In her first two novels, Boston-based Crystal King has explored the unique ways that history and food both reflect and affect each other. King talks with Canadian historical novelist, Roberta Rich, about The Chef’s Secret, set in Renaissance Italy, which details the life of Bartolomeo Scappi, the legendary chef to several popes and author of one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time. King talks about, among other topics, how the few details known of Scappi’s life afforded her an opportunity as a novelist to invent and imagine. Crystal King is an author, culinary enthusiast, and marketing expert. Her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy. She has taught classes in writing, creativity, and social media at several universities including Harvard Extension School and Boston University, as well as at GrubStreet, one of the leading creative writing centers in the US. A Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and former co-editor of the online literary arts journal Plum Ruby Review, Crystal received her MA in critical and creative thinking from UMass Boston, where she developed a series of exercises and writing prompts to help fiction writers in medias res. She resides in Boston but considers Italy her next great love after her husband, Joe, and their two cats, Nero and Merlin. Roberta Rich divides her time between Vancouver and Colima, Mexico. She is a former family law lawyer. The Midwife of Venice, her #1 bestselling debut novel, has been published to acclaim in thirteen territories, including the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Spain and Brazil. Her second novel, the nationally bestselling The Harem Midwife, has published in over ten countries.
Books by Crystal King
Feast of Sorrow: a Novel of Ancient Rome
Books by Roberta Rich
Other Related Materials
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Tasting Rome: Fresh Flavours & Forgotten Recipes from an Ancient City
Here Let Us Feast: a Book of Banquets
Cooking for the Pope: Bartolomeo Scappi, the Renaissance’s Most Innovative Chef, Revolutionized the Culinary Arts (link opens Paris Review article)
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever.
Live Mic: The Chef’s Secret by Crystal King
Gregory: Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
___
RR: I'm very pleased to be interviewing Crystal King. I have recently finished her wonderful book. They say you can't judge a book by its cover; look at how beautiful this cover is. Maximilian Pfeiler is the artist, a Czech 18th-century artist. And I enjoyed every page of the book. And Crystal, I would like you to, if you would, give us a bit of a precis about your book, a bit of a summary.
CK: Sure. I decided that I had needed to pick up the Bartolomeo Scappi book when I was researching my first book, Feast of Sorrow, which is about Marcus Gavius Apicius, or Apicius, or there's a couple different pronunciations, but the original Latin is Apicius. And when you're researching different culinary periods in time, sometimes there's not much you can find, and so you get compendiums. So these culinary compendiums of all of the Italian historical figures. And Scappi kept coming up, and so I picked up his cookbook. And his cookbook is a 1570 cookbook with 1000 recipes in it. And I thought, this guy looks so interesting. He was a chef to several different Popes. We know nothing about him, and I thought, that means I get to make it all up. [chuckle]
CK: So what it is, it's a story about Scappi's life as I imagined it. He was the chef to several different Cardinals and Popes, but he... We don't know if he had anyone in his life that he loved. We have his will, but he doesn't mention a wife, or a spouse, or children. So I decided, what if he was in love with someone, and maybe what if he was in love with someone he shouldn't have been in love with? So I had him fall in love with someone he shouldn't have fallen in love with, as the old song goes. And then what you're also getting is this story in the present with his nephew, Giovanni, who was his apprentice in real life. And Giovanni has uncovered these journals and letters that his uncle has left behind. So you're getting the story of Scappi's life, a 50-year love affair that he had with a noblewoman, and then you're getting Giovanni uncovering the mysteries of this life that his uncle lived.
RR: So Giovanni inherited a strongbox filled with mysterious journals that were written in code, and you have a mysterious item on the table in front of you...
CK: I do.
RR: That I would like you to hold up and tell us about, and tell us what that is.
