February 2021: VATICAN COOKING, PAPAL EATING
My two past visits in the Vatican in October 2000 and December 2015 had given me an epiphany on what “doing as the Romans do” means in the context of food and the pontifical enclave of Rome. That is, locals of Rome will never dine inside the sovereign papal state.
Think about it. For a land area of 0.17 square miles/0.44 square kilometers, the world’s smallest republic only has two publicly accessible indoor landmarks, namely, the impressive St. Peter’s Basilica and the treasure-laden Vatican Museum. Neither one of these establishments has an actual restaurant that caters to visitors and pilgrims. Yes, trattorias, pizzerias, pasticcerias, and gelaterias do fill the surrounding streets and line outside the exit of St. Peter’s Square, but these are integral to the Italian national capital and ipso facto do not belong to the Holy See. Hence, nobody outside of the papacy can stake a claim of formally dining inside Vatican City in a strict technical sense, unless that person is a member of the Sacred College of Cardinals, a political or symbolic head of state, or an invited guest of the pope.
Given the minuscule chances, how do we define Vatican cuisine? Or better yet, what does the Papacy eat? Surely, the dogmatic Scriptures nourish the Catholic soul, but who operates the pontifical kitchen to prepare the meals that biologically sustain the Pope and his staff in the physical and earthly plane?
With 217 out of 266 ruling popes being Italian, associating papal gastronomy to one of the world’s beloved cuisines may be the overly simplistic and formulaic route, and there have been instances that support this case. The most popular and obvious example is Fettuccine alla Papalina, a richer, more buttery, and more peppery variation of the Roman Carbonara created for the polarizing Rome-born Pope Pius XII, who led the Catholic flock in the midst of genocides by the Nazis and Italian fascists during the second World War and communist and totalitarian regimes during the Cold War.
Over the past forty years, the reign of the last three popes adds a secular dimension in defining papal tastes and eating habits for the rest of the world to witness and experience. Highly crucial to this revelation is the de facto military force of the Vatican, the Pontifical Swiss Guard. Members of the elite battalion have not only sworn on their own lives to protect the papacy at all costs, a designated task dating back to Pope Julius II in 1506, but they have also humanized their holy employer through food in recent times. To be clear though, the Albertine nuns of Poland supervise the Vatican kitchens, and the former mercenaries only cook for the pope on rare occasions, such as formal events or special requests. The fact that honor guards know the hungry cravings of the pope more than anyone else makes the nature of Vatican cuisine all the more amusing and enlightening.
All this talk leads us to the February 2021 theme of The Kitchen Scholar, which centers on The Vatican Cookbook by David Giesser, Erwin Niederberger, and Thomas Kelly. The acclaimed 2016 bestseller unveils the Polish, Bavarian, and Argentine favorites of the last three popes, as researched, compiled, and selected by the Pontifical Swiss Guard chefs. David Giesser was a former guard of the Pontiff for two years and an accomplished chef and cookbook author in Switzerland prior. Erwin Niederberger, on the other hand, was a pastry chef before rising to the guard sergeant rank. So, get some spiritual inspiration in the kitchen with simple, beloved, and classic papal fares that taste heavenly divine. A hierophany of the table indeed!
