Feeding the Papal Conclave

After a pope dies there is a process to elect a new pope called the conclave. Essentially all of the cardinals are locked away until they vote on a new pope but they still gotta eat, and historically that has been quite the process. A process I'll tell you about as I make this dish of ribs served at one of the most infamous conclaves in history. So thank you to Wild Grain for sponsoring this video as we feed the papal conclave, this time on Tasting History. Glausi cum clave or closed with a key. That is where the term conclave comes from because the cardinals are actually locked away until they can decide on which of them is going to be the next pope, and the process has changed a little bit over the centuries but much of it is still the same but one aspect that has definitely changed is the food that is served to them. Today the cardinals are fed modern meals like in 2013 they received meals of soup, spaghetti, small meat kebabs, and boiled vegetables, and those meals were prepared by nuns but in the 16th century there was an entire army of cooks dedicated to feeding them and they were led by one of the world's first celebrity chefs Bartolomeo Scappi, and in his cookbook known as the Opera he detailed the preparations made for the conclave of 1549. Now today the business of the conclave takes place in the Sistine Chapel but in 1549 it took place in the nearby Pauline Chapel as the Sistine Chapel was being used as a dormitory for some of the cardinals. This and several other rooms around the Sistine Chapel were partitioned off with wood partitions that were draped in green or purple cloth, and then inside of these 16 and a half by 16 and a half foot rooms the cardinals were sequestered and they would have a bed and a few other accoutrements but it was pretty sparse, and for the most part they ate all of their meals in these cells. They did not eat together for most of the conclave rather they would have stewards bring food from the kitchens to the cells, and they would bring them in these hampers which carried hot food from the kitchen and then there was a tub that was filled with cold food from the credenza, and since Scappi's Opera has all the recipes that would have been served to the cardinals at the time I decided to choose one for this episode, but I was barred from many of them because the conclave took place during winter so basically there were no fresh fruits or vegetables and that x's out a lot of the recipes, and I also decided to steer away from some of the harder to find meats like porcupine, cow eyes, and peacock, and instead I opted for papal baby back ribs as Scappi includes instructions for different ways to cook the back ribs of a domestic pig. If the pig is young the ribs can be roasted on the spit with the rind or without, and with onions split in the pan which are cooked with the fat that drips from the meat as it cooks, and before it is put on the spit it is sprinkled with salt and ground coriander seed. You could also let the ribs stand in a marinade of vinegar, grape must syrup, garlic cloves, and coriander, and then cook it on the spit in the above way serving it hot with a sauce on top made of the seasoning, and Scappi includes some other optional variants like adding rosemary or cutting up the ribs before cooking them in a sort of pile and then putting sour orange juice on top, but I am going for the marinade and the sauce. What I am having to do is slightly alter the way that it was actually cooked because I don't have a spit nor an open flame here in my kitchen so I'm going to be making them in the oven, and an oven is a wonderful way to cook ribs as it is also a wonderful way to cook the many baked goods that I have been receiving from today's sponsor Wild Grain. Wild Grain is the first bake from frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries, and fresh pastas, and delivery day has become one of my favorite days of the month because I know that whatever is in that box that they've sent me it's going to be mighty good, and I must say there is nothing better than having freshly baked sourdough bread coming right out of your oven. The smell, the flavor, all of it. Actually there is something better and that is their chocolate chip cookies because their chocolate chip cookies, they're ridiculous. They are so good I have become rather addicted to them and I get them in every box now. So if you do like baking but have trouble finding the time to do the entire process I really encourage you to give Wild Grain a try. They're fantastic. Just head to wildgrain.com slash tasting history or click the link in the description and use my code tastinghistory and you will get $30 off of your first box plus free croissants for life. You will get free croissants in every box that you order from Wild Grain using my code tastinghistory at wildgrain.com slash tasting history. What they don't have is pork ribs so that's on me. So yeah for this recipe what you'll need is one rack of pork baby back ribs, two or three small onions, one tablespoon of salt, three teaspoons of coriander divided, one will be for the rub, one for the marinade, and one for the sauce, and then also for the of garlic, one teaspoon of red wine vinegar, and one tablespoon of mostocoto or grape must syrup. Scappi actually uses the term mostocoto but today it's very often found under the term sapa or saba, and they actually use this even in ancient Rome under the term defrutum, and it's wonderful. It's sweet, and it's tangy, and it's basically just grape must that is boiled down into a syrup. It's fantastic. You're also going to use the same ingredients the garlic, coriander, grape must, mostocoto, and vinegar for the sauce but we will visit that later on. So first if your ribs do still have the silver skin membrane on the back of the ribs it's best to remove it. It's not going to hurt you if you eat it but it's kind of an unpleasant texture. So just pry it away with a knife, sometimes easier said than done, but