CK: This is an Alberti cipher wheel, and I'm gonna stop talking for a second. And it spins. So basically there's two wheels, and they both spin, and there's letters on the inside and the outside. And in the book... So in the 16th century they were starting to be very interested in code; code was very in vogue, and it was in vogue not just... We think about it in a military sort of way; that's why we would code things, you don't want anyone to uncover your war secrets. But at this point in time, they didn't have encryption like we do and passwords, they... But they could code their letters and their journals and their missives to their friends, and their diaries and things like that. And so I took advantage of that. The Alberti cipher wheel was devised by Leon Battista Alberti, and it says on the back here, in 1467. He does not appear my book, but the code does. And I actually just wrote a blog post on my website, CrystalKing.com, where you can see how the wheel works, somebody walks you through it. And you can purchase these online, too, these cipher wheels.
CK: And then there's a second code that's in the book. Scappi becomes a little more sophisticated in using the code that he wants to hide the words of his diary behind, and that is by a man named Giovan Battista Bellaso. And he is a character in the book briefly, where he gives the code book that he has written to Giovanni so he can help uncover and decipher the code. And it is a more advanced version of this particular code, which they call a polyalphabetic cipher.
RR: So among other things, he would write down his recipes using a code similar to that.
CK: I don't know if that was true in real life, but in my... And I didn't have him do that with the recipes, just with the diary that he kept all of his secrets in.
RR: Okay. And tell us a bit about why you fell in love with the 16th century, because your previous book was set in ancient Rome, and then you've leapfrogged through time and you're now in the 1570s. What attracted you to the Renaissance?
CK: Well, I think I've always personally been very interested in the Renaissance, even as a little kid I loved the whole princesses and the Arthurian tales, and then you get it from medieval times into the Renaissance and the Tudors, and I just love that whole era. But when I was writing the ancient Roman book, I realized that there's all these culinary heroes, is what I call them, in Italy, who nobody really knows anything about, and so... And that's throughout time. So I actually have a whole series of books planned on culinary figures that are Italian culinary figures in different eras. My third novel that I'm working on is also in the Renaissance, but then my next one after that I think will be in the Baroque Era, and then I have another one in the 1800s that I'm planning, and one about the Futurists, which the modern... The Futurist Cookbook, if anyone wants to Wikipedia that, that is a fascinating way to spend a few minutes.
RR: Are there recipes included in your... Not in the book, I know, but do you have some posted on your website?
RR: I do. I actually have a cookbook for both the Feast of Sorrow and one for Chef's Secret. So that's the really fun part about writing about culinary figures is that hopefully there's recipes involved. And so in Scappi's time, you can actually pick up the recipes from his cookbook and go into your kitchen and make them, almost like you would have made them in the same way. There's a little bit of difference in proportions, you're not cooking over an open fire for the most part, [chuckle] and you might not be making peacock or hedgehog pie, but you can make braised beef, and you can make fricassee of rabbit, and you can make ciambelli, which is basically a precursor to the bagel of today. So there's all sorts of pastries, there's pies galore, every kind of pie, there's apple and pear and pumpkin and all sorts of crazy pies in the recipes.
RR: And so if you go to my website, CrystalKing.com, you can actually download both the ancient Roman recipe cookbook and then the Renaissance one, which are all based on recipes from here. And they're either by my husband and myself, or I worked with area chefs in Boston, as well as food historians in different parts of the world, and then a bunch of food bloggers who interpreted some of the recipes.
CK: Could you give us a little menu of what we might expect if we went to the Vatican for the... And what is the right expression, the investiture of a Pope? That's not quite correct. The ordin... No. How do you...
RR: When they're ordained basically, yeah. Who's Catholic? Who knows?
Speaker 4: Installed.
RR: Installed. [chuckle]
CK: Installed. Thank you. Thank you for that verb.
RR: I know more about the funeral side of things than I do about the... [chuckle]
CK: That's when they're dis-installed.
RR: Yes. [chuckle]
CK: Actually interestingly enough, the reason I know so much about the funeral side is because in Scappi's cookbook, in the 1570 cookbook, there is an English translation by a guy named Terence Scully, he's a British guy, and you can purchase that translation today. But there was actually a whole description of how the Pope's funeral took place and actually how the food moved when all the Popes were in the conclave, or when the Cardinals were in the conclave to choose the Pope, how the food moved in and out of the conclave without notes going back and forth. And so I know a lot more about the funeral side of things.
