Food Related Painting of the Week

January: A Kitchen
Antonio Tempesta (Italy, Florence, 1555 - 1630)

January: A Kitchen
(from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

It's been a while since I babbled on about a painting, so it's about time for another.

A few days ago, someone (thanks, Johnnae!) posted a link to this etching to one of the mailing lists I follow. There was a brief discussion about the items and equipment being used and the thread died down. Basically it centered around the spigots at the sink on the left, and the women nearby apparently plucking poultry. Those aren't what first caught my interest in this image.

The first thing I saw was the stark division of the kitchen.

The table in the center splits the kitchen in half, and separates the functions of cooking and service. It also serves to keep servers, dishwashers, and other non-cooks out of the way of the cooks (and vice-versa). This is surprisingly similar to my preferred setup for cooking medieval feasts (and how many - most? - modern restaurant kitchens work as well).

The second thing I saw was that the dining setup wasn't what I expected.

I'm used to seeing either a U-shaped arrangement of tables with the feasters sitting around the outside, or (in smaller or less formal settings) a single table with the feasters sitting around it. Here the tables are set out as one very long table, and it's hard to be sure but I think the feasters are seated only on the side at the far right. On the left side, opposite the table, is what I believe to be a side-board. It has big serving platters on display, and would probably also have an array of sweets or the like set out during the feast.

After these I started looking at smaller details.

Various pots and pans are being stored on high shelves over the sink. Presumably this would help keep them clean and out of the way. Similarly, there are a couple of cooking implements being stored on the hood over the fire.

The food on the plates (bowls? they look kind of deep to be plates) about to be served is covered with another plate. Is it to keep stuff from falling into the food? I don't think so, because the food on the flatter plates isn't similarly covered. Perhaps it's to keep wetter foods from sloshing, or maybe to help keep the food warm until it reaches the feasters.

I initially thought that the things sticking out of the meats being roasted over the fire were the small skewers that help keep the meat from sliding around and to turn when the spit turns, but it looks like they're still on the meat that the cook is putting onto the table to be served. So I suspect those are pieces of fat inserted into the meat to help keep it moist (a process called larding).

Finally, an odd little detail: on the table in the lower right corner of the image is a small round thing that looks like a drawer knob. Is that really a drawer? I don't think I've seen drawers in medieval artwork before, but then again that's not something I've been paying attention to - up until now.

Food Related Painting of the Week

The Well-Stocked Kitchen
Joachim Beuckelaer, 1566

The Well-Stocked Kitchen
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

Apparently there have been a bunch of additions to the Web Gallery of Art since I last updated my Food Related Paintings pages - I'll have to spend some quality time web surfing next weekend. At any rate, this is a painting I hadn't seen before.

From the look of the little patch in the center background, I suspect this painting has some other title like "Paul Converts the Unbelievers in Samaria". I salute whatever genius thought up this scheme, as it allowed them to paint overtly secular images in great detail while maintaining that their work had a religious theme. Without this trick we probably would have very few works that documented the food of the time.

This one's a doozie, filled with a wide variety of foods and kitchen implements. On the far right is an earthenware tankard with a metal cover and a similarly covered pitcher (bottle?), next to what look like cantaloupes or melons of some kind. Just behind them on the table is an earthenware pot and a large brass mortar and pestle.

Near the center of the painting I note the artichokes and cauliflower, and cucumbers (which may have been absent from England for much of the medieval period). At the front right there's a plate of lemons and olives, both of which were probably imported from Spain or the Mideast.

See those white things at the center left? The things next to the bowl with the knife in it. I'm not really sure what they are. I'd think they were white carrots, but the leaves don't look right, and the shape isn't at all right for parsnips. Maybe they're skirrets (Sium sisarum), which is a sort of water-parsnip sometimes eaten in the middle ages. Or, maybe some kind of white beet (the leaves look right for that). Interesting.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha
Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez
ca. 1620

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

Yet another painting that is a bit too late (1620) to be considered properly medieval. This is one of those odd "inside-out" paintings where the title refers to what's going on in the background. Of course, I prefer it this way - those pesky important figures don't get in the way of the detail.

