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Italian Inspired Cookbooks for Romanian and Croatian Aristocracy: A Reality of the Seventeenth Century?

Food and recipe collections have larger cultural connections, political, religious, economic, and social ramifications. Consequently, the Romanian and Croatian/Hungarian 17th-century manuscript cookbooks under scrutiny are important because they acknowledge, once more, the existence of a Croatian and Romanian aristocracy which showed interest in new and foreign luxury foodstuffs and fashionable dishes made according to costly Western cookbooks - Italian, for example (but most probably not only). In such a way, Croatia and Wallachia joined the Europe of rulers' courts setting fashions and high court cuisine: the Italian city-states, Spain, France - the most important countries from the point of view of elite cuisine in those times. Most probably, the owners of the two recipe collections, Nikola Zrinski and Constantin Cantacuzino Stolnicul, having strong cultural links with Italy and leading an anti-Ottoman policy, understood Italian elite cookery as a vehicle of culture and prestige, and even of asserting one's identity – although even the gourmet pursuits of the two aristocrats as such should not be left aside. Yet the two manuscripts under scrutiny have to be considered valuable not only for assessing the historical influence of Italian cuisine in Eastern Europe, but also for the history of Italian cuisine itself, including even the language of the Italian cookery books. Almost the same is valid for the German-Austrian (in the case of the Croatian/Hungarian recipe collection) and the Ottoman-Turkish and Greek cuisines (in the case of the Romanian manuscript).

recipe collections ; history of gastronomy ; social elites ; 17th century ; Croatian history ; Romanian history ; Nikola Zrinski ; Constantin Cantacuzino Stolnicul

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