RR: Well, give us an example of what a funeral feast would look like.
CK: Well...
RR: For those of us who haven't had dinner yet. [laughter]
CK: Well I can talk more about... I'll just talk about the feasts in general. So Scappi has hundreds of menus in this cookbook, and he actually lays them out for all sorts of different occasions. There's a menu for a meal with... For Emperor Charles V, Emperor Charles V, there's meals for different Cardinals when they were having their coronation anniversary. Coronation, that's the word we were looking for. When the Pope is coronated. But a meal, a very... One of these elaborate meals that Scappi was used to creating would have sometimes upwards of 10 courses. They would start potentially with apples or with eggs, and they would end with fruit, which is very ancient Roman, too, that's very traditional, you would start with eggs and end with fruit. And there was a saying in this time frame, from eggs to apples, and that means from beginning to end.
CK: But you would have really elaborate platings, extraordinarily elaborate platings, and you might have, as I said, many as 10 courses. But you would have in this time probably at least maybe 20 or 30 dishes in each course. And so over the course of a night, you might have 1000 different dishes. You would not be expected to eat all of them. [chuckle] And today we call the sideboard in our house, we call it a credenza, and that has its roots in medieval and Renaissance times, this credenza. And the credenza was a big huge sideboard where they would serve all of the cold dishes from, so that would be your salamis, and your cheeses, and breads, and anything that would have been made ahead of time, and you would serve those at various times during the meal. And so today we... The ancient Romans established the idea of three courses, which we continue to keep today, but in this time frame we also start... And today we start with the savoury foods first, we have an appetizer, we have a main dish, and then we have sweet at the end. In this time frame they would have had sweet things in the middle of it. They didn't care where it all fit, it didn't matter, you would just deliver the food and people would eat it.
RR: And how many people would be sitting at the table?
CK: There's a really fascinating menu for some... Actually, when Pope Clement IV was going to be... His first anniversary meal. And I think there were 15 Cardinals that were going to be at the meal, and there were 1000 dishes listed in the menu.
RR: For 15 people?
CK: Yes.
RR: Wow!
CK: For the course of... Over the course of a whole afternoon. And like I said, you wouldn't eat all of those, you would have little bits from all of it.
RR: I was fascinated by your description of a sugar form that was designed by Michelangelo that appears in the middle of the book. Could you talk about sugar molds and sugar forms a bit?
CK: Yeah, and Michelangelo probably did not sculpt in sugar, but I love the idea that he made... He did sculpt in bronze, which means he knew how to make a mold. And so I took that idea and I kind of ran with that in the story. But the sugar sculptures were something that were very common in this time frame for nobility. Sugar was something that was starting to become much more common coming into Italy from the New World. In the southern parts of Italy, they had sugar from... The Arabs, actually, cultivated sugar, and so in Sicily for example, and in Malta, and in parts of the south you actually had sweet dishes that were very common that weren't in the northern parts of Italy up until the Renaissance. And in this time, all the sugar started coming in from the New World, and the more money you had the more sugar that you could buy and the more sculptures you could make.
CK: And you would mold the sugar... You would use molds for all of the sugar sculptures. Scappi described some sugar sculptures as being very large and elaborate. A few that I can remember off the top of my head, one is a unicorn with its horn in the jaws of a lion. There's one with Hercules clubbing a tiger. There's all these just incredibly mythical sculptures that would just be sitting on the middle of the table. Or there's actually drawings in some of these ancient... These Renaissance cookbooks. I keep... I talked about ancient Rome for a couple years, so if I slip into the ancient bit, forgive me. But you would have a table like the length of this room and it would be covered in a whole city of sugar. And in this time frame, it would have been painted. The sugar probably would have been brown, and it wasn't until about 100 years later that sugar became white. And so you would paint the sugar, and you would not eat it; it would be hard and just definitely for visual pleasure.
RR: So it could be reused.
CK: No, you wouldn't reuse the sugar.
RR: No?
CK: Nope.
