Odd Table Scene

Johnna Holloway sent me a link to the painting below and I'm going to add it to the list of Food Related Paintings on the website. It's a 16th century work by Frans Pourbus the Elder titled "The Prodigal Son Among Courtesans" and there's a lot going on here.

Source:  Wikimedia Commons

In terms of food the most notable item (for me) is the pie in the center of the table. At a guess I'd say it's a pear pie because it looks like it's got a pear rising up out of the middle. This is a total tangent but I can imagine it being something like the recipe below, which is English but from roughly the same time period.

To make a Tarte of Wardens. You must bake your Wardens first in a Pie, and then take all the wardens and cut them in foure quarters, and coare them, and put them into a Tarte pinched, with your Suger, and season them with Suger, Synamon and Ginger, and set them in the Ouen, and put no couer on them, but you must cutte a couer and laye in the Tart when it is baked, and butter the Tarte and the couer too, and endore it with suger.  [The Good Housewife's Jewell, (England, 1596)]

Ok, back to the painting - here's a closeup of the stuff on the table.

I assume the things on the plates at 12, 3, and 9 o'clock are loaves of bread.  The two similarly colored things on the platter with the pie might also be bread or maybe ... fruit?  The one to the left of the pie looks kind of like an egg.

It's hard to tell what the white stuff in the dish at around 1 o'clock. It's possibly a rice dish.

The white stuff in large bowl at 7 o'clock with a spoon is also kind of unknowable but it could be a soup like the following:

In the first instance, if you want to make a white brewet for capons or for pullets or for veal, so boil the capons or pullets or veal and take broth [from it] and set that aside. Then so peel almonds and pound them in pieces and then so temper them with the broth of the capons or veal, whichever you have. Then so put the almonds through a strainer (cloth) then shall you take white ginger powder, as much as you think good, then temper with verjuice and white wine. There you shall let it cook and then put in a good amount of sugar and look well that it be salted enough and when it has boiled a little put it in a clean pot alone. If you then wish to serve those capons or hens or veal so lay [them] in a dish and pour over them this aforesaid brewet. [Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen, (Netherlands, ca. 1510 - C. van Tets, trans.)]

The big questions though are the giant white domino at 8 o'clock and the platter of pokey red things at 4 o'clock.

The domino could be just that but there isn't any game related stuff on the table, so I don't think that's it (besides, the dots are wrong). I suppose it could also be bread carved into a brick shape but that doesn't seem right either.

There is one recipe that does come to mind though. It goes by many names such as Taylours or Lenten Slices and is essentially almond milk cooked until it's like jello which is then served in slices. As a bonus many of the variations of the recipe call for currants - which could be the spots on the pictured white brick.  Here's an English recipe from the same period:

27 - To make Leach of Almonds. Take halfe a pound of sweet Almonds, and beat them in a mortar; then strain them with a pint of sweet milke from the cow; then put to it one graine of musk, 2 spoonfuls of Rose-water, two ounces of fine sugar, the weight of 3 whole shillings of Isinglass that is very white, and so boyle them; and let all run thorow a strainer: then may you slice the same, and so serve it.  [Delights for Ladies (England, 1609)]

That just leaves the pokey red plate, and with this one I'm stumped.  Maybe a higher resolution image would help. As it is I can't tell if it's a dish of red stuff with things stuck into it or a pile of separate red things (part of my brain wants it to be Chinese barbecue chicken wings but I think that's just because I'm hungry.

Setting all of that aside, there is another question I have about this painting and it relates to the woman on the far right side.

Just what is that thing hung up on the wall and what is she doing to it. After talking with a few people about it I'm inclined to think it's a tally board and she's erasing it. But why? I'd guess it was a visual pun about erasing the (musical) "score" but, sadly, the musical connotation of "score" only goes back to 1701.

As for all the other stuff going on in the painting, I keep looking and thinking I'm missing some kind of in-joke. I'm open to suggestions.

Mystery Fruit

Sometimes it's kind of embarrassing how my brain works.

A friend of mine (Hi Erica!) posted this picture to Facebook, and of course (embarrassment #1) I found it amusing and (embarrassment #2) I responded with a fruit-based pun.

