Buon Appetito, Your Holiness

That many of the Popes throughout the two millenia of Christianity lived and ate well is common knowledge. This vivid history of the papacy reveals not only the culinary secrets of the papal kitchens but offers many of the favorite recipes with which the Holy Fathers regaled themselves. We meet the thirteenth-century Pope, Martin IV, whose excessive love of eels literally killed him; Leo X, who favored sugared capons covered in gold leaf, and Pius IX, who always ate a siple but nutritious lunch, punctually at two o' clock, washed down with a glass of fine Bordeaux.