RR: You have a theme of revenge that runs through the book, various of the characters are duplicitous and treacherous. And I wondered what you thought of the difference between the attitude towards revenge in the 16th century and how we think of it today.
CK: Yeah, so today, of course, revenge takes more petty forms, like keying somebody's car or something like that. But back then in Italy, in particular, there was a sense of family honor and the idea that you would protect that name of your family no matter what, and that actually still runs all the way through very deep from ancient times even up into the stories you hear about the mafia it's about the family, it's about protecting your own. And so, in this time frame, vendetta was something that was very common to... If somebody had wronged your family in a way you would make sure that you basically made sure that they paid for that. And so, I explore a couple of different themes of vendetta in the book. And the other thing that's interesting, and this carries from ancient Rome, all the way through the Renaissance, is the idea that the sins of the father also carried through to the family. In ancient Rome if somebody did something wrong, which they have happened in my first novel, Feast of Sorrow, they would eradicate the entire bloodline. Which is pretty dire.
CK: And by the Renaissance, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was still pretty violent. And if your father had done something wrong, your sons might still be paying for it in their lifetime, with feuds with the families and things like that.
RR: Well, let's talk about sex for a minute.
CK: Oh, everybody's favourite hot topic, right.
RR: I think we're covering all the major themes. You have a couple of very passionate love affairs in the book and I'm wondering what the Renaissance' attitude toward sex was and maybe you can talk about, I'm sure the attitudes, differed from class to class, but maybe you could talk about that.
CK: Yeah, we see a lot of... Of course, when we're watching TV and you're watching The Borges on Netflix or you're seeing some of the Renaissance depictions what we're most listening is the nobility and the idea that the women married at the age of 13 and they were property and they were basically a way to cement relationships between families. And when it came to the commoners that really wasn't so much the case they were a lot more free to do what they wanted to do and to have relationships with who they wanted to. In the middle class, there might still have been some of this marrying back and forth, but also it has to do with the marriage ability of the woman. If the woman is barren or is not unable to produce a child or is divorced and then that woman might have a little bit more agency to make some choices that she wouldn't have had if she was going to be used as a means to cement a relationship with a family. So, really depended on the class you were in and what your family situation was.
RR: I'm curious about your research process. Do you read Italian?
CK: I do some.
RR: You do.
CK: Not as great as I would like, but I can get my way through a book.
RR: So, do you brave the archives in Italy?
CK: I have not yet done that, because I feel like it would take me so long that it would just be embarrassing. So, for example, the third novel, that I'm working on is about Vincenzo Cervio who is the meat carver Alessandro Farnese, and he left behind a manual of carving and it's only in Italian, there's no English translation, so I have a copy at home, and I have painstakingly worked my way through that, which is really fun, but also very difficult. It does slow things down. I do have somebody who would write me a letter to the Vatican Library, and I would love to do that just to go into the Vatican Library, but you don't get to really... You have to just point and tell them what you want and they bring it to you, and then I think I would just spend so much time trying to figure out the Italian, it wouldn't be worth it. So I do it at home.
RR: What are some of your favorite places in Italy? I assume you've been Italy many times and have visited many different cities.
CK: Yes, I try to go at least once a year, more if I can. I just came back, actually, from Syracuse in Sicily, did visit Malta which is not Italy, and Sardinia. But my favorite place is Rome, Rome is where my heart is, Rome is where my books are mostly set but I have also spent time in Venice. Part of The Chef's Secret is set in Venice, and I really resisted going to Venice for a while, 'cause I thought, oh it's so touristy, there's so many cruise ships. I just, I don't know if I wanna do it. And then finally I realized, Google Earth is just not gonna cut it for walking through the canals right? So I went and was... I mean, you know, you've written your novels there and I realized I couldn't have even begun to write anything unless I had walked in that most incredible, impossible city. So I also really love Bologna. And I recently visited, several towns near Emilia-Romagna region and Ravenna and Urbino. Urbino was the seat of the Renaissance much more so than Florence for quite some time. And a lot of people don't really hear about that anymore because most of the treasures are in Florence. But Urbino is this beautiful walled city that I just, I think about that city all the time. You could see it in about 20 minutes, literally, it's so tiny, but it's breathtakingly beautiful and the Palazzo Ducale is worth a visit.