But this is a 17th century painting of a fruit & vegetable seller, so my brain isn't going to let me ignore all the food in it. In short order I've got it open at the highest resolution the meme will allow and unlike a majority of guys my age, my eyes are quickly drawn to (embarrassment #3) this one particular fruit.

There's something about it that looks different from the nearby apples. In fact, it kind of looks like a frickin' tomato.

For those not so into medieval European cooking, here's the thing about tomatoes: they're a new-world food that wasn't available in Europe before around 1500, and weren't commonly eaten until the 1700s. John Gerard mentioned them in his 1597 herbal, but he thought they were poisonous. That means it's a bit unusual to see one depicted in a 17th century painting with a bunch of food.

The resolution of the meme is too low to tell for sure though, so I start looking for a better image. My Google-fu skills quickly reveal that the painting is Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, by Nathaniel Bacon (c. 1620-5). Google also politely provides me with a much better quality image.

I eagerly zoom in and here's what I see:

Huh.

That's helpful, kind of, sort of, but ... huh.

I'm pretty sure it's not an apple. The shape is very tomato-like, as is the glossiness. The thing in the middle doesn't look right though. It looks more like the calyx (bottom belly-button like thing) of an apple than either the calyx (top leafy bit near the stem) or stigma (bottom little nubbins) of a tomato. Also if it were the top of the tomato I'd expect some discoloration or cracking around the shoulder.

Another friend (Hi Drake!) suggested it might be a persimmon, which would match the glossiness and shape but not really the color, and again the calyx isn't right. Persimmons have a calyx and stigma more like a tomato.

It's certainly not a medlar - it's not nearly obscene enough.

At the moment I'm still not sure. Maybe it's just an oddly-shaped, wet apple.

The (probably wrong) answer I find most appealing though is that it's a tomato, and that the artist chose to put it into a still-life that would normally be associated with fertility, fecundity, and a bit of eroticism, specifically to provide a touch of hidden peril.

Quest for Broccoli

So this evening I was leafing through my copy of The Herbs & Vegetables of Italy by Giacomo Castelvetro (What?  Doesn't everyone spend their spare time looking at books about vegetables?), and I came across this painting ...

Still Life with Christ at Emmaus, Floris van Schooten, c. 1630
Rijksmuseum - https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-2058

This sort of thing is an addiction for me. I start looking at all the stuff in there and then I'll turn to the next one, and then the next. Pretty soon I've wasted hours muttering things to myself like "That's a medlar. Are those gooseberries? I think they are." But every now and then I spot something exciting.

Yes, I said exciting. You want to make something out of it?

In this particular case, what caught my eye was a bunch of something to the right of center in the painting.

Aruh?

Whatever that thing is, it's not the dense head like the cauliflower depicted in other paintings from the same time period, but it doesn't quite look like modern broccoli either. I've written elsewhere about the uncertainties of medieval broccoli, so this is something that has been long upon my mind and it's the biggest lead I've had in *mumble* years.

I said to myself, "Self, I think that's broccoli."  Ok, actually I said something more along the lines of, "ZOMGWFTBBQSQUEEEEEEE! [insert happy little dance here]" but you get the idea.

Still, it doesn't look like modern broccoli - for example the modern stuff can flower, but the blossoms are usually yellow. Brassica oleracea has a lot of weird variants though. Is there a white flowering variant of broccoli? I do a quick google image search and guess what I find. No, don't guess because I'll show you.

White Sprouting Broccoli
Image from Solstice.co.uk

That looks pretty much like the same thing to me. Now I have to find a source nearby and see what it's like.

Plus ça change ...

I came across an image today that I've seen before and mentioned in some of my seminars, so I thought I'd post it here before I lost track of it yet again. It's one of the illustrations from the margins of the Luttrell Psalter (England, 14th c).

British Library Add MS 42130 ("The Luttrell Psalter"), f.157v

Now it could be that the beverage being poured into the funnel is water and the gentleman in blue was very thirsty, but I think it's much more likely that people haven't changed all that much in the past 800 years, and what we're looking at is a couple of bros at a frat party with their beer bong.

On a side note, I particularly like the detail of the beer splashing into the drinker's eyes.

Medieval Hot Dog Stand?

I'm browsing through the collection of "Culinary Prints" at Academia Barilla when I come aross this image.

