Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800

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Edited by Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu

The Art of Food in Europe 1500–1800

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This book is dedicated to our dear friend and colleague Ivan Day with love, admiration, and grateful thanks for being such a generous fount of knowledge and a true inspiration

PHILIP WILSON PUBLISHERS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London WC1 B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, PHILIP WILSON PUBLISHERS and the PHILIP WILSON logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain in 2019 Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500−1800 The Fitzwilliam Museum, Tuesday 26 November 2019 to Sunday 26 April 2020 Copyright © The University of Cambridge (The Fitzwilliam Museum), 2019 Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of and Contributors to this work All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The authors and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for ISBN: 978 1 78130 102 9 10–9–8–7–6–5–4–3–2–1 Designed and typeset in Walbaum and Myriad by E&P Design Printed and bound in Wales by Gomer Press Limited

The Fitzwilliam Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the following: The Paul Mellon Discretionary Fund; The Marlay Group; The Charlotte Bonham-Carter Charitable Trust; The Fitzwilliam Museum Business Partners: TTP and Brewin Dolphin; as well as:

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

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Contents

Foreword–6 Introduction–7 One | Food cycles and systems–11 Two | Production and sourcing–25 Three | Local and global foodways–59 Four | Preparing and preserving–113 Five | Gastronomic contexts and cultures–131 Six | Religion and morality–181 Seven | Food choices and diets–199 Eight | Inspired by food–231 Catalogue–248 Comparative images–254 Bibliography–256 Acknowledgements–263 Index–265

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Foreword

This beautiful book amplifies the narratives and arguments of the Museum’s innovative exhibition, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe 1500–1800, and serves as its permanent record. Our show opens just before Advent, traditionally a time of fasting, and closes just after Easter, when feasting can resume. Celebrating the production, preparation, and presentation of food, its consumption or rejection, its ideologies and identities, Feast & Fast considers extremes of eating and everyday experiences. It has inspired the Museum’s first annual theme: Sensual/Virtual. Can sensory enjoyment of food be dangerous? Are there ways in which artists of the past, and scholars of today, can capture (virtually) the lost pleasures of taste and smell? The historic recreations so brilliantly conjured up by food historian Ivan Day – a Renaissance sugar banquet, a Baroque feasting table, and a Georgian confectioner’s shop – are designed to delight the senses, re-animate historic objects, and highlight the artfulness of food itself. Indeed, they are works of art in their own right.

Feast & Fast is the latest partnership between the Museum and Cambridge University’s History Faculty, led by Victoria Avery (Keeper, Applied Arts) and Melissa Calaresu (Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History, Gonville and Caius College).

Their interdisciplinary research is published alongside that of other historians of art, culture, economics, politics, and religion. I am extremely grateful to each distinguished contributor, and especially to the project progenitors.

More than 275 objects – decorative and functional, unique and mass produced, pristine and broken, familiar and intriguing – have been selected to tell the compelling and complex, local and global, story of food in Cambridge, Britain, and Europe between 1500 and 1800. Many have

been hidden away in our reserves for decades, and Feast & Fast provides the perfect opportunity to research, recontextualise, and return them to the public domain.

The Museum’s holdings are complemented by significant loans from the University Library, several Colleges, museums and private individuals, to whom I give my sincere thanks.

Funding for conservation and loans are just two areas in which we have benefited from the generosity of our sponsors and business partners, without whose support Feast & Fast would not have been possible.

By focussing on food in the early modern period, Feast & Fast will, I hope, stimulate readers and visitors to think more about how we consider and engage with food now. The issues are legion and they all have historic roots, or at least precedents. The objects and works of art discussed here anticipate the desired impact of artful plating in upmarket restaurants and the carefully calculated design of eating spaces, public and private. The allure of food magazines and luscious food photography, the cult of celebrity chefs, the publication of new diets, and the concerns over eating disorders and food-related diseases, are anticipated in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So, too, are the debates around vegetarianism and veganism, the desirability of the seasonal and local versus the exotic and imported, the vulnerability of food supply chains, the ethics of food production, and sustainability. All of these urgent contemporary concerns have their parallels in the period of early modern food culture tackled by Feast & Fast. We stand to learn a lot.

