Thank you for joining me for the next installment of Post-Quarantine Cooking with Kallie. In case you missed my previous four-part video series, I selected recipes from the Villanova University Digital Library and provided viewers cooking demonstrations and step-by-step instructions for crafting the delicious dishes. While I am no longer in quarantine, I had a great time brining a few historical recipes to life. In that spirit, I plan to continue the blog series this summer with a few new delicacies.

This month, I’ve selected a lasagna dish from Anonimo Toscano, Libro della Cocina (late 14th or early 15th c.) The original text can be viewed here. The Italian cookbook, penned by an anonymous Tuscan author, features 184 recipes with a variety of ingredients and helpful preparations. Below is the translation:

(147) Take good, white flour; dilute it with warm water, and make it thick; then roll it out thin and let it dry: it must be cooked in capon or other fat meat broth: then put it on a platter with grated rich cheese, layer by layer, as you like.

The recipe was one of many featured during the College of Professional Studies virtual mini-course: “The History, Culture and Language of Italian Food.” In partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Mary Migliozzi, Ph.D., Assistant Teaching Professor at Villanova University, shared Italian culinary traditions by “tracing Italian food from Roman and Etruscan origins through the myriad transnational influences of the middle ages and Renaissance and into the regional and globally-influenced food traditions of the 21^st century.” See below for cooking tutorial. View the noodle recipe here. 

Some of my Falvey colleagues attended the virtual course and we reviewed a few primary sources:

• Project Gutenberg’s Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome, by Apicius.
• Liber de coquina (14th c.) Author from the Anjou court of Naples.
• Libro di cucina (14th c.) Anonymous Venetian author.
• De honesta voluptate et valetudine (c. 1470) Bartolomeo (Sacchi) Platina, papal historian, author.
• Banchetti (c. 1549) Cristoforo di Messisbugo, author.
• Opera (c. 1570) Bartolomeo Scappi, Vatican chef, author.
• La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di mangiar bene (c. 1891) Pellegrino Artusi, author. 

For more Italian recipes, check out these resources from Falvey Memorial Library:

• Essentials of classic Italian cooking (Hazan, 1992).
• The cook’s Decameron: a study in taste, containing over two hundred recipes for Italian dishes (Waters, 2012).
• Fine cooking Italian: 200 recipes for authentic Italian food (Taunton Press, 2012).
• Food of the world. Italy (Kidd, 2009).
• My Italian kitchen: home-style recipes made lighter and healthier (Zappala, 2010).
• Cool Italian cooking: fun and tasty recipes for kids (Wagner, 2011).
• Growing up Italian: a book of recipes and memories: Annie’s cookbook (Guarino, 2005).
• Rosemary and bitter oranges: growing up in a Tuscan kitchen (Chen, 2003).
• Lidia’s Italian-American kitchen (Bastianich, 2001).
• A fork in the road. Series 1, Episode 2 (Academic Video Online, 1993).
• Italian food safari (Academic Video Online, 2010).
• Faces of Italy. Episode 1 (Academic Video Online, 2012).
• La cucina italiana: storia di una cultura (Capatti, 2005).
• Rao’s cookbook: over 100 years of Italian home cooking (Pellegrino, 1998).
• Carbone’s cookbook (Stern, 2003).
• Cooking the Italian way: revised and expanded to include new low-fat and vegetarian recipes (Bisignano, 2002).

The next featured recipe: Philadelphia vanilla ice cream.

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.