Leonardo da Vinci, the Tuscan genius with the multifaceted personality, is remembered for his immense legacy of art, thoughts, ideas, drawings, writings and more, from the Codex Atlanticus to The Last Supper and Flying Machines ... not to mention Montèbore. On the 500th anniversary of his death, commemorated with festivals around Italy and the world, we would like to remember the quintessential Renaissance man with a culinary fact that you may not be familiar with.
Many people don’t know that Leonardo da Vinci had an unbridled passion for cooking and food. In recent years, a number of books have delved into this aspect of his spectacular life (like the issue of whether he was really a vegetarian), even if there are no definitive sources. In fact, according to the much-discussed Codex Romanoff, young Leonardo was an errand boy and cook at the Tavern of the Three Snails on Florence’s Ponte Vecchio during the years he was apprenticing in Verrocchio’s studio. Then he was supposed to have opened Sandro and Leonardo’s Three Frogs Inn with none other than Sandro Botticelli, another great figure in Italian art. His ability to take a different perspective may have led him to reinvent the way to place food on plates as well as the use of tablecloths, for example, and inventions still used today, such as the rotisserie spit or the corkscrew, which he documented with visionary drawings and designs.
A genius even in the kitchen with recipes for quick appetizers or making rosewater, the epicurean Leonardo da Vinci also left us Montèbore, the ancient cheese of Piedmont, which will be the guest of honor next October at the fourth Forme, an event in Bergamo dedicated to the excellent Italian dairy/cheese supply chain. The shape of a Montèbore cheese resembles a wedding cake, and this is no accident. Indeed, in 1489 Leonardo da Vinci, acting as Master of Ceremonies, chose it as the only cheese on the menu at the wedding banquet held for Isabella of Aragon and Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the grandson of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro.
Today, Montèbore is still a rare cheese made from both raw cow and sheep’s milk, whose origin has been lost to the centuries. It got its name from a small town in Val Curone near the watershed between the valleys of the Grue River and the Borbera River. A cheese manufactured and exported to Genoa and Lombardy for hundreds of years, it was almost entirely forgotten. In 1999, the Slow Food Council tracked down Carolina Bracco, the last keeper of its traditional cheese-making technique, recovering the ancient processing method, which has now passed to producer Roberto Grattone of the Cooperativa Vallenostra. The precious recipe is now exclusively in the hands of Grattone and his wife, Agata Marchesotti. “We are the only producers in the world,” he says. Let us thank the visionary thinking of Leonardo da Vinci for the recovery of this savory tradition.