Luke Syson Director and Marlay Curator

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Introduction

The comparative simplicity of the black and white outlines of a cuccagna from 1629 belies the extravagance and complexity of the associated festivities that commemorated the end of the Duke of Alba’s seven-year tenure as Viceroy of Naples (fig. 0.1). The woodcut shows a triumphal arch composed of stacked wheels of cheese and loaves of bread, hung with cured ham hocks, salami, and local pear-shaped cheeses called caciocavallo. Two small pigs look outwards from the top of each column, with tubes wedged in their mouths from which fireworks would be lit. This spectacular, multi-sensory, edible arch was erected as the penultimate stop in an elaborate procession held on the eve of the Feast of St John the Baptist on 23 June, which ended at the church of San Giovanni a Mare, one of the many churches in Naples named in honour of the saint.1 Erected during Carnival and other times of the year, the cuccagna was a complex ephemeral structure, known as a macchina or an apparato, in the form of arches, temples, or mountains, which was made of wood and canvas, often incorporating edible foodstuffs and occasionally live animals.

The spectacle of the cuccagna was not simply in its display but also in its dismantling by a crowd of hungry Neapolitans, watched over by their Spanish governors and later Bourbon rulers.2 The Modenese painter Antonio Joli represented a Neapolitan cuccagna in a painting from the late 1750s, in which one can see the spectators in the royal balcony (on the left) and the soldiers on horseback (at the centre) over-seeing the crowds of Neapolitans who rush to and scramble over the ‘mountain’ to grab the live animals tied to it (fig. 0.2). An English noblewoman, Lady Anne Miller, described her horror and

fascination when she witnessed a similar cuccagna during Carnival 1771, in which birds nailed by their wings were ripped from the structure and live animals were torn apart in front of her eyes, leaving her sick to her stomach and unable to eat.3 Food was central to the creation of Neapolitan cuccagne – or rather the lack of food – for a population that struggled to survive on a daily basis.4 The origins of the cuccagna lie in the idea of the ‘Land of Cockaigne’, an imaginary place of plenty in which all the bodily needs are met. The threat of famine was ever present in early modern Europe, and food was highly regulated in an attempt to ensure a safe and secure supply. Since it was understood in Naples that ‘the common people thought with their bellies rather than their heads’, the cuccagna can be understood as a form of political communication as well as social control by the Spanish and Bourbon governments.5 Such activities of festive excess around the celebration of Carnival have been interpreted as a momentary world-turnedupside-down, which ultimately served to strengthen existing political hierarchies.6 However, these kinds of festivities also contributed to the creation of powerful civic and religious identities mediated through food, and to powerful collective and individual memories for participants and spectators alike.7 The cuccagna with its extraordinary display, dismantling, and eating of food was both a political tool which offered rulers an opportunity to show their munificence and an artful installation conjured out of food, which gave common people the chance to experience, rather than merely imagine, a world of edible wonders on special days throughout the year. The edible cuccagna demonstrates the diverse uses and multiple INTRODUC FEAST & TION FAST 7

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While food is often associated with key rites of passage and culinary memories are embedded deep within an individual’s psyche, it is designed to be consumed and is therefore the most ephemeral of historical subjects. Rarely does food survive from the historical past (with some extraordinary exceptions – for example, carbonised bread from ancient Pompeii or brittle biscuits collected by early twentieth-century folklorists).10 We are therefore left with images, objects, books, and archival material which often reflect elite practices and attitudes, privileging the table over the street, porcelain over wood, the fork over the spoon, and Europe over the rest of the world.11 Despite the ephemerality of eating and cooking, the survival of this material does provide ways into understanding broader eating and cooking practices as well as the imaginary and moralising potential of food in the early modern period.

This book and exhibition aim to re-contextualise and reanimate surviving examples of visual and material culture relating to food, highlighting a range of diverse types of objects and images from the Fitzwilliam Museum and other local collections, in an attempt to answer new kinds of historical questions as well as to address urgent contemporary concerns as consumers in a globalised world, thereby linking the past with our present.

fig. 0.1 | Porta dedicata alla Vigilanza, from Francesco Orilia, Il zodiaco, over, idea di perfettione di prencipi (Naples, 1630), fol. 456 | cat. 55

meanings of food and its imaginary possibilities in the lives of early modern Europeans.