The young woman in the foreground is preparing some kind of fish dish, which features garlic and eggs. She's grinding the garlic or some unpictured spice in a mortar. It's worth noting that medieval cooks would have covered the top of the mortar with a tied piece of cloth if they were grinding a spice that would make a lot of dust, so my guess is the garlic.

What's really interesting in this painting though is the presence of a dried chili pepper just in front of the bowl of fish. This may be the earliest depiction of a capsicum pepper in European art (I haven't found anything earlier).

Food Related Painting of the Week

Kitchen
Vincenzo Campi, Cremona, Italy
ca. 1580

Kitchen, Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

This painting is one of my favorites. Being from around 1580, it's pretty late to be considered "medieval", but a lot of information relevant to medieval cooking can still be inferred from it. There are so many things here to look at that it's hard to know where to start.

In the upper center at the table, a woman is about to put the top crust on a pie. Notice the sloped sides of the pie pan? Other than it's larger size, it's pretty much the same as the average modern pan - complete with the lip around the edge. I love how she's got the dough for the crust rolled around the pin. That's how my grandmother always did it too.

Next to her to the left, another woman look like she's kneading some dough. The table surface in front of her has been floured. She could be making bread, but that was usually done earlier in the day so I'll guess that it's another pie/tart crust.

To the right of these two, the woman in green doing something to some pasties on the sideboard. I suspect that the dish visible under her right arm is a bowl of egg yolks or the like, which would mean she's painting the pasties, possibly before baking them. This would also explain why two of the pasties are golden colored and the other two are white.

In front of her, the woman in the blue apron is grating something. It could be cheese, but given the odd shape (it looks smooshy to me) I'd say it's bread.

Then there are all the other busy folk. The men are butchering/dressing a carcass - probably a calf by the look of the hoof, but it might be a sheep. The old woman is using a large mortar and pestle. The odd-looking guy on the far right is putting poultry and game birds on a spit for roasting. The woman in yellow in the foreground is happily pulling the entrails out of a chicken.

And of course, the child on the left is blowing up the bladder from the carcass behind him.

There's a lot more, of course: bowls, plates, pots, pans, knives, furniture, fire irons. Oh, and I suppose you could look at the clothing ... if you're into that sort of thing.

On Baking Rice

One of the neat tricks I've learned from talking with caterers and the like is that when you're cooking rice for a lot of people (e.g. 120) you can bake rice instead of boiling it. The rice goes into a steamer pan with the same amount of water that you'd use to boil it, and then it's covered tightly and put into an oven for an hour. This method has the benefit of being less time-sensitive than boiling, and you don't have to worry about it burning on the bottom as the stuff in 30 quart stockpots often do.

A couple of days back I decided to try cooking frumenty this way. Frumenty is essentially a thick cracked-wheat porridge. I've tried making it at a feast once or twice and it always gave me trouble. Sometimes it just took too long to cook, other times it burned. The wheat is boiled in the same way as rice, so it seemed like a perfect candidate for baking.

I put a cup of cracked-wheat into a deep glass baking pan along with two cups of water, covered it with aluminum foil, and popped it into a 350°F oven. An hour later I took it out to check on it - huh ... too soupy and the grains were still a bit too crunchy. Back into the oven it went. I checked it another hour later and it was perfect. So frumenty can be cooked this way, and it is a lot easier, but it takes longer. Not a bad trade-off. I'll have to remember to update my recipe for frumenty to reflect this.

Days later the thought occurs to me: did they ever bake grain in the middle-ages instead of boiling it? This can be a hard sort of question to answer for certain, but I can look for evidence in the medieval cookbooks. There are lots of medieval recipes for rice, and at least a couple from each country. I start reading through them and after a while things begin to blur - they all sound about the same. Wash the rice, put in a pot with some liquid (e.g. water, broth, milk), and boil. Some add other things like meat or rice-flour or almond milk. Some add saffron or other spices. All of them say to boil it.