once you get it up you can pull it off just using a paper towel and you'll get a better grip. Then sprinkle on some of the salt rubbing it in as well as some of the coriander, and then flip the ribs and do the same on the back side. Then prepare the marinade by crushing the garlic into a bowl and then adding one teaspoon of the coriander, the red wine vinegar, and that tablespoon of mostocoto. Whisk this all together and then pour it over the rack of ribs front and back brushing it all over, and once both sides are coated wrap the ribs tightly in the foil and set them in the refrigerator to marinate overnight, and then when you are ready to actually cook them unwrap them from the foil and then chop the onions into quarters and place them beneath the rack of ribs. Then re-wrap the foil tightly around them and set them on a baking sheet with a wire rack. These then go into the oven at the rather low temperature of 275 degrees Fahrenheit, 135 Celsius for two and a half to three hours. It's low and slow to get the best texture and you want to just make sure that they're fully cooked by having the meat fall off the bone, and at that point the ribs are done but better to emulate the open fires in Scuppy's kitchen I stuck mine without the foil under the broiler for about two or three minutes and that just gave a nice darkening to the top of the ribs. Now these ribs would have been something served to the cardinals at that conclave in 1549 provided the cardinals were behaving because if they weren't behaving they would only get bread and water, and that was something left over from the very first conclave several hundred years earlier, a conclave which lasted for three years. The year was 1268 and Pope Clement IV had just died in the city of Viterbo which at the time was the seat of papal power since Rome was deemed too dangerous. So as was tradition the College of Cardinals gathered in the city to elect one of their own as the new pope. Unfortunately they all hated each other or more accurately the leaders who they were kind of beholden to, they hated each other. That would have been the Holy Roman Empire which was actually leaderless at the time, and the king of Naples Charles of Anjou who was a member of the French royal family. So on December 1st 1268, 19 cardinals gathered in Viterbo to elect a new pope. Eleven were beholden to the Empire and eight were beholden to the French. Now the Empire and the French had each given them a list of who they could and could not vote for and there was no overlap between the two lists so from the start they were at a stalemate. Now at this time the voting was done very differently than it is today. They would gather, they would chat, they would have a vote, and then they would go home to wherever they lived which was essentially a palace, and then they wouldn't meet again for a few days, a few weeks, just whenever they wanted to. So they were living a rather cushy life and were not in a big rush to make a decision but the people of Viterbo they wanted a new pope so they decided to lock the cardinals inside of the papal palace. This was in late 1269 about a year after the whole thing had begun and so they locked them in the or with a key. That turned into conclave or conclave. Now you would think that being sequestered would hurry up the process. They would be uncomfortable but it did not. They were still too comfortable and time kept going on, and so finally the people said okay then you don't get to eat. We're cutting your food down to one dish a day. That still didn't work so then they cut their food down to just bread and water. That's all they got. Surely that worked except no. Well by June 1270 a whole year and a half after this thing began Cardinal John of Toledo made a comment supposedly in jest that they couldn't make a decision because they were locked inside and so the Holy Spirit couldn't get to them. Not sure that's how it works but he couldn't get to them and so they had to be either let out of conclave or have the roof torn off of the palace. Well the people decided to tear the roof off the palace. So now the cardinals are sequestered, they're not eating very well, and they are out in the elements pretty much all of the time. So surely now they had to come to a compromise and make a decision right? No it still took quite a longer. It wasn't until September of 1271, almost three years after the last pope had died, that they finally agreed that they couldn't make a decision. So instead they had six of their own get together to form a subcommittee and they would make the decision and still they could not decide which of them was going to be the next pope. So finally they all decided to elect someone who wasn't even there, who wasn't even a cardinal. His name was Teoboldo Visconti. He wasn't even ordained and on top of that he was off in the Holy Land on the Ninth Crusade with the future King Edward I of England. So being that far it took a few months before he even learned that he had been elected pope. Must have come as quite the shock, kind of a King Ralph situation if anyone remembers that movie, and then it took a few more months for him to get back to Italy, back to Rome where finally he could be ordained because he still wasn't ordained, then made a bishop, and then he could be crowned pope. And on March 19, 1272, a full 40 months after the So with 40 months of a rudderless ship it's no wonder that one of Gregory's first acts as pope was to issue a papal bull known as ubi periculum, and this was a way to set up the rules of the next conclave, and it was meant to make it rather uncomfortable. Essentially nine days after the death of the previous pope the conclave would begin in whatever city the pope had died in, then the cardinals would be locked away. They would all sleep in one big room divided by curtains, and they weren't allowed to have meetings with each other unless all of them were present. They would have no communication with the outside world unless all of the cardinals