Did you know that library houses over 4,700 historic menus from the 19th and 20th centuries? And did you know that they are all available for public view should you make the very worthwhile trip to visit us in Parma, Italy?

And in perhaps even more exciting news for our friends on the other side of the Atlantic, many of these menus are available online.

Hidden within the Gastronomic Library section of the Academia Barilla website, you will find a wide array beautifully decorated menus that mark milestones of Italian gastronomic history. There is so much to explore… so let’s get started.

Here is a fun historical fact.
Menus – or printed lists of dishes to be served at a specific occasion – did not appear until around 1810 when formal dining in Europe witnessed a major change. Prior to this date, most formal dinners were presented with traditional French service, which meant that all the dishes were placed down on the banquet table at once.
However, in Russian service dinner guests were served one dish at a time, over the course of the evening. Printed menu cards were presented to the guests, like playbills, giving them a preview of what was to come. These elegant menus of yesteryear are not unlike the prix-fixe menus you might fine in a contemporary fine-dining restaurant or at a gala dinner.

As was custom during the 19th and some of the 20th century, many of the menus are printed in French – the language of European diplomacy. However, with the unification of Italy, the menus printed in Italian began to appear.

The Academia Barilla virtual menu gallery is subdivided into sections, making it easy to navigate. The “A Menu a Month” section contains 12 menus – one for each calendar month – and is a fun introduction to the collection.

A brief description of the event for which the menu was printed is presented next to the digital image of the menu itself. You can click on the image to enlarge the menu, allowing you to read, for example, exactly what Umberto I of Savoy at for lunch on February 27, 1897.

In the “Menus of the Italian Nobility” section, you will find the menus from meals served to many of Italy’s great noble families. Take a trip back in time by scrolling through the menus from the Borromeo, Meli Lupi di Soragna, Negroni, Spinola, Visconti and Litta family lunch and dinner parties. One of the Spinola family documents even contains a seating chart for a 1920 lunch held at the Villa Spinola in Genoa.

And there are even more hidden treasures to be discovered in the “Historic Menus from the House of Savoy” and “Menus of the Italian Government” sections of the gallery. Here you can explore what the Vittorio Emanuele III used to eat for dinner or what the Italian Ministry served visiting diplomats.

You may even be surprised to find a menu including pizza alla Napoletana, served with sparkling wine no less.

Come and join us on a gallery tour!

The Economist tells how “a pasta-maker gets a taste for books“, describing the Gastronomic Library’s collection of over 8,500 cookery books in more than ten languages, and nearly 5,000 menus and scores of old prints showing food in various phases of preparation.

The Economist’s journalist quotes BIGAB’s Director Giancarlo Gonizzi and the Dewey decimal system he adopted to classify the collection, besides the cultural activities scheduled at BIGAB with students (from Parma’s university, but also US visiting students) and with Parma’s city authorities. The article mentions that the library has begun digitizing its contents and plans to make them available online.

Digitalizing the entire Gastronomic Library is a long process, but currently in progress; we will definitely keep you updated on BIGAB’s online availability.

In the meanwhile, you can start enjoying the first fruits of this hard work at the new Academia Barilla website, that features an entire section dedicated to BIGAB, and started publishing online the first series of traditional Italian regional recipes, as well as fun food facts such as those about Academia Barilla’s collection of historic menus, or “At the table with…“, a section where you can discover the favorite food and recipes of great people in history, from Cato to Catherine De’ Medicis to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The content and full index of the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library, while not currently entirely available online, it is searchable through the new Academia Barilla website, a good resource page for all food culture students, historians, chefs and food lovers!

Enjoy the food culture readings, they are food for thought!

At this point in the evolution of the online presence of Academia Barilla, we cannot refer to academiabarilla.com simply as a “corporate/institutional” website. Sure, the website still features all the info you need to discover Academia Barilla, including its company mission, philosophy, headquarters and product line but, as for our Italian Food Lovers blog, the latest design revolution involved accessibility to a lot of content!

First of all, you get a new recipe per day straight out the home page, so do not miss the opportunity to enrich your Italian gourmet cookbook by printing out some of the featured recipes.

Talking about recipes, it is impossible not to mention the nice section dedicated to the Italian regional cuisine, that you can discover by mousing-over the regions of Italy for direct access to the regional gourmet recipes, or you can reach from the page that lists all the regions of Italy. You can also explore a page featuring info about the most important gourmet products from the traditional Italian regional gastronomy.

The new Academia Barilla website proposes also the exploration of the Academia Barilla Culinary Center and, most of all, of its Gastronomic Library, that we friendly call BIGAB (for BIblioteca Gastronomica Academia Barilla), and its rich, exclusive collection of culinary treasures tht ranges from rare cookbooks to hand-written recipes from the 17th century, to historic menus and more. BIGAB will be sharing its culinary knowledge and daily recipes from the Library directly on the new Academia Barilla home page!

A not-to-miss link is the one to At the table with…, a page that lists the gastronomic profiles, culinary preferences and favorite recipes of some among the most famous people in history, from Cato to Catherine De Medicis, from Giacomo Casanova to Napoleon Bonaparte, Enrico Caruso and more.

The BIGAB team is now working on a digital indexing of all Library titles, giving priority to traditional regional Italian recipes, which will be published on the new Academia Barilla website. It is a huge effort form our BIGAB friend, so it might take some time - stay tuned with us, we will be of course announcing the good news from our blog at the beginning of next year!

No more to say, if not: click on this link and visit the new online world of Academia Barilla! We would love to get your feedback and comments about it, please use the comment box of this blog post to let us know your feeling about the new academiabarilla.com!

(thanks for the comments on the blog design, by the way - but stay tuned, more surprises to be announced tomorrow!)

