Food Related Painting of the Week

Market Scene
Joachim Beuckelaer, before 1574

Market Scene
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

This week I'm again turning to a late medieval (post medieval?) painting by Joachim Beuckelaer. Like The Well-Stocked Kitchen, this one is full of interesting things to muse over.

Some of the things are pretty easy to identify, such as the cabbage/lettuce in the very front (with the root still attached ... funky), the artichokes, the turnips, and the cherries. The basket full of black-ish things had me a bit puzzled at first. They're certainly not capsicum peppers (new-world), and look wrong for okra. Then I noticed that some of them are a bit lumpy, so now I'm pretty sure they're fava beans in their pods (there's a picture halfway down on the Wikipedia page for favas that shows some mature fava bean pods can have a dark color).

In the background on the right is a bucket of something - milk, maybe?

Which brings me to the Mysterious Football-Shaped Things® on the left. I know others have put together entire pages about these things (with nothing conclusive), but my current guess is some sort of semi-soft cheese. I'll post more on this later.

There's also the big earthenware jug in the upper left. I did a quick search to try and find out who's arms those are, but came up with nothing. Whoever it is, it's someone that likes towers.