Bartolomeo Scappi

Bartolomeo scappi is to cooking as Michelangelo is to the fine arts. His cookbook Opera, in its beauty as a printed work, in its ordered presentation and comprehensiveness, exemplifies the practical elegance of the High Renaissance. No comparably authoritative work appeared again until the mid-eighteenth century in France, and none has ever matched Opera for its series of bold but scrupulously accurate drawings depicting the ideal kitchen furnished with all the equipment of the expert cook. Here is the fish tank full of fish, there the ravioli wheel, the nutmeg grater, and the slotted spoon for draining pasta, and there the kitchen boy manipulating a whisk by rolling the handle between his hands exactly as is done today. The text of Opera is as accomplished as the illustrations, and the recipes are so thorough in their detail and so clearly indexed that they put many a modern cookbook to shame. Scappi leaves nothing to chance; he even illustrates the perfect traveling saddle with leather bottles and containers, like a modern picnic basket – and stipulates that it needs a strong horse.