La grigliata - The Grill

17th century German etching

Livio e Wilma Cerini di Castegnate Collection

On the website it's described as "A rare representation of a women selling grilled vegetables outdoors." A nice, simple picture. No surprises in terms of cooking utensils or methods. No big deal. I'm about to go on to the next image when I take a closer look at what's in the customer's hands. For all the world, it looks like a sausage in a bun. Maybe it's just being served with a piece of bread? No, it definitely looks like the bread is cut down the middle, with the sausage between the halves.

Now the common belief is that sausage sellers first started putting sausages into split rolls sometime in the late 19th century, so I doubt my own eyes and post a link on a cooking mailing list. The quick consensus is that it does indeed look like a sausage in a bun. Then someone suggests that the caption on the etching might shed some light on things. My German is only good enough to know that it says something about "good fried sausages", but a better translation is provided moments later.

Here, a decent sausage is roasted for not much money, with which hunger can be appeased but not thirst.

This (thirst) can be appeased later as much as someone wants in a place where wine and beer is sold.

[translation courtesy of Emilio Szabo, via the SCA-Cooks mailing list]

So the notes are incorrect - the woman is selling sausages, not vegetables, and she is serving them in a bun. No sign of ketchup or mustard though.

Mystery Things?

I'm going to jump topics for a moment here, but I promise to get back to the discussion on the quiz posts soon.

I just came across a post on the blog "This is why you're fat" that caught my eye. It's an image of a dish from the Republic of Georgia - essentially a sort of custard or quiche cooked in a bread crust.

The reason I note this is that it looks an awful lot like some unidentifiable (to me) things in a Dutch painting from 1559 that I posted about some time ago (look in the lower right portion of the painting, on top of the basket of birds).

I don't know if they're in any way related to this dish, but I find the similarity of shapes interesting.

It's one more bit of information in the quest of the Mysterious Football-Shaped Things^®.

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

Supper at Emmaus
Marco Marziale, 1506

Supper at Emmaus
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

This painting illustrates one of the problems I have to face: early medieval artwork was usually much more concerned with religion than it was with food. I can find heaps of paintings and illuminations depicting religious figures, but very few that have any kind of accurate depiction of medieval food (I almost chose a painting of Herod's banquet where John the Baptists' head was being served on a platter, but it just wasn't food-related enough).

At any rate, there actually is a bit of interesting food-related stuff going on in this picture. Most prominent of course are the oddly shaped loaves of bread. I haven't seen kidney-shaped loaves before. Each loaf has a strange little dimple on the side as well - perhaps it's a baker's mark.

In front of each diner is a rectangular trencher, apparently made of metal. Bread trenchers were increasingly popular for feasts in the later 14th and early 15th centuries, but may have fallen out of fashion by the time this was painted. I'm not sure exactly what;s on these trenchers. It looks kind of like the calamari I get at the local sushi place, but I kind of doubt that. The ones on Jesus' trencher look like uniform slices of something. Meat? Sippets?

Aside from the trencher and a spiffy knife for each diner, the remaining items on the table are all rather plain. Jesus's bowl, the pitcher, and the glasses are certainly of nice quality (metal and glass), but are not ornate. The glasses don't even have the stereotypical prunts (bumps added to the outside to make the glass less slippery). The possible exception is the salt cellar in front of Jesus, which looks like it's made of gold or brass and appears to have some decoration around the side.

That's it for the food though - just bread, wine, and some mysterious things on trenchers.

The sawhorse table is rather interesting of course, as are the stools at either end. I still need to get around to making a couple of tables like this, and maybe stools too. Others may be fascinated by the clothes, hats, rosaries, belt pouches, napkins, boot closures, and the fact that the fold lines are so visible on the table cloth, but not me. I didn't notice those things at all.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Fishmongers
Vincenzo Campi, 1580s

Fishmongers
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

Another late-medieval (depending on your viewpoint) painting by Vincenzo Campi. This one depicts a (assumed) fish merchant.

The group of people on the left (family?) immediately catch the eye. The man and woman are both holding bowls of what I assume are cooked beans (see Annibale Carracci's The Beaneater). Nice, simple bowls. Partly obscured view of the spoon the woman's holding. It's hard to tell what's on the table in front of them. I think the blocky, rock-shaped things are pieces of bread. It looks to me like there are dead mice on the plate, but I'm pretty sure that's not it. At the woman's feet is a pitcher with a bowl on top. My guess is that the bowl is being used a drinking vessel, and is filled with some of the wine (or whatever) that's in the pitcher.

