Culinary Recipes and their Readership in the Italian Renaissance

After almost a thousand years of silence, the writing of cookbooks was resumed between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But what of their readership? Who was the cook who decided to devote time and, probably, effort to writing down his recipes – or dictating them to copyists – aiming at? Who was the reader that he had in mind? The answer is neither simple nor univocal, but interpretations based on the form, as opposed to the content, of cookbooks written in Italy – from the first manuscripts of the Late Middle Ages to printed collections that owed their success first to Platina, then to Bartolomeo Scappi – provide food for thought in this respect. In the first phase I identify – which coincided with the first families of written codices – it would appear that the authors were cooks writing for other cooks of the same rank as themselves. On the one hand, a court cook would write down recipes for another court cook whose basic knowledge he could take for granted. On the other, a cook working at a lower level, would provide more details and leave less scope for individual creativity, because he himself possessed less creativity. Things changed with Maestro Martino, probably prompted by Platina, and later with Bartolomeo Scappi. Partly as a result of the invention of printing, Renaissance cookbooks were written and published to teach the art of cooking and reach a broader audience than the one we might presume for the earlier period.