While food today is familiar and vital to all of us – as growers, preparers, and consumers, its ubiquity in our lives belies the complexity of our relationship and that of past generations with food and eating. Food defines us as individuals and communities – we are what we eat, and also what we don’t eat. When we eat, where we eat, why we eat, how we eat and with whom we eat are crucial social, religious, and – increasingly – political identifiers. However, reducing the history of food in early modern Europe to ‘who ate what when’ does not reflect the diversity and creativity of approaches in current historical research, and which are embedded in this book and the associated exhibition, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe 1500–1800.8 This new interdisciplinary history of food has become a rich and important field through which topics such as religion, class, race, gender, globalisation, and the ‘everyday’ can be explored through food and integrated into wider historical perspectives.9

Food is everywhere in current cultural and political debates.

The threat of the devastation of climate change has brought an increasing focus on global food security. Many people are turning to vegetarianism and veganism as a political choice as much as a dietary one, as we rethink our relationship with animals and their treatment in an industrialised world. Food choices are not only determined by political concerns about what we eat but also compounded by the moral anxieties which resonate around diet, self-image, over-consumption, and our bodies. As Feast & Fast demonstrates, many of these contemporary concerns about our relationship with food are not new. ‘Eating right’ in early modern Europe was as treacherous and complex as making food choices now.12 Food was as central to those living in the early modern period as it is for us today. It structured the calendar and religious year and created and divided identities. Food was – and still is – a powerful source of inspiration for artists who delighted in depicting the rich colour of a pomegranate seed, the intricate form of an artichoke, the sheen of polished kitchen pans, the bulging girth of a glutton, and the stillness of a dead hare. As the image of the Neapolitan cuccagna shows so clearly, the extremes of feasting and fasting were materially and visually present in the minds of our early modern predecessors, reminding us that food was ‘eaten’, imagined, and remembered with all of the senses. VJA/MTC

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fig. 0.2 | Antonio Joli, Napoli, Largo di palazzo con la cuccagna, 1756–9 | Palace House, Beaulieu

1. For a description of the arch at the Porta del Caputo, one of the central gates from the port into the city, see Orilia 1630, pp. 455–9. Although the woodcut shows two pigs, Orilia refers to boars (‘cignali’). On the cult and feast of San Giovanni, and the procession route, in Naples, see Marino 2011, pp. 203–10 and 211–20; 2. On the cuccagna for Carnival in Naples from 1617 to its abolition in 1778, see Guarino 2017, pp. 12–19. See also Guarino 2019. For images and designs of this ephemeral architecture, see Cassani 1997. These kinds of public entertainments during Carnival, some of them involving food, were not unique to Naples, for example, la festa della porchetta in Bologna; see Reed 2015; 3. Miller writes ‘This amusement was so far from proving such to us, that I believe our curiosity will never again induce us to partake of it: for my part, I was so sick in the stomach, that all eatables went exceedingly against me; and it was with difficulty that I could sit down to table at my return’ (Miller 1777, vol. 2, letter XXXVI, 9 February 1771, p. 62); 4. Cuccagne made for St John the Baptist processions after the revolt of Masaniello in 1647 included seafood to be sacked, offered by the Fishmonger’s Guild, and even macaroni (Marino 2011, Table 5.2, p. 223); 5. ‘la plebe minuta è più vetre, che capo’ (Orilia 1630, p. 455); 6. Guarino 2017, p. 19; 7. For Naples, see Marino 2011, pp. 234–44; 8. Cited in Pennell 2017, p. 193; 9. See for example, the journal Global Food History; and also Pennell 2017 and Kissane 2018, p. 6; 10. See ‘Introduction’, Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 24, no. 1 (January 2020) ; 11. See, for example, Pfeifer 2020 on the complexity of the Ottoman table and the extent to which early modern food history is dominated by a narrative, following Norbert Elias, which links the fork with civilisation; 12. For a recent discussion of ‘the way we eat now’, see Wilson 2019; see also Albala 2002.