RR: And did you see the Venus of Urbino?
CK: I did not, it's not in Urbino at the moment... At the time we were there, I don't think it's actually kept there anymore. If I recall, I think it might be somewhere else, in Italy.
RR: Who were some of your favorite renaissance painters?
CK: Oh, there's a lot. I love Canaletto. I love a lot of the Venetian painters actually and Rapahel. Rapahel also hold a dear place in my heart. On one of the places I write about in the book, there's a character named Seraphina and her son Valentino, and Valentino is Giovanni's best friend in the book. And they live in a mansion, a palazzo, it's actually a very small palazzo in the grand scheme of Italian palazzos, it's called Farnesina. Has anyone here been to the Farnesina in Trastevere in Rome? Okay, you have to bucket list this because it is one of the most beautiful places in Rome, it's this little beautiful palazzo. It's right on the other side of the river from the Campo de' Fiori in Rome and it's covered in Raphael paintings. It's just breath taking, this beautiful palazzo. And I write a scene that's placed there. So I would have to say, probably Raphael, he ranks up there too.
RR: It's one thing to unearth historical facts and know dates and battles and names of characters and so on, but how do you recreate the world view of the people who lived in the 16th century? Or in ancient Rome, how do you get inside people's heads? Because they didn't think and act the same way that you and I do.
CK: Yeah, and that's a tricky thing, I think that's a conversation that a lot of writers that write historical fiction, and a lot of historians have is... We're making up stories about this time frame. Did those people really think like this? How much of our modern sensibilities do we put into the stories that we're writing? And that's a really tricky thing I think. I tried to stay true to the characters in the time frame that I know of them, but I know that there are some modern sensibilities that creep in. The women are probably slightly more have slightly more agency than they would have. In my first novel, I tried to be very, I did not do that, I did not give them as much agency in that first story in the second story, it's a little bit more of a love story and I thought that it made a little bit more sense to add a bit more modern thinking in there, but I think it's tricky. I for one read a whole ton of everything I can get from the time period, and so that means all the source material in ancient room, that means I was reading Kato's treaties on agriculture, I was reading Suetonius and all of these ancient tax written by people in that time frame. In the Renaissance. I'm reading Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography which is incredible. The best biography, you can pick up, it's hilarious and amazing. And it was written in the Renaissance. I can't say enough good things about that biography. Have you read it?
RR: No.
CK: Okay, just definitely add that one to your list. Benvenuto Cellini was a goldsmith and his statue is on the bridge in Florence on the Ponte Vecchio where all the gold shops are. And he was this really fascinating character who wrote an autobiography in his time frame and it wasn't published until posthumously, but he was very grandiose and he had saved the Pope single handily in The Sack of Rome and he had murdered people, but the Pope, loved him so much, 'cause he wanted him to create medals that he pardoned him and just this insane stories. And he slept with all these women and he left out all the men that he slept with and so a really fascinating guy. Anyway I'm reading stuff like him. Because you're really getting into what's happening in the minds of those characters. I read a lot of court cases too in the Renaissance that's I think one of the... It's really hard to get information about the common people and stuff like court cases give you a ton of information that you might not be able to find anywhere else. So we did a lot, that kind of stuff.
RR: And where would you go to read court cases? For example?
CK: There's actually books that you can buy and or check out from the library. I just really dig deep into the reference sections and look for any historians that have written on these materials.
RR: So when you read court proceedings for example, does it give you a sense of the language does it give you a sense of the attitude and the philosophy of...
RR: Definitely.
RR: The day-to-day people?
CK: I had a lot of the cuss words from the court proceedings. And it's interesting too, because the court proceedings tell you a lot about just how they managed themselves. So the idea of how the police system worked and the idea of courts worked is very different than ours, but yet, it's still sort of the same. It's familiar at least but you could be put into jail, for cursing, you could... And if you were accused of a crime, you would go before the magistrate you and the person that accused you and if the judge thought that that was interesting enough that you might, it might be a plausible enough case you both went to jail until they could have the actual trial, and so you would have to sit in jail with the person that accused you. And so I play with that in the book. The threat of that occurs in the stories too.
