by Michelle Legro
They called him “fat boy,” this seventeen-year old apprentice in the studio of Florentine painter Verrocchio who would receive care packages from his step-father, a pastry chef. The bastard son of a Florentine notary and a lady of Vinci, the boy’s doting step-father gave him a taste for marzipans and sugars from a very young age. The apprentice would receive the packages and devour them so quickly—crapulando, it was called, or guzzling—that the master felt the need to punish him, instructing the boy to paint an angel in the corner of a baptism of Christ, a mediocre painting which hangs in the Uffizi because it includes the first work of Leonardo da Vinci.
After three years as an apprentice, twenty-year old Leonardo took a job as a cook at the Tavern of the Three Snails near the Ponte Vecchio, working during the day on the few commissions his master sent his way and slinging polenta in the evenings. Polenta was the restaurant’s signature dish, a tasteless hash of meats and corn porridge. The other cooks at the Three Snails cared little about the quality of the food they served, and when in the spring of 1473, a poisoning sickened and killed the majority of the cooking staff of the tavern, Leonardo was put in charge of the kitchen. He changed the menu completely, serving up delicate portions of carved polenta arranged beautifully on the plate. However, like most tavern clientele, the patrons preferred their meals in huge messy portions. Upset with the change in management, they ran Leonardo out of a job.
Much like a modern struggling artist, Leonardo da Vinci was in his daily life a line cook, tavern keeper, and chef-for-hire. “My painting and my sculpture will stand comparison with that of any other artist,” he wrote in a humble introduction to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, by way of a job application. “I am supreme at telling riddles and tying knots. And I make cakes that are without compare.”
Sforza took him on neither as a cook, painter, or sculptor, but instead as a lute player and after-dinner entertainer. Leonardo attempted to show his lord his new inventions for fortifications, catapults, and ladders, but Sforza paid little attention until the lute-player fashioned his inventions out of marzipan and jelly. Sforza charged the young man with refurbishing his kitchen, a task which would consume the life of Leonardo and the entire Sforza court.
Five hundred years before Modernist Cuisine’s exhaustive look at molecular gastronomy, The Kitchen Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci envisioned a culinary world as studio and laboratory, where food was to be prepared efficiently, beautifully, and ingeniously. Unfortunately, Italian food of the late fifteenth century had less to do with the luxurious feats of Ancient Rome and more to do with the rustic tastes of the Goths, whose dishes included meats and birds for those who could afford it, and an endless parade of porridge and gruel for those who could not. Leonardo was horrified by much of the food that was served to him, both at court and at home, and he included in his notebooks a running list of dishes that he hated, but that his own servant insisted on serving him: jellied goat, hemp bread, white mosquito pudding, inedible turnips, and eel balls—which he notes, “this dish if eaten often can cause madness.”
The notebooks, which include a history of Leonardo’s tenure as chef at the Sforza court, is primarily a collection of recipes (cabbage jam, snail soup), wayward thoughts (“Would porridge balls in gold-leaf attract My Lord’s attention?”), dining etiquette (“On the Unseemly Behaviors at My Lord’s Table”), household tips, (“On Ridding your Kitchens of Pestilential Flies”), and household inventions (“The Machines I Have Yet to Design for my Kitchen”).
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