I didn't find a single recipe for rice or wheat that said to put it in a pot with liquid, cover it, and bake it. Ugh.

So then I'm forced to ask myself why? This is a cooking method that is perfectly suited to medieval European cuisine. The dish will turn out perfectly for a huge range of time and temperature. Why wouldn't they cook it this way? I don't have an answer for this, but I will veer off into speculation for a moment here.

The setup of the medieval kitchen, and especially the oven, was functionally different in a couple of significant ways. The ovens were usually heated up early in the morning by filling them with wood and sealing them up. When the oven was hot enough (around 500°F) the ashes were shovelled out, the floor of the oven was wiped out, and the bread baking began.

Interestingly enough, the ovens were often in a separate room from the kitchen. Sometimes they were in a completely different building. In small towns you could take your bread dough to the baker to bake it in their oven. While boiling rice is easy enough over a fire, and baking it is easy in a modern kitchen, it would be much more awkward to do if the oven were elsewhere. Not impossible, mind you, just more awkward.

I suspect that it just never occurred to any medieval cook that they could bake rice. Heck, it didn't occur to me, and I've got an oven right in my kitchen that heats to a consistent temperature at the push of a button. We modern cooks also use our ovens for a larger variety of foods - we "roast" meats there instead of over an open fire, and we bake vegetables like potatoes or turnips. In the middle ages, ovens were generally used for bread and pies - things made of or enclosed in dough.

So it looks to me like baking rice is one of those thinks like the sandwich. They could have done it - they had all the stuff to do it - but they just never had the idea, and so they didn't.

Of course I could be wrong, and I'd be overjoyed if someone found a recipe for baking grain instead of boiling it.

Gas vs. Electric

While considering the potential renovation of our home kitchen the issue of choosing a gas or electric cooktop came up, and a strange thought occurred to me (big surprise, I know - me having a strange thought - you'd think I was used to it by now).

The most common preference among cooking enthusiasts is gas, which allows you to quickly adjust the amount of heat being applied. Not so for electric, where the heating element takes long enough to cool down that it adds a significant challenge to making temperature-sensitive recipes (like many modern French sauces). In spite of being plumbed for gas, we have an electric cooktop.

In fact, I've been cooking on electric stoves for the past 24 years. You get used to it, really. You learn to move the pan around a lot, have it hang halfway off the element as it cools down, or lifting it up an inch or so for a minute. This makes my cooking style a bit funky when I'm working on the nice new gas stove at my mom's.

So my initial reaction was to go with a gas stove. After all, you can't get more medieval than cooking over fire, right?

Then I thought back to last summer, when I did a bit of cooking over a real fire using an earthenware pot. I had Helewyse de Birkestad (Louise Smithson) with me to show me the basics, and the first thing I learned is that I wasn't going to be cooking over flame. Instead we had the pot on a grill over coals. This gives a much more constant and even heat. So here's the kicker: how did we control the amount of heat applied to the pot? By moving it around. As the coals cooled down the pot got moved closer in. If it boiled a bit too much it got moved away - or was raised up a bit.

So maybe the past 24 years of electric cooktops was good training.

Making a Medieval Field Kitchen - Part 2

Foods for Medieval Field Kitchen

In my first post I talked about the furniture and equipment I'd need. Here I'll be looking at the foods. Come to think of it, this is probably my computer science background showing through - first I speced out the hardware, now I'm doing the software.

Italian Kitchen from "Il Cuoco Segreto Di Papa Pio V",

Bartolomeo Scappi, Venice, 1570

As a source of raw data, I used lists of foods I'd pulled out of medieval English and French cookbooks for the section of my website on Statistics from Medieval Cookbooks. Since I know which foods appear most often in the cookbooks I work from, I can ensure that I have the majority of ingredients I might possibly need.

These foods seem (to me) to divide themselves into four categories: Spices, Staples, Fruits and Vegetables, and Fresh Foods.