On the other side, a young woman is dumping a large bucket of fresh (live?) fish onto the table for sorting. I'm not sure what the stick-like things just in front of her are. Next to her is a big, beautiful copper kettle with a knife.

The variety of seafood in the picture is very impressive. The big guy in the center is a sturgeon. There are at least a half-dozen other species of fish, along with scallops, oysters, clams, and crab. There's also a turtle under the table. Conspicuously absent are skates and rays - they usually show up in these sorts of paintings (see Pieter Aertsen's Market Scene). The one that really gets me though is the starfish at the bottom center. I don't think I've ever seen a recipe for starfish in a medieval cookbook, and from what I remember of biology class there isn't anything in a starfish that is edible. Are they just there as bycatch? Were they used for soup stock? Did Campi just include them because they look cool?

Another thing to check on as soon as I get a time machine.

Food Related Painting of the Week

The Egg Dance
Pieter Aertsen, 1552

The Egg Dance
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

I briefly talked about this painting in my post about medieval eggs, but there's a lot more here worth perusing.

One of the more obvious things is all the leeks and mussel shells scattered over the floor. I read somewhere (and can no longer find the source) that these - along with the leeks in the vase on the wall in the background - indicate that the place depicted in the painting is a house of ill repute. I don't know enough about that aspect of medieval history to be sure, but that sounds reasonable to me. Aside from the mess on the floor there are a couple of interesting kettles hanging over the fire and, at the very top of the painting near the center, some odd things which I think are sausages.

The really big draw though (for me at least) is the stuff on the table. The small loaves of bread are easy to figure out, and the little metal thing is probably a salt cellar, but what are those flat, diamond-shaped things? Waffles? They don't quite look like the waffles in other paintings. They're too thick to be playing cards. Trenchers maybe? The one to the left is curving up slightly at the edges in the same way the trenchers I made did after they started to dry out a bit.

And what in blazes are those things in the center of the table? I've seen these things before (in Aertsen's painting Butcher's Stall) and I couldn't figure then out there either (though in that painting they were accompanied by two similar things with a disturbingly red-brown colored filling). Schmaltz tarts? Marrow? Soft cheese with a rind? If so, the "rind" looks kind of wrong. Whatever they are, they come from the butcher ready-to-eat. I'm stumped on this one.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Christ and the Adulteress
Pieter Aertsen, 1559

Christ and the Adulteress
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

Yet another "inside-out" painting (sense a trend here?), this one from Amsterdam. So what do we have here? Front and center is an assortment of fruit and vegetables: carrots (maybe in two different colors, but it might just be shadow), onions, cucumbers (that look slightly fat like that cucumber-like thing last week), strawberries (in front) and peaches (just behind them), and a couple different kinds of cabbage. I think there's something that looks like an acorn squash in with the cabbage, but it's hard to tell.

Note the basket of very modern looking eggs in the front. Enough said on that.

Just behind the veggies is a basket of round things. They could be bread, but they seem just a bit too uniform in color. Cheeses maybe? That would make sense in connection with the pots of milk just behind them. This brings me to the oddly shaped things in the lower right corner, partly covered, in the bowl sitting on top of the bird cage. I haven't the foggiest idea just what they are. As a guess I'd say butter - something about the way they're kept in a bowl and (presumably) kept covered. I've seen these in other pictures, and they may (or may not) be related to the Mysterious Football-Shaped Things® discussed elsewhere.

Oh, and while they're not food, I love the pile of cookpots in the lower left. I need to buy a few of those.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha
Vincenzo Campi, ca. 1580

Christ in the House of Mary and Martha
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

Another "inside-out" painting, this time from Italy. Lots of fun things in this one. In the upper left hanging next to the duck and a skewered chicken is a little wild pig - almost too cute to eat. It's a good reminder that they were eating a lot of game animals. Similarly, there's a lot of fish here too, and a beautiful salmon steak. With the church forbidding meat on three days out of the week, fish was very important.

