The Leonardo Food Trail

Paul Murray

Cotoletta alla Milanese was a great favourite of Leonard da Vinci's, so the story goes. It is more easily described in English as "breaded veal cutlet fried in a lemony-butter sauce".

Charles Nicholl in his recent biography, Leonardo da Vinci: the flights of the mind, records that "in later life Leonardo was a vegetarian". We are thus left with two images of the great Leonardo: the first, Leonardo the meat-eater, and the second, Leonardo the vegetarian.

Imagine a trip to Italy to find out!

The longish flight from Cape Town in October 2004, with an afternoon of sight-seeing in Central Milan, was a good enough excuse to retire to the Hotel Monica for dinner and the night. Our hosts were the charming couple, Giulio and Giuseppina Maggioni of Pregnana, a suburb of Milan. The hotel, named after their only daughter, has a fine restaurant serving authentic Milanese fare.

The meal began with a risotto ("rice with saffron"), a typical dish that dominates the first course of the city's menus. The true quality of a good risotto is that it is served hot and it must be sticky. The admixture of the precise amount of Parmesan cheese to the fully prepared dish ensures that not a single grain will leave the fork.

The second course was crumbed veal in a lemony-butter sauce and so the time was right to ask: Did Leonardo really eat cotoletta alla Milanese? While no one at table was able to verify the story, the Monsignore, visiting from Bergamo, pronounced that it was the Milanese who invented the dish and not the Austrians, as it has sometimes been suggested. For the sake of upholding patriotic fervour this was more important to any Milanese than worrying about what Leonardo liked or did not like. He was Tuscan after all. Tuscans liked pasta fagioli, a thick bean soup, and bistecca alla Fiorentina, a juicy steak grilled in garlic and olive oil.

I recall how, with precision of diction and argument, almost as if engaging in a lesson of homiletics, His Grace the Monsignore explained, in pure Bergamask, that cotoletta alla Milanese was first served by the noble Melzi d'Eril family to General Radetzky, the commander of the Austrian troops in Northern Italy. He enjoyed it so much that he ordered the chefs of the imperial court of the Hapsburgs to prepare it, instructing them to use pork in order not to make the copy too evident. From this came the dish we also know as Wienerschnitzel.

Austro-Italian competition on so many fronts is as old as the hills. Food is certainly one such contest match!

It was Giuseppina's turn to defend the culinary superiority of her land, which she did with great aplomb as she revealed the secret of making a really good cotoletta alla Milanese. Fry the crumbed veal in plenty of butter, not too hot. Give time to the meat to be perfectly cooked without burning the bread, in order to reach a golden colour.

Such are the Milanese, serious about food. All the time the explanations, first from the Monsignore and then from the Signora, were accompanied by the intense waving of hands, characteristic of Italians, as if their lives depended on convincing you.

Alas! The explanations never centered on Leonardo and his favourite dish. The regard by the Lombardi for Leonardo the Tuscan was evident, though. The wealthy agricultural Po Valley was helped by Leonardo's irrigation and drainage schemes, that later served for transport. Trade flourished and industry grew. His standing as an engineering genius till this day goes undisputed and unchallenged by one of the most sophisticated societies in the world, the Milanese. To suggest that he ate cotoletta alla Milanese is just another tourist attraction.

Referring to Leonardo's preference for food, Charles Nicoll writes: "There is no evidence that he was a life-long vegetarian, but he certainly was in later years" (Leonardo da Vinci: the flights of the mind, p 43). A very close associate of Leonardo's, Tommaso Masini, held similar views: "He would not kill a flea for any reason whatever; he preferred to dress in linen so as not to wear something dead" (Leonardo da Vinci: the flights of the mind, p 43).

True to his Tuscan roots, Leonardo had a predilection for a thickish bean soup, pasta fagioli. However, being at work in Milan would have exposed him more to the Northern Italian type of minestrone. What may the difference be? The former concentrates on broad and canellini beans forming the essential ingredients, whereas the latter contains a wider variety of veggies, neatly cut into blocks. Each of these two dishes ends up being a superb potage. Try this recipe for the minestrone that Leonardo would have eaten on a cold night in Milan. I asked Franco from the trattoria round the corner from the hotel for a suitable recipe of the kind of soup Leonardo would have liked. He searched in his nonna's tatty cookery book and gave me this to jot down:

Take 1 pound of hot or mild Italian sausage,
2 tablespoons of olive oil,
1 large chopped onion,
3 large chopped cloves of garlic,
5 cups of chicken stock,
1 can of chopped tomatoes,
1 packet of chopped frozen spinach,
2 cups of sliced carrots,
2 cups of frozen peas,
2 teaspoons of dried basil,
ditto dried marjoram,
one pinch of hot pepper flakes,
1 can of Romano beans and
1 cup of small shell pasta.

Prick the sausage skins and place the sausage in a saucepan and cover with water, bring to a boil, cover and let the sausage simmer for 15 minutes until nicely cooked, then drain the sausage and cut into slices. Heat the oil and lightly brown the sausage slices in a saucepan and add the onions and the garlic. Cook this for 4 minutes until browned and soft, then add the chicken stock, chopped tomatoes, not leaving out the juice, add the spinach, carrots, beans, basil, marjoram and red pepper flakes. Bring this all to a boil and let it simmer, covered, for 10 minutes, until the veggies are nice and tender. Add the beans, including the liquid, and the pasta and peas. Simmer for between 5 and 7 minutes or until the pasta is al dente. Adjust the seasoning, as preferred. Thin down the soup with additional chicken stock if necessary. Serve the soup in heated bowls. Sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese on top.

"Leonardo must have liked this very much!" came the convincing words from Franco, "just as he liked pasta fagioli when he lived and worked in Florence!"

But da Vinci's last years were spent in Cloux in France: in 1516 he moved to France on the invitation of King Francis I. He had a small studio in the court. He had his own serving-woman by the name of Mathurine. She used to prepare a hot vegetable soup for him. It was probably a little less thick and a little clearer, as the French are wont to eat. There was bread and wine as an accompaniment. Charles Nicoll's introductory chapter of the da Vinci biography is entitled: "The Cooling of the Soup". Apparently, one evening in his studio in Cloux, because the soup was getting cold the very Mathurine summoned the maestro to table. According to Nicoll, Leonardo was deeply engrossed in writing a complex piece of geometry at the time and had to interrupt the task right there and then in order to sit down and have his meal. It was more important to eat a bowl of hot vegetable soup getting cold than to complete the experiment. Leonardo's last words ever written were, "because the soup is getting cold … etcetera" (Charles Nicoll, Leonardo da Vinci, the flights of the mind, p 1).

Such is the importance of food in our lives, even for Leonardo, who abandoned his experiment for supper.



LitNet: 18 January 2005

boontoe / to the top

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