From the outside there are no clues diners inside Osteria D’Angelo Divino are being served Renaissance cuisine. Its light pink color and subtle appeal hint at a contemporary restaurant experience.
But one glance at the menu corrects that impression. Chef Claudio Amati, it turns out, is on a mission to bring back the flavors that helped make Urbino a capitol of cuisine as well as art during the Renaissance.
Claudio Amati is the only chef in Urbino that studies Italian Renaissance cuisine. ”Each restaurant (in Urbino) has a Renaissance menu that has the same ingredients revisited with modern techniques and modern ingredients of the season.”
And Claudio isn’t alone . . .
Daniella Storoni is also interested in bringing back Renaissance food cuisine. . (insert quote here).
Claudio is one of the chefs that are in the presentations of food in the Piatta Del Duca, a festival dedicated to demonstating the influence of the Duke of Montefeltro over Renaissance cuisine in the cities around Urbino over the summer months of June through September.
Walking into (get shop name) there is an ensemble of organic and biological ingredients and products. Talking to Daniella Storoni is both informative and intriguing. Her interest in Renaissance cooking strikes you in a way that leaves you wanting to find out more and more, even if its very simple. She describes renaissance cooking in descriptive ways that enable you to create a visual image in your head of what it should have looked like. Renaissance food is a combination of meats, pasta, fruits and vegetables on hot and cold plates, seasoned with oriental spices, and presented to those of higher social classes and standards.
She talked about the Renaissance cooking atmosphere as a (quote here) and a demonstration of the Duke’s power. The banquet halls were great, and the tables long, Urbino grew to its peak of power under the Duke of Montefeltro during the Renaissance era. Today, it’s considered one of the greatest representations of architecture from that period, and the cuisine follows it.
Storoni stated that the largest influence on Renaissance cuisine during this time was the Duke of Montefeltro. In order for the Duke to show his power he would present large banquets in order to feed his friends and guests. These banquets lasted many hours, whether for wedding parties or for simply eating and sharing food. Sometimes the Duke would instruct the chef to kill a female calf, proving his wealth because “if you killed the girl that meant that you were very powerful, you were giving up having other calves, it was highly symbolic” Storoni mentioned. As the main power figure in Urbino, the Duke of Montefeltro became the main force behind the development of Renaissance cuisine.
As Amati stated, the ingredients today are the same as the ones that were used in the Renaissance, they have different tastes and are used differently. Through the natural evolution of animals, meats taste different now than they did in the Renaissance era. Many of the meats in the renaissance were caught wild and then cooked while most of the meats today are cooked on farms and fed special diets. At certain times of the year, Catholics were not allowed to eat red meats, and so the diets of the people who lived in those years changed with it. Instead of red meat they were able to eat fish, and they caught it themselves, and over time it became a primary food source in the Renaissance era.
There are blends of meat and food, meat and fruit, and smells that are interesting but you need to find the equilibrium.
All of the elements in the Renaissance period were presented differently as well. They were on plates that were decorated with plants not meant for eating. “There are blends of meat and food, meat and fruit, and smells that are interesting but you need to find the equilibrium”, Claudio Amati states about the mixes of foods. Pastas and meats were served alongside fruits instead of as separate dishes. All of the elements on the dish, even the fruits and vegetables, were seasoned with the same spices. The combination of spices that was predominately used was “cinnamon, sugars, ginger, and pepper” and according to Daniella Storoni, “they came from the oriental east and this made him (the Duke) very powerful because not everyone could afford to have spices and sugars because they came from very far.”
The generic Renaissance banquet was centered around friendship and community. There were two courses, the credenza and the chochina. The credenza was the cold plates and then the cochina was the hot plates. The plates were often centered on the body, appealing to senses and making the meats match each other according to age principles of dry and wet. The older animals were considered dry so their meat was boiled, while younger animals were considered moist and they were roasted. The dry meats were served with wet foods and the wet meats were served with dry foods. This made for easier pairings and cohesion amongst the dishes.
Community was important in the Renaissance, and people would get together and share conversation over meals on long tables in banquet halls. The guests shared no tension with each other and it is said that banquets were, according to Storoni, “a sign of unity and cohesion and sharing food, culture, friendship, and community”. The guests and the host were able to share a common ground and talk around the table for hours.
Even though all of the guests were on common grounds they were not on them physically. Depending on the social status of the guests they were on lower physical levels than the Duke himself. You were also organized on where you set by your social status or your importance, if you were a close friend of the Duke you sat closer to him rather than far away on a lower physical level. There were also several times also that people were allowed to stand outside of the building that the banquet was in, and all of the leftover foods were thrown to them so that they were able to taste the food.
Daniella Storoni is on the executive board for the Le Piatto del Duca festival that runs through the summer months of June to September. The festival was formed 5 years ago to honor the Duke and everything that he did for the Renaissance food and the era. The Duke is the one that was known for making everything happen and they wanted to honor him. The 5 towns in the Pesaro – Urbino area put together a several month long festival that demonstrates the influence of Renaissance food on the Marche region. There are festivals that are put on and demonstrations that are shown at several restaurants and shops in the areas.
For the past two years, during this time the entire city has begun to make the various restaurant menus’ focus on the cooking styles that were used in the Renaissance. They prepare summer menu’s that follow the general style while updating the cooking methods. In order to keep the methods of Renaissance cooking alive Storoni “created a line of cookies that were based on the renaissance menu’s and the recipes were taken from renaissance recipes using biological ingredients” that she sells in her shop, (name of shop).
Claudio Amati’s restaurant focuses on the elements of Renaissance cuisine and through his studies he has helped to keep the Renaissance cuisine evident in today’s daily life. The demonstrations and efforts made by food historians and experts are important in connecting Urbino to the glory that it held during the Renaissance era.
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