With more than 8,000 titles of gastronomy art, italian and international food culture, and everything cuisine, BIGAB is also proud to treasure culinary and recipe books, hand-written volumes and rare gastronomy treats, some of them dating back to the 16th century.

At the beginning of last year Academia Barilla and BIGAB acquired an historic and rare menus collection we already blogged about, and thanks to our BIGAB friends we managed to select two special historic menus from the collection that are in tune with the Season: Historic Thanksgiving Menus from the US Embassy in Rome’s official Thanksgiving dinners in 1927 and 1929.

The US Embassy in Rome booked for the events a very exclusive locations in Rome such as the Hotel Excelsior, in the heart of Via Veneto that, with the cinema industry boom 30 years later, would have become the heart of the Roman Dolce Vita.

A special VIP dinner followed by a gala dance, as in the Thanksgiving 1927 event, and of course plenty of gourmet food, American gourmet reinterpreted by the Italian Chefs at the Excelsior.

This last picture, from the Thanksgiving 1929 menu, doesn’t really show how precious the invitation is - the US flag crossing a missing flag (the Italian flag, that unfortunately has been lost before BIGAB’s acquisition) is a real little flag with the actual pole and flag fabric!

Also the menu is balanced and, of course, gourmet American: Ox tail, Cheese Straws and Tomato Soup, followed by Turbot Washington, and Stuffed Turkey with a side of Cranberry Sauce, Excelsior Potatoes, Texas Salad, and Asparagus Chantilly. Roosevelt Mandarines, the traditional Pumpkin Pie and Fruits closed the gala dinner and, we are sure, opened the gala dance as in the previous Thanksgiving event!

Now that we posted this last Thanksgiving post we can look forward and start getting in the Christmas mood!

Today we share with you a traditional recipe for your Traditional Thanksgiving Turkey that we found browsing the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library in Parma, Italy. The cookbook we found is “America e la sua grande cucina” (America’s Great Cuisine), by Philip Stephen Schulz, published in Italy by Rizzoli in 1990.

Cookbook author Philip Stephen Schulz explores in this cookbook the traditional cuisine of all US States and, when it comes to the culinary traditions of Connecticut, he proposes the traditional local recipe for Roast Thanksgiving Turkey with Cornbread Stuffing.

Ready? Let’s go to the kitchen!

ROAST THANKSGIVING TURKEY WITH CORNBREAD STUFFING
A recipe by Philip Stephen Schulz
(serves 8-10)

INGREDIENTS

- 1 (22 lb) fresh turkey
- 2 large crushed garlic cloves
- salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

INGREDIENTS FOR STUFFING

- 3 bacon strips, chopped
- 1/2 cup dried white wine
- 4 cups water
- 1 onion
- 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
- 3 parsley sprigs, plus additional sprigs for garnish
- 1/4 tablespoon salt
- 4 black peppercorns
- 1 1/2 tablespoon flour
- 1/4 cup cream

PREPARATION

Preheat oven at 330°F. Remove giblets from turkey and if desired set aside for the gravy. Clean turkey inside and outside with a wet kitchen towel and rub with 1 crushed garlic clove, salt and pepper. Fill cavity of turkey with stuffing. Tie it. Wrap up the breast with bacon.

Place turkey in a roasting pan, cover with a netting previously soaked in wine. Pour some wine onto it. Cook in oven for 30 minutes.

In the meantime, put the giblets (not the liver) in a large saucepan, add water, onion, celery, the remaining part of garlic clove, parsley, salt and peppercorn. Boil, then turn the heat down and simmer, without lid, until the broth reduces to 2 cups. Sieve.

Dip the turkey in broth and keep cooking by adding broth every 30 minutes, until drumsticks are easy to move up and, if you prick the meat sauce comes out, cook for about 5 1/2 - 6 hours totally. During the last 30 minutes of cooking time, remove the netting by sprinkling it with wine.

Heat oven to 375°F in order to obtain a crisper skin. Remove the turkey from oven and let it cool down for 15 minutes. In the meantime, sieve the sauce of the turkey, skimming off the fat if necessary.

In a saucepan melt butter over medium-low heat. Add flour continuously mixing. Cook for 2 minutes by keeping mix. Add cream and simmer for 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish turkey with the remaining part of parsley. Serve with the sauce and the stuffing.

CORNBREAD STUFFING
(Cornbread has to be prepared 1 or 2 days before Thanksgiving)
Ingredients for a 22 lb turkey

- 8.75 oz sweet Italian sausage
- 1/2 cup melted butter
- 1 large onion
- 2 celery stalk, minced
- 1 little red or green pepper, removed from seeds and minced
- 1/2 cup parsley, minced
- 2 cups open oysters, not drained
- 1 corn bread squarely (7.9 inch)
- 1 tablespoon fresh sage minced or ¼ tablespoon sage powdered
- salt and freshly ground black pepper

CORNBREAD STUFFING PREPARATION

In a large saucepan brown the sausage over medium heat for 10 about minutes, by mixing until sausage washes and is of a golden-brown colour. Put in a stock pot.

From the same saucepan remove the sausage fat. Add 1/4 cup melted butter, onion, celery and pepper. Cook for 10 minutes by keep mixing. Remove from heat and add parsley. Pour forth the oysters keeping the liquid, then add to vegetables.

In a mixing bowl crumble the corn bread with the sausage. Add vegetables and oysters, sage, salt and pepper. Mix well.

Add slowly the oysters liquid and the remaining part of butter, keep mixing until the dough results humid, not wet. Let it cool down, then stuff the roast turkey.

Thank you to the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library team for providing us with this traditional Thanksgiving recipe. This week we will publish more Thanksgiving recipes also from the gourmet Chef of the Italian Food Lovers Chef Network; stay tuned with us this week for more gourmet Thanksgiving recipes every day!