The Spices

This category is pretty simple to deal with. They don't take up much space, so I should be able to keep them all in a "spice chest" the size of a shoebox. As long as I keep them dry, I don't have to worry about them. The spices are: cinnamon, cloves, cubebs, cumin, ginger, galingale, grains of paradise, hyssop, mace, marjoram, mint, mustard, nutmeg, parsely, pepper, saffron, sage, salt, sandalwood, and savory.

The Staples

These are the foods that I'll need in larger quantities than the spices, but like the spices they'll be fine as long as I keep them dry (or for the liquids, in suitable containers). The staples are: almonds, amidon (wheat starch), cooking oil, flour, lard, nuts, oatmeal, peas (dried), pine nuts, rice, rosewater, sugar, vinegar, wine, and yeast.

Hmm... suitable containers - there's a whole new problem. I really can't have an authentic medieval field kitchen if I have a plastic bottle of olive oil and commercial spice tins sitting out on the table, can I? Obviously I'll need to look into medieval food containers - but that can wait until later on.

Fruits and Vegetables

This is a bit of a mixed bag. Most of these will keep reasonably well for several days (assuming good weather). A few (e.g. apples, onions) have a high enough moisture content that I'll need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't go all green and fuzzy on me. They are: apples, currants (zante raisins), dates, figs, garlic, onions, oranges, prunes, and raisins.

Fresh Foods

These are the troublemakers. The fruits and vegetables on this list won't keep as well as those on the list above, and some of these foods will quickly become unsafe if kept at room temperature. They are: cabbage, cream, grapes, leeks, mushrooms, pears, radishes, spinach, strawberries, turnips, butter, eggs, cheese, meat, and milk.

Most of these will need to be purchased on the day they're to be used. There are some medieval preservation techniques that could help - especially with the meat - but again, that would be (and will be) a whole separate topic.

Making a Medieval Field Kitchen

A while back I came across the picture below, and of course it got me thinking. "Field kitchen? I could really use a proper medieval field kitchen."

Field Kitchen from "Il Cuoco Segreto Di Papa Pio V",

Bartolomeo Scappi, Venice, 1570

You see, every now and then (at least once a year - and it should be much more often) I go to a medieval camping thing. In the past I've avoided doing any serious cooking (kind of embarrassing to admit), which I usually attribute to lack of equipment and not wanting to cook over a fire on hot days. But seeing this picture has made me realize that the equipment needed for a proper medieval camp kitchen might not be all that hard to put together at a reasonable cost. I'd still have to be cooking over a fire on hot days, but I suppose I should just accept that as part of the whole medieval experience, eh?

So ... just what do I need for a properly working - and safe - kitchen?  In terms of furniture, I don't need an awful lot as long as I'm not trying to be too fancy.

• two saw-horse tables
  
• a roasting rack
  
• a sun / rain awning
  
• some shelves to keep stored items off the ground
  
• boxes and baskets for food storage

That's pretty encouraging, especially since I already have the roasting rack - it doesn't even look too different from the one in the picture.  The list for kitchen equipment is quite a but longer though.

• two or three earthenware pots
  
• tripods / trivets
  
• mortar and pestle
  
• wooden spoons
  
• a meat hook
  
• a cauldron or large kettle
  
• an S hook
  
• a griddle
  
• a wafer / waffle iron
  
• pitchers
  
• wooden bowls
  
• serving platter
  
• knives
  
• hand towels
  
• dish towels
  
• tablecloths

I think I have about half of these, and some of the remaining could get pretty expensive (have you priced large wooden bowls lately?  The real ones, not the cheap salad things).  Then there's a list of things I need for the sake of food safety and cleanliness.

• three wash tubs
  
• dish soap
  
• dish sanitizer
  
• water dispenser for washing hands
  
• bucket for waste water
  

That's a lot of stuff, but really it's not too bad.  Notice something though?  I didn't list any food, and I didn't list anything for keeping foods fresh.  That's a whole topic on its own, and I'll cover it in the next post.