RR: It would cut down in court cases would not?
CK: It would.
[laughter]
CK: We should adopt it.
RR: Talk a little bit about language and your selection of dialogue, how do you create plausible 16th century dialogue and language without being too long-winded or too archaic or to stilted?
CK: Yeah, so I try to keep a high sense of the timeframe. So you're not getting a lot of... You're not getting a lot of contractions I'm not using a lot of slang, and if I do use some slang it would be slang that would be specific to the timeframe. And those are hard to come by, but I also have to explain a lot of things. So, if I use an Italian phrase, I have to put it into context so that the reader is not lost. So I really try to explain a bit in both. I have some Italian words that are in the book, to give it some color, and some flavor, but I always try to explain those in context so that somebody who doesn't speak Italian, can understand that, but really it's trying to make sure that I'm not using words, that are to modern day that would have been more appropriate then. One of the things that I think is amazing, too, about being a writer is when you get to work with the copy editors, because copy editors are amazing, they're amazing people, and they will go through and they'll be like, "That word did not exist until 1782, are you sure you wanna use it?" And I think that going through the etymology and understanding the words I think is important when you're writing historical fiction.
RR: There's a wonderful website etymology.com that, well sets you straight on all of those questions. Your book is obviously a labour of love. How long did it take you to write it?
CK: So, this book took me a little bit less time than Feast Of Sorrow, Feast Of Sorrow took me about four or five years to write it, but it took me 10 years to get it published between looking for an agent two to three years to find an agent, and when I was looking for an agent Feast Of Sorrow was a longer book. And when you write a first novel publishers are not always excited about long books, because if they publish that book and then it doesn't sell well, they've have wasted a lot of paper, so they are a little hesitant on the long books hence I had a really hard time finding an agent because nobody wanted a book that long from a first time author. And so I thought I'm gonna keep looking but I'm gonna write this other book. So while I was looking for the agent, I started working on this book. So by the time, Feast Of Sorrow came out, I already had this one done and I could just sell it back. It was ready to go at that point, so I lucked out, my next novel, I'm still... It's a work in progress. It will be slower, but I think it also gets easier. I think maybe you found that the first novel was very...
CK: The first time I'd ever done anything like that. And the second time I kind of feel like I know what I'm doing, and now I'm at a point where I know what I need to do to get things done a lot quicker, so hopefully they'll go faster.
RR: The work... The novel you're working on now, where is that set?
CK: It's set in Renaissance Italy as well. I chose the same timeframe so I didn't have to do as much research, and I could also write it quickly. The Baroque Era, well, I'll have to do a lot more research on that next book. But it's set in Bologna, and in Urbino -which is why I had gone there, and also in Rome, and it's in parts of the Lazio. It's about Cardinal Alessandro Farnese's meat carver. And there is a scene in Chef's Secret where this dinner for Pope Clement... He was supposed to have this dinner, and it didn't happen because Pope Clement was a very austere Pope, and he decided when he got wind of this elaborate meal that was gonna happen, he told Scappi nope you can't do that. And Scappi was so angry about it that he actually put the menu in his actual cookbook. He was like, "I was gonna make this meal, but I wasn't allowed to." That was kind of the gist of it. But in that scene there is something very astute readers and now you will notice it... Look at... There's a man that... One of the Cardinals comes up to Scappi and says, "I'd like you to come and do a dinner for me," and you don't get much more about this dinner at all, but that dinner is going to take place in the next book.
RR: Very clever. Very clever. Now, I know there's some writers in the audience, and I know they're gonna want to know about your work schedule and how diligent you are. Tell us your writing schedule.