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One Food cycles and systems The ever-present need for food dictated the rhythms of life for people in early modern Europe, and knowledge of the ways of nature was essential to produce enough food for the perpetuation of humanity. The themes of feasting and fasting refer to the consumption of excess in contrast with the intentional refusal of food or enforced starvation when crops failed or war disrupted vital supply chains. However, for the vast majority, business as usual was comprised of eating in moderation, in keeping with religious strictures and the desire to live well enough. The life cycle, the paths of the stars and planets, the changing seasons, the labours of the months, the days of the week and the hours of the day all inspired a wealth of visual culture, from illustrated calendars to allegorical depictions of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses whose various earthly realms included food and drink. Many images and objects from the early modern period demonstrate the deep connections between nature and culture that underlie food cycles and systems.

Ideas about diet and nutrition date back to antiquity, when food was understood to be like a medicine that could be used to temper the imbalances of an individual’s particular make-up. Ancient Greek medicine established descriptive systems structured around the number four, as in the four basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water. It was Galen of Pergamon, a doctor who lived in the second century CE, who brought together a number of earlier ideas in formulating a theory that held sway throughout the early modern period. Galenic medicine, as it became known, posited the existence of Four Humours or Temperaments that influenced the type of person one was. Everyone possessed a different balance of the Four Humours: blood, yellow bile (or choler), black bile, and phlegm. Blood was hot and wet and associated with spring; yellow bile was hot and

dry and associated with summer; black bile was cold and dry and associated with autumn; and phlegm was cold and wet and associated with winter. A person’s temperament could be affected by particular foods that were also divided into four types: sweet, bitter, sour, and salty.1 The set of prints

by Heemskerck and Müller depicting The Four Temperaments illustrate this theme (fig. 1.3).

There were similarly four basic organs: heart, liver, spleen, and brain; and four stages of life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Christian Evangelists, conveniently numbered four, were also integrated into the system, as were the seven then-known planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Food was therefore an essential component of the structure of the universe and was a powerful determinant of the length and quality of life. Those responsible for its preparation, whether doctors, cooks, or ordinary men and women, needed to have specialised knowledge of the natural world. There was a fine line between eating to maintain good health and eating for pleasure.

By the end of the Middle Ages, writings on food had emerged from the larger umbrella of medicinal texts and were the subject of recipe collections and eventually cookbooks directed at a general readership rather than solely medical practitioners. It is worth noting that the first recipe collection to be published, in 1475, was entitled De honesta voluptate et valetudine, usually translated as ‘On honest indulgence and good health’. It was a hybrid composed of recipes from a professional cook combined with advice for keeping healthy from a humanist at the Papal court in Rome. Translated and re-printed many times, this book enjoyed a wide readership all over Europe.2 FOOD C YCLES AND FEAST SYSTEMS & FAST 11

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 fig. 1.1 | Books of Hours, c.1500–20, possibly Tours, France, fols 3v–4r | cat. 50

Time was measured across Europe by the cyclical agricultural calendar. Even urban dwellers were aware of the specific tasks that had to be accomplished throughout the course of the year. The Labours of the Months, as they came to be called, depict these activities in ways that were, by the fifteenth century, formulaic. An exquisitely illuminated French prayer book likely made in Tours c.1500–20 (figs 1.1–1.2) opens with a calendar that lists the saints who were to be commemorated on each day of the year. Pictorial vignettes, located at the top of each parchment page, frame the text with images of the relevant labours of the months alternating with the particular signs of the zodiac that governed those months. The page illustrating the months of May and June, for example, shows a well-dressed youth riding a white horse and holding a hawk, with an embracing couple representing Gemini to the right (fig. 1.1). The month of May was often represented by the art of falconry, an upper-class pastime that would have provided enjoyment after a hard winter of tasks, as well as fresh food after the culinary privations of Lent. The month of June meanwhile is shown by the hay harvest, with a young man wearing a simple linen shift to denote the heat, followed by Cancer, under whose constellation much of the month was governed.

On the next page, July shows the wheat harvest, presided over by Leo, with August’s wheat threshing taking place under the watchful eye of Virgo, the Virgin, represented as a young, golden-haired woman holding a palm frond.

The following pages (fig. 1.2) illustrate the next four months.

