar with foreign foods. I am sure that other important people have food tasters but no one likes to talk about it because it means they are not very popular. I never knew exactly how many food tasters there were in Italy during the Renaissance, but at a banquet in Milano there were nine including me. I always wanted to have a guild of food tasters--why not? they have guilds for everything else-- and I even went so far as to make up a list of rules, it is in the book, but I could not find any food tasters who I thought worthy of joining. Potta! The food tasters I met were all suspicious fools. I think to be a good foodtaster you must be quick-witted, have a very sensitive nose, a knowledge of food and nerves of iron. Unfortunately, in my day, they did not ask you if you had the right qualities. You developed them or you died.