In the middle of all those fish though, in the lower left corner of the painting, is a lobster. At one point I'd been told that medieval Europeans weren't eating north Atlantic lobster, but instead ate Mediterranean ones - which look different and don't have the big claws. However almost all of the lobsters I've seen depicted in paintings like this one are clearly north Atlantic. This shows that the trade of fresh seafood was quite impressive. Huge amounts of fish were carted for hundreds of miles inland. Where possible, it was kept alive in barrels. These were not "simpler times".

In the center we have some songbirds - larks? - some small loaves of bread, and an artichoke. Among the things in the seller's basket are a couple of different colors of carrots and a lumpy green thing. It could be a melon of some kind, or maybe a fat cucumber. I'll have to spend some time trying to figure that one out. Oh, and in the upper right are those big, round heads of very modern looking cabbage.

In the lower right, if you look underneath those birds, are some folded white tablecloths. The draping of the table was very important, and medieval stewards wrote detailed instructions on how to do it correctly in books like The Boke of Keruynge (Peter Brears, ed.). It required three tablecloths per section of table, with special folds and sections to delineate where the lord of the manor sat. I don't think that storing tablecloths underneath ducks and geese was the recommended way of keeping them clean though.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Still-life with Parrot
Georg Flegel, ca. 1600

Still-life with Parrot
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

This week I've chosen a German painting full of sweets and such.

Like most still-life paintings, there's a bunch of interesting things scattered about. At the front and just to the right is a round wooden box that is filled with what's probably quince paste (cotignac or membrillo - like marmalade but much more firm, if you haven't tried this stuff then look at the local gourmet grocery, they usually have it near the imported cheeses like manchego - with which it goes exceptionally well!).

I'd be tempted to call the flat things in the lower right trenchers, but by the 1600s the use of trenchers had pretty much fallen out of fashion. They look more like biscotti (zweibaken? my German is not that good). Those things on top are either small pears or (more likely, I think) fresh figs.

The tall silver dish in the center is filled with sugar-covered things. I imagine the stick-shaped ones are strips of orange peel or maybe even horseradish root. I have no idea what the other things are, though the smaller, oval things might be almonds. Notice how nice and white the sugar coating is? I've ranted about the color of medieval sugar before. On a side note, the bumpiness of the sugared items is caused by having the sugar syrup too hot during the coating process. Around the dish of sweets is a plate of dried figs (maybe with some dates as well), a pomegranate, and a small (about 1/4 pound) loaf of bread.

On the left, near the spoons, is a beautiful prunted beaker - I have a set that look almost exactly like it. Behind and under the stack of plates is what looks like a wheel of cheese. I really hope the color of the paint has changed over the centuries, because that's not the color I like my cheese to have.

It wouldn't be that hard to re-create this setup, though I'd cover the table with a nice cloth. I'd also leave out the parrot - I'm sure it's a health code violation.

Food Related Painting of the Week

Still-life with Turkey-Pie
Pieter Claesz, 1627

Still-life with Turkey-Pie
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

Ok, so I'm way out of the medieval period with this one, but there's still a lot of neat stuff to look at.

The big draw is, of course, the turkey. Turkeys originated in the Americas and were therefore unknown in Europe before the late 1490s. Obviously the cooks of Europe had figured out what to do with them by 1627. Here, the neck and head, and the wings of the turkey are decorating the top of a large pie that presumably was made from the meat. This was a fairly common practice in the late middle-ages. Pies were decorated to show what was in them. Sometimes the pie was shaped like the animal, sometimes (as here) parts of the animal were used. Funky, huh? One other interesting bit about the turkey pie, notice the decorations on the sides? I'm still trying to figure out how they did that, but I'm pretty sure they used a mold of some sort (Elise probably has more info on that).

See the smaller pie to the left of the turkey pie? Notice the shape? It's a beautifully cylindrical pie like the one I pointed out in an earlier post. This time we get to see what's inside - it looks like a slice of lemon, a date or large raisin, currants, and probably finely chopped meat.

Aside from the pies though, I just love the packet of spice on the lower right. It's a cone of recycled paper with a twist at the bottom. Fresh from the spice merchant and still in its medieval wrapper. Salt. Pepper? Cinnamon maybe? I should start taking ground spices to feasts that way.

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.

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.

