Have you ever tasted Montèbore? It is a rare cheese chosen by Leonardo da Vinci for the magnificent wedding banquet of Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon. Find out more about this fine Slow Food Presidium
Leonardo da Vinci, the Tuscan genius with a multi-faceted personality, is remembered for his infinite legacy composed of thousands of works of art, thoughts, ideas, projects, writings, and more, from Atlantic Code to Last dinner until to Flying cars and the Montebore. In the year of the five hundredth anniversary of his death celebrated with exhibitions throughout Italy, we like to remember the man symbol of Italian culture with a culinary curiosity, which perhaps you have never tasted.
Not everyone knows that Leonardo da Vinci has always had one unbridled passion for cooking and food. In recent years, there are several books that have dealt with this aspect of his spectacular life (such as the doubt about his being a vegetarian or not), although there are no certain sources. In fact, according to the discussed Codex Romanoff, the young Leonardo would have been an apprentice and cook Tavern of the Three Lumache on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence during his formative years at Verrocchio's workshop. Then he would open the inn The Three Frogs of Sandro and Leonardo along with nothing less than Sandro Botticelli, another great representative of Italian art. His way of thinking outside the box would have led him to reinvent the way food was placed in the dishes as well as the use of napkins, for example, up to useful inventions still today such as the rotisserie or corkscrew, documented by drawings and projects totally visionary.
Genius in the kitchen even with quick starter recipes or rose water, the gastronomist Leonardo da Vinci also left us the Montebore, the ancient Piedmontese cheese, which next October will be the guest of honor of the fourth edition of Forms, an event dedicated to the Italian dairy industry of excellence in Bergamo. The shape of Montèbore resembles a wedding cake – and it is certainly not a coincidence. In fact, it was inserted in 1489 by Leonardo da Vinci as exceptional Master of Ceremonies as single cheese on the wedding banquet menu between Gian Galeazzo Sforza, grandson of the Duke of Milan Ludovico il Moro, and Isabella of Aragon.
Even today, the Montebore is a rare cheese made from raw cow and sheep milk, whose origins are lost over the centuries. It takes its name from a small town in the Val Curone, on the watershed between the valleys of the Grue stream and the Borbera river. For centuries produced and exported to Genoa and Lombardy, practically every trace had been lost. In 1999 the Slow Food Presidium traced Carolina Bracco, the last custodian of the traditional dairy technique, recovering the ancient processing technique, passed to the manufacturer to date Roberto Grattone of the Vallenostra Cooperative. The precious recipe is now in the exclusive hands of Grattone and his wife Agata Marchesotti: "We are the only producers in the world". Impossible not to thank the visionary thought of Leonardo da Vinci in the recovery of this tasty tradition.
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