The Renaissance was so called because it was a ‘rebirth’ of the classical forms of art. In the culinary arts, too, Latin origins were studied, notably by Bartolomeo Sacchi. He had just been made head librarian at the Vatican, when in 1475 he published a cookbook that was to become a bestseller. Sacchi was a scholar, and the fact that he called himself Il Platina, after the Latin name of his home town Piadena, is an indication of his love of ancient Rome.
A remarkable sign of the great interest that there must have been in cooking in Renaissance Italy is the fact that between 1475 and 1500 his book, De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, went to nine editions, a large number for those days. Platina included many recipes for pasta, in one of which he specified that the pasta should be cooked ‘for as long as it takes to say three Pater Nosters’.