September shows the vendage or grape harvest, with a man crushing by foot the ripe fruit to make wine in a large, wooden vat, with its symbol, Libra. Wine was important not only as a popular drink, but because of its sacrificial role in the Catholic Mass, where Christ was seen as the True Vine

and also the metaphorical Sacrificial Lamb whose outpoured blood would cleanse and save his followers. October shows a man beating oak trees to bring down acorns for the pigs to feast on, under the guise of Scorpio. Acorns were thought to improve the taste of the pork that these pigs would become after the slaughter, which takes place in the following frame depicting November, with Sagittarius presiding. The final frame shows a baker standing before a hot oven holding a wooden peel laden with bread, a fitting activity to denote December, when feasting would take place, and the warmth of the oven would be welcome.

The images in this manuscript, though unique, were part of a long iconographic tradition and would have been easily recognisable to an educated reader. The linking of the agricultural calendar and signs of the zodiac, allusions to a system of food production that was codified long before the advent of Christianity, with a Christian prayer book, would not have been jarring to a reader, since Nature – and its ability to provide food – was seen as part of a larger divine architecture.

It is easy to imagine a reader delighting in the colourful visions of familiar tasks such as harvesting wheat or ploughing the fields while preparing to recite the daily prayers, such as the Angelus that was said at day break, midday and sundown.

Food was deeply embedded in the visual and material culture of the overlapping cycles and systems that governed life in early modern Europe. Whether as potent metaphor or simply representing itself, the familiar qualities of food helped to domesticate the unknowable forces behind the mysteries of nature. DK

1. See Arikha 2007; 2. Platina–Milham 1998, pp. 46–61.

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fig. 1.2 | Books of Hours, c.1500–20, possibly Tours, France, fols 4v–5r | cat. 50 FOOD C YCLES AND FEAST SYSTEMS & FAST 13

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The Four Humours

fig. 1.3 | Harmen Jansz. Müller, after Maarten van Heemskerck, Phlegmatici (The Phlegmatic Temperament), 1566 | cat. 36

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For centuries a person’s health was defined as the proportional balance of four fluids, the ‘Humours’, manufactured by the body: blood, yellow bile (or choler), black bile, and phlegm. All humans were believed to be born with a predominance of one humour, which governed their temperament (or ‘complexion’) and made them, respectively, sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic. Broadly speaking, choleric people were prone to anger; melancholics to depression and phlegmatics to lethargy.

Each humour had qualitative, sensorial properties, connecting them with the four elements and the four seasons. For instance, phlegm was regarded as excessively cold and damp, which linked it to the element of water and to winter; the fluid choler, in contrast, had hot and dry qualities, and was thus related to fire and to summer.1 Physicians were often conflicted when it came to advice on how best to achieve a perfect humoral balance, since factors such as an individual’s age, social status, occupation, and gender were contributing factors.2 Obvious signs that a person was phlegmatic were their pale colour, cold clammy hands, and tendency to suffer from paralysis, catarrh, and arthritis. Diet was an important consideration since a slow digestive tract could cause blockages and internal petrification. Phlegmatic people were advised therefore to refrain from eating foods of the same humour, most obviously

fish, but also sheep, since its fodder – grass – had a direct influence on the quality of meat.3 The Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck contributed prolifically to what are now known as ‘profane allegories’ or ‘instructive series’ of prints that abounded in the second half of the sixteenth century (figs 1.3–1.4).4 Using various devices including personification of Classical gods, the signs of the zodiac and depictions of daily life, these engravings gave visual form to cosmic phenomena and abstract human qualities, including the Four Elements, Four Seasons, Five Senses, and the Four Temperaments or Humours. While his contemporaries, such as Crispijn I de Passe, often used figures in contemporary dress for their allegories (fig. 1.8), Heemskerck chose to include hovering gods and goddesses from the Classical pantheon and zodiac signs, linking to the system of the planets, which was also thought to affect a person’s disposition. The zodiac signs feature as ‘houses’ of the seven known planets, while below, the ‘children’born under the signs are engaged in representative activities.5 In Heemskerck’s print of The Phlegmatic Temperament (fig. 1.3), Luna, goddess of the moon, regarded as a moistening celestial ‘planet’, takes her rightful place above the phlegmatic people. Almost naked and with long flowing tresses and horns on her head, she is depicted holding a crescent moon, and in the company of the three ‘water’ signs – Cancer, Pisces, and Scorpio. Below,

her phlegmatic subjects fish with all manner of lines, nets and traps in all kinds of water from ponds and rivers to the open sea, whilst others hunt water fowl including swans, geese, and ducks.