CK: I met this writer... I actually did a reading at Harvard bookstore a couple days ago, and the woman that was organizing the library event she was also a writer, and somehow we got on the subject of schedules. And we were asking her, the woman I did the reading with -we were asking her about her writing, and she's like, "Oh, I don't get much time to write. I don't know if I'll ever really get a book done. I don't really have a lot of time to write." I said, "Well, I only write on Sundays." And she looked at me and her eyes just kind of lit up, like is that really possible? And that's kind of the truth. And it's not every Sunday. I'd say every third Sunday I probably set my butt down. But the story's always brewing in my mind. When I go on a streak it's not just Sunday, it's a here and there more and more, but I'm not an everyday person, sitting in the chair. I just don't have the time. I have a day job in software, in marketing, actually, where I teach social media. I teach people how to use Twitter, and Facebook, and all of that. When I come home at the end of the day it's kind of hard to write, because I feel so drained from all of the script writing that I had been doing for all of that.
RR: So you're a weekend writer?
CK: Pretty much, yeah. But I've been in a writing group for the last 12 years. There's three women that I have been meeting with every two weeks, and we hack apart each novels, and we're really good at setting deadlines for each other. And they've all had their books... Either book's published, or in the process of going to be published. We've been really good at spurring each other on, and that has been really helpful. Having a partner to say, "Hey, where is that chapter you were gonna submit?" And having that has been super helpful. I mostly write on weekends. If I'm really, really in a place where I feel excited about the story I will throw in time here and there, but mostly on the weekends.
RR: In the course of your research, what were some of the more surprising things that you discovered about the 16th Century, about your culinary interests?
CK: I was really pleased to see how accessible the food was, in a way, because in Ancient Rome it was hard. Everything was made with garum, which is a fish sauce, and I don't like fish. That was a fun thing to overcome, which I did. And the ingredients were hard to come by. And they were also hard to... I had to explain a lot to people. And now I feel like with the recipes in this cookbook, it's just much more... They're more accessible, they're more familiar. This is where you start to get pasta. There's actually tortellini, and tortelloni in it. Those are familiar to us. There's braised meats that are really familiar. Like I said, the pies are familiar. There's just lots of really interesting foods that are super familiar to us today, and I was pleased to see that, that it happened then. One thing that surprised me the most about the food is that we grew up, or at least in the States, we grew up thinking fried chicken is a Southern thing. And there is... I did some research to see where the origins of fried chicken are, and there's some theories that it also originated in Scotland somehow, cause they like fried everything I guess. I don't know.
RR: They like fried Snickers bars.
CK: They do! Mars bars, too.
RR: And I have that on good authority, yeah.
CK: But it turns out that in this 1570 cookbook there is a recipe for fried chicken. You brine the chicken in vinegar, which is a little unusual, but then you... It's vinegar and spices. The spices in Renaissance Italy were very... They loved spice. They heavily spiced everything with cinnamon, cloves, coriander, sometimes ginger, and nutmeg. And there's coriander, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg in this vinegar brine that you brine the chicken in. And then you dredge it in flour and you fry it just like we would today. Literally it's fried chicken, but the spices are really weird. And that cinnamon-y flavor on chicken is strange to a modern palate, but fried chicken was available in the Renaissance, so I think that was the most surprising thing.
RR: We know what the rich people ate, but what did the poor people eat?
CK: They would not have had access to meat in the same way, or sugar. For example, in the cookbook, Scabbi's cookbook there's a thousand recipes. 900 of them have sugar in them. 600 have cinnamon in them. [chuckle] The pastries are amazing. Actually, the food's really sick. We should talk about that, too. But there's... The common people would not have had access to sugar or cinnamon, or anything like that. They would have eaten bread. Maybe lentil and beans other types of vegetables, cabbage. Tomatoes were not something anyone at in this time frame tomatoes didn't really take hold a little bit more until the 1600s, they were a nightshade plant, and so they were considered to be poisonous, and then in the 1600s, it was the peasants that actually began eating the tomatoes and then the wealthy realized, "Oh, those might be kind of good. How do we get our hands on those?" But it was very much more of a simple diet. They also would have probably eaten the awful from the animals, so the chicken feet and the liver, and just the things that were the scraps they wouldn't have had slabs of steak.