On the Size and Color of Eggs

One of the things I was told back when I had just started to dabble in medieval cooking was that the eggs they had in medieval Europe were smaller than modern eggs. Not being overly skeptical back then, I accepted this as an established fact and filed it away for future reference. As I progressed in my research though, I became more doubtful of this factoid. Now I'm at the point where I'm comfortable in saying it's utter bunk.

The recipe for May Eggs involves pouring the liquid yolks out of partly boiled eggs, 

mixing them with spices, pouring them back in, and allowing them to boil until hard. 

This is difficult and messy enough using large eggs. I doubt it's even possible with small ones.

It's easy enough to understand how such a belief could come about. We're told repeatedly that the great size of farm animals compared to their wild counterparts is directly the result of modern farming practices. What we forget is that some of those practices have been practiced for the past thousand years.

Evidence for modern-sized eggs in the medieval period is surprisingly easy to find.

Chicken Vendors, Vincenzo Campi, 1580s
Web Gallery of Art

The painting above is a beautiful example (click on it to go to a bigger version). See there in the lower right corner? Four Grade-A, Extra-Large eggs.

The Egg Dance, Pieter Aertsen, 1552

Web Gallery of Art

In this one the egg is on the floor, next to the overturned bowl and near the wooden shoe - about to be stepped on.

"Ah! How do you know those are chicken eggs and not goose eggs? How do you know they weren't smaller in, say, the 14th century?" I hear you ask. How about this for an answer?

Taccuino Sanitatis, 14th century

Large, modern-looking eggs ... being gathered from chickens ... in the fourteenth century. That pretty much sums it up.

Oh, and about the color of medieval eggs: common wisdom is that they were probably brown or speckled. P'feh! Take another look at those paintings. See any brown eggs? Me neither. If you find a painting of medieval eggs that show them to be any color other than white, I'd love to see it.

Food Related Painting of the Week

La succession des plats
15th century

La succession des plats
(from the Bibliothèque National de France)

This is a page (February) of the calendar in Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne. It's a simple scene of a noble dining, apparently alone.

There's a bunch of good stuff here to look at. The pie in front of the diner is the most prominent (to me) - it has a sharply defined, regular shape that is characteristic of medieval pies, complete with the hole at the top which was probably where the cook poured in melted butter or vinegar.

The diner is holding a bowl of something red. It could be wine (I don't see a cup on the table) or some kind of soup. Given the absence of a spoon, I can only assume he'll drink directly from the bowl.

There's a knife on the table next to the half eaten loaf of bread. According to John Russell's Book of Nurture, bread should never be torn or bitten off, but should always be cut into bite-sized pieces with a the knife. Comparing the size of the bread to the size of the diner's hand, I'd guess it's about a quarter-pound loaf (assuming things are represented vaguely to scale). On a side note, I like how the rivets in the knife's handle are clearly visible.

One leg of the table is visible, peeking out from the table cloth. It appears to be part of a typical medieval sawhorse table.

On the whole, it's a nice clear dining scene. If I can get around to getting a table like this, I'll have to try setting this up to see what it's like.

Food Related Painting of the Week

The Marriage at Cana
Gerard David
ca. 1500

The Marriage at Cana, Oil on wood, Musée du Louvre, Paris
(from the Web Gallery of Art)

A busy painting from the late medieval period, this one is unusual in that it has a lot of food detail for a religious-themed artwork (if you look at the paintings titled "The Last Supper", you'll find that nothing was being served other than bread).

The first thing that catches my eye in this one is (of course) the pie being brought in at the left. The perspective is a bit squashed, but this is a nice example of the geometrically perfect, cylindrical medieval pie - I'll post other paintings with such pies in the future. My gaze then travels across the table to the right, noting the bread, knife, and beaker-shaped glass just in the foreground of Jesus. Just right of center a server is carving a piece of meat. The resolution here isn't good enough to make out what's on the platter next to him. There's a nice salt cellar next to that.

Something else worth noting, in this painting the diners are seated all around the table instead of only along one side as is the case in most feast scenes. This makes me wonder if the seating arrangements in all the other paintings are wrong (set up so you could see all the figures), or if it's this one that doesn't represent how feasters sat, or perhaps even if both arrangements were common. Something I'll have to check into.

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).