agreed, so basically only if someone inside died, got really sick, or if they elected a new pope. As for food it would be delivered through the wall via a sort of turnstile, and all it would be was a single dish and a soup, and after five days this was reduced to just bread, water, and a little wine. But perhaps the most motivating aspect of these conclave rules was that during the process the cardinals were not allowed to get any income from their cardinalship. So that was motivating, and guess what? It worked because when Gregory X died the next conclave was over in just a day. Unfortunately this next pope, Innocent V, died after just a few months, and they had three more popes over the course of the next year. They just kept dying, and one of those popes got rid of these new rules of conclave, I guess because it was just too uncomfortable. But then a couple decades later there was yet another stalemate of two years, not as long as the first but almost, and after that Pope Boniface or Boniface reinstituted the rules of conclave which were still mostly in effect in 1549 at the conclave that Scappi writes about, and he has a section in his opera entitled The Funeral of Pope Paul III and the Subsequent Conclave. I am loathe not to relate the sumptuous arrangements adopted in 1549 for the funeral of Paul III along with the number of cardinals living at that time which amounted to 58, the ones who entered the conclave and the ones who came along to it after it was closed, and the ones who came out sick and who died, along with the names of the Roman barons who had the keeping of the conclave. In his writing he details how they lived and how they were fed paying special attention to the fact that they were meant to be cut off from the outside world. All of the cardinals were put in just a few rooms including the Sistine Chapel and everything was draped in either purple or green fabric. You got purple fabric if the pope that had just died had appointed you as cardinal, and if it had been a previous pope then you got green fabric. Then they had their two large boxes for food and Scappi includes not only images of these boxes but also images of the stewards carrying them from the kitchens. Scappi says that the cardinals received two meals a day and they would be served one at a time. Essentially a list was made up the night before putting all of the cardinals in order and it was it was random except that the sick ones went on top and then that next day that was the order that they would be fed in, and so their stewards would go into the kitchen and fill up the hamper and it would all be tested for poison there in the kitchen. Once it was tested then it would be brought into another room where there was a table of bishops or prelates in charge of the conclave and there a messenger would announce the name of the cardinal whose food was being presented. Then came the steward with four or six squires carrying decanters filled with all sorts of wine and pure water. The decanters were all covered with oranges and flowers and had labels on which were written the variety and quality of the wines. Then came two footmen carrying the large tub with the credenza foods. Then came the food testers with two more footmen carrying the hamper. Then the food and drink would be laid out before the prelates and the bishops and tested again but not for poison this time but rather for messages trying to get inside of the conclave. So they would pick at it with a fork, pick through all of the food and that's why Scappi says it was not possible to send in closed pies or whole chickens since those were cut open in the presence of the bishops, nor could anyone send in wine in a container other than glass, nor napkins, cloths, or anything else that had not been first opened and examined. Any remaining food was distributed to the servants of the conclave, that is barbers, masons, carpenters, apothecaries, cleaners, and various other servants. Service was done this way evening and morning. And now after all of the food had been presented to the bishops and the prelates and picked through then it could be sent inside to the cardinals, and it would be sent via something called the ruota del conclave which was a sort of turntable that would spin to deliver the food inside of the chapel. So should we take Scappi at his word then it would seem that the conclave of 1549 followed the rules to a T, but we know from many, many other writings that the conclave of 1549 was actually one of the most public and absolutely rule-breaking conclaves in history, at least documented. As one letter from the times said, all the rules governing the election of the pope have been broken. All the customs set aside, oaths broken, order perverted, ceremonies foregone. The conclave is conducted in public and no good can come from the assembly. That was a letter written to Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and really the entire conclave which ran from the end of November 1549 to early February 1550 was a sort of proxy war between Charles V and his rival King Henry II of France. Each ruler had their chosen candidates and they were going to make sure that their man won the vote. It's nothing had changed except for the actual players, and pretty much from the start the rules were being broken. One of the things was that each cardinal could only have one person with them, like one servant, and this quickly turned into three, but then after a while we know that most of them had like six, seven, eight people with them the whole time. There were also letters going back and forth between the conclave and the different rulers in Europe with details about all the things that were happening inside of the supposedly closed conclave. There was even one time where a brother of one of the cardinals was sent with a letter from the French king and he was allowed inside the conclave, and he wouldn't leave for weeks. They tried to get him out and he just wouldn't leave probably because he was also sent with a letter, a promissory note promising 150,000 golden coins that could be used for bribes in general just to make sure that the cardinals voted the king's way, but the emperor also sent in bribes so at least they were on an even playing field. The inner workings of the conclave became so public that even the common people knew what was going on, and so the bookies of Rome started taking bets on how the next vote would go. They had that much information that they could adjust the odds on an almost daily basis. There was a letter from the Venetian ambassador that said it is more than clear that the merchants are very well informed about the state of the pole, and that the cardinal's attendance in conclave go which thus causes many tens of thousands scudi to change hands. On December 28th those who were running the conclave, those in charge decided to to lay down the law and closed up the windows. They started boarding up the windows so there was no air or natural light coming in, and they reduced the amount of food that the cardinals were getting, but after a while a few of the cardinals started get sick and they blamed it on the lack of fresh air and good food, and so they went back to the way that it had been and nothing really changed. By January a messenger of Emperor Charles wrote that the election of the pope is going from bad to worse, and it appears that the cardinals have sworn to die in conclave rather than change their minds and correct their impious counsels, and eight days later on January 31st that is exactly what happened. Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, one of the front runners in the vote died, and immediately there were accusations of poisoning, and so this led to an autopsy, and the person doing the autopsy declared yeah this guy was most definitely poisoned, and so that did lead to an actual crackdown on the cardinals. They were really sequestered, people were kicked out, they couldn't get together, and they had to stay in their little cubicles from 10 30 at night until sunrise. They were basically treated like children, but it worked because finally on February 6th acting on orders from the king and the emperor, or rather kind of a lack of orders from the emperor, but anyway the cardinals decided all right let's just choose someone that none of us likes, and that was the least defensive answer to the problem. It was Cardinal Giovanni del Monte who took on the name Pope Julius III, and later both sides agreed that he was and I quote, incompetent, unworthy, and pernicious. Now today while the conclave is still fraught with politics it is not the same as it used to be probably because the pope no longer has access to like a standing army, so the stakes are a little bit different but that doesn't mean that the conclave has changed all that much. The timing has changed and they are a little bit more lax about the rules but many of the aspects still do apply, though I definitely think that the food has changed quite a bit because I don't think that anyone at the conclave will be eating these scoppy baby back ribs. Now once your ribs are ready out of the oven you can go ahead and make your sauce. It's the same ingredients as the marinade though I opted for a little less garlic, just one clove along with a teaspoon of coriander, and since the sauce is not going in the oven I wanted to cook it just a bit to mellow the garlic flavor so I added a little oil and set it over medium heat just until the garlic was fragrant, and then I added a tablespoon of red wine vinegar and about three or four tablespoons of that delicious sweet mostocotto. I let that simmer for two minutes and then poured it over the ribs which should be served alongside the onion, and here we are the pork back ribs served to the cardinals during the conclave of 1549. I just love the look of a rack of ribs. Ribs are one of my favorite foods. Give them a try here. Perfection. Messy but perfection. Let's get this big piece here one second. The flavor is just, it's wonderful because you get a little bit of the garlic and the onion but neither of them are overpowering, and you get that far more interesting flavor of the mostocotto and the vinegar, but it's not vinegary, it's not too tangy, and it's not too sweet. Like it's not like a barbecue sauce where it can be very sweet which I like barbecue sauce, but it is, it's like a proto barbecue sauce. The flavor is so complex. They are tender. It's not, they're not slathered in the sauce. You could make more I guess but I do feel like this is closer to what it would be. What I want to taste though is the actual onion. I had somebody make me this knife and it is actually based off of a knife in Skopje which I think is really cool. I love onions. Here we go. I can just see actually just a plate of the onions. It's so sweet. It's like lost any of that kind of bite that the onion has. It's just sweet and delicious. So one thing I wanted to show you is this. This is a replica obviously of the key that opens the Sistine Chapel, and I got it when I went to the Vatican a couple months ago and I did something called the Key Master Tour which was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. You show up at the Vatican before anyone else is there and it's a small group of just 20 people. You go in to the Vatican with the person who opens all of the doors and you get to open the doors and they got tons of keys and you get to be in the Vatican essentially alone. It's hard to get tickets. I was like checking the website for months every single day because they don't let you know when they're putting them on sale. It's very Italian, but it's so worth it. Key Master Tour. If you only have a little bit of time to see the Vatican it's a good way because you don't have to deal with any crowds. It's literally 20 people. Anyway make these ribs, enjoy the Papal Conclave unless it's over and then we have a new Pope and then you know yay for that, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.