RR: Turnip tops. When I was in Southern Italy, I ate more turnip tops, I don't know whatever happened to the bottoms, but I ate a lot of tops and a lot of fava beans.
CK: Oh, and it's interesting. So, actually broccoli rabe if you're familiar with that, it's a weed and it grows in Puglia and that is exactly the kind of food a commoner would've eaten that you would have gone, and you would have eaten the weeds that tastes good.
RR: Now you have a number of symbols in your book that run through the whole book and give it a lot of unity and I wonder if you would discuss those. So you have a comet and you have a chef's knife? Can you talk about those two?
CK: Yes, the comet that was actually a discovery that I made when I was doing the research. One of the things I do in my world-building is, I create these elaborate timelines. There's a timeline for everything that's happening in Italy, in the years that I'm writing, so that might be everything that's happening with the families. It might be everything that's happening with painters, everything that's happening with the Pope, and the papacy and all the Cardinals. And so one of the... And then what, just what's happening in science in the world. And one of the things I found is that in 1570, there was a great comet that appeared in the sky in November of that year, and it lasted for three months, and it disappeared in late January and there were a number of Astronomers, Tycho Brahe, I think is Tycho Brahe I never know how to say his name 'cause you never hear it said you only read it, right? And he was one of them that observed it, and there was a famous Arab that I can't say his name, either. I'm not even gonna try that also observed it as well. But they were... One of the things they observed about this comet was the first time that they had realized the comet actually sat outside of our atmosphere, so it was seen all across Europe for three months straight.
CK: And there are paintings and pictures, and many accounts of this comet, that appeared in the sky. And I thought that's super interesting. I'm gonna take this comet. And one of the main characters in the book, her name is Stella or the pet name that Scappi gifts her is Stella. And so I decided to move the comet from November to April, when Scappi died. So the comet appears on the day that Scappi dies and the comet frames the entire book because Giovanni's section in the book only is only about three months long. And so, it made sense that the comet, the arc of the comet is the arc of the book and it has a lot to do with Stella. And then then the chef’s knife, so there's a chef's knife that is given to Giovanni that Scappi had and when Giovanni cooks with this knife, it gives him a thrill to use it. And we don't really learn too much about the chef's knife here but if you read Feast of Sorrow I mentioned the chef's knife there, and there were two knives, in that book. And originally I wanted to write... When I first started writing these books, I started out by writing a... I was gonna write a novel about a celebrity chef who had a magical set of knives that were imbued with special properties and that had carried through time, but I needed an origin story for these knives.
CK: So I decided that I was going to research this and I came across a line in a book called Feast by a man names Roy Strong and it's just a book about banquets, and it was a line about how Apicius died and he died in this totally messed up crazy way. And if you wanna know how you should read the first book, Feast of Sorrow. But I thought that is so messed up. I'm gonna write that book. And so or I'm gonna write a scene from that. And so I wrote a scene where he gives these chef's knives to his cook Thrasius. And then I thought that is so much more interesting. I'm just gonna write the book, Feast of Sorrow. I'm just gonna write about this guy and these knives and so... But I liked the idea of these knives and so they're in The Chef's Secret, and I plan on carrying them through the books and they're just... An astute reader would notice the knives over the course of the books, I think, but maybe I'll write that other book at some point.
RR: What does the knife signify in the book?
CK: It's just it's more about the original set of knives the magical knives that carry through time. So if I write that capping book of the celebrity chef with the knives, you will have had the whole back story all along.
****
Gregory: On the Live Mic episode page, livemic.ca, you will find biographies of featured writers, guests and hosts, as well as links to TPL’s collections or other episode-related materials. For all of TPL’s podcast series go to tpl.ca/podcasts.
Toronto Public Library is one of the world's busiest urban public library systems. Every year, more than 20 million people visit our 100 branches in neighbourhoods across the city and borrow more than 32 million items.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations is produced by the Toronto Public Library. Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes. Jorge Amigo, and me, Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. And marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by Worst Pop Band Ever also known as WPBE.
I’m Gregory McCormick, Manager of Cultural and Special Event Programming at Toronto Public Library. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for another episode of Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations.