The first printed cookbook. PLATINA. De honesta voluptate ac valetudine.

4to. 205x145 mm. Binding in full leather with ornate blind tooled rules and frame on the covers, title and date on labels on the spine, marbled endpapers, red edges. Leaves 95 unnumbered, 29 lines. 

Collation: a-m8, missing blank leaf m8. Colophon on verso m2 leaf, with printer’s device and date 11 May. Roman type, spaces for initials with guide letters, index printed in double columns. Marginalia of ancient hand. Heraldic Ex libris ‘R. Grottanelli Ugurgieri’ on the inside cover and ex-libris stamp of Hercole Silva on the white endpaper. A few pages with foxing and a few small wormholes, occasional slight dampstaining, good copy with wide margins.

Very rare first edition from Bologna and first book printed by Joannes Antonius Benedictis. This treatise on the pleasures of the table and good health was the first cookbook ever printed. Divided into 10 chapters, it contains a multitude of recipes and guidelines for a healthy life: it includes general rules for nutrition, physical exercise and sleep, sections on fruit, wine, vinegar and condiments and many recipes for cooking meat; the last part is dedicated exclusively to cooking fish and shellfish. The scholar and humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi was called "Platina", referring to the medical and philosophical thought of classical times, envisages an integral humanism that also includes the "honest", that is, measured, pleasure of food, among the legitimate components of a person's existential balance. The recipes proposed record the affirmation in Italian cuisine of the sweet taste and sugar, the "new spice" that, since the fourteenth century, has tended to accompany or overlap with the traditional ones. Follows the principles of Galenic medicine, according to which foods must re-establish the balance between the primary elements that make up the human organism, namely air, fire, water and earth, with their respective qualities of cold, hot, fluid and solid.