The Latin inscription at the bottom was supplied by Heemskerck’s friend Hadrianus Junius. As a physician, Junius would have been well aware of the medical significance of the humours, but the inscription is simply a brief description of the composition: ‘O Moon, in your realm, the one sets his knotty nets for fish / the other snares for birds, and yet another ploughs the briny deep’.6 Interestingly, The Phlegmatic Temperament is the only one of Heemskerck’s Four Humours to include food-gathering activities.

Two years later, in 1568, Heemskerck produced another of his ‘instructive series’, The Seven Planets, with the same engraver, Harmen Jansz. Muller, which feature inscriptions that allude to the character traits of the ‘children’ born under these planets.7 The Latin verse under Luna (Moon) states, ‘Those whose mistress is the Moon pass their lives as if in water, due to their innate wateriness / working either in ships or in fishing. Many are prone to paralysis’ (fig. 1.4).8 The ‘watery’ food caught by the people in this print is similar to that in his Phlegmatic Temperament; it could be consumed by phlegmatics but only under strict conditions, ‘corrected’ with hot and dry spices, garlic, salt, and even sugar.9 EL

1. Gentilcore 2015, p. 15; 2. Albala 2002, pp. 123–4; 3. Albala 2002, p. 134; 4. Dackerman 2011, pp. 358–64; 5. Grössinger 2002, pp. 61–7; 6. ‘Luna tuo in regno, nodosa hic retia pandit / Piscibus hic volucri pedicas ille aequora sulcat’: Veldman 1980, p. 171; 7. Schuckman 1996, p. 271, nos. 1353–6; 8. ‘Qui Lunae habent geniturae dominam, ob innatam illis humiditatem vitam fere in aquis degunt / nauticam exercentes, aut piscationibus operam dantes. Paralysi obnoxij sunt’: Veldman 1980, p. 164; and Klibansky et al. 1964, p. 397; 9. Gentilcore 2015, p. 20.

fig. 1.4 | Harmen Jansz. Müller, after Maarten van Heemskerck, Luna (Moon), c.1568 Fitzwilliam Museum FOOD C YCLES AND FEAST SYSTEMS & FAST 15

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fig. 1.5 | Abraham Bosse, Gustus; Le Goust (Taste), c.1638 | cat. 39

The Five Senses

The Five Senses was one of a number of serial concepts, like the Twelve Months, the Four Seasons or the Seven Deadly Sins, which emerged during the Middle Ages and whose formulae were developed and popularised in the early modern period. Discussion of the Five Senses can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy and especially to Aristotle, who ordered them into a hierarchy. Sight and Hearing, which were designated as of most use to the soul and mind of man, were at the top whilst those associated with bodily preservation, namely Taste and Touch, were located lower down the scale. Smell existed in a median position and could belong to either upper or lower parts of the hierarchy, depending on the context.

Les Cinq Sens (The Five Senses) series by the French artist and printmaker, Abraham Bosse, etched around 1638, presents us with imaginary episodes in the lives of his contemporaries from the wealthier classes of seventeenth-

century France (fig. 1.5).1 These scenes of everyday life reflect the shift in the representation of the Five Senses from allegory to genre that had evolved during the sixteenth century.2 In Gustus or Le Goust (Taste), Bosse presents us with a range of meanings. The texts printed below the main image – one in Latin (left) and one in French (right) and believed to have been written by Bosse himself – reference opposite ends of the gustatory spectrum.3 The Latin is grandiose in its allusion to the inexorable cycle of production governed by Nature through the elements, seasons and months of the year: Whatever toils on earth, what descends from the stars Whatever sails on the sea’s waters; All of these things labour ceaselessly for me without end.

Therefore I am deservedly called the king of senses and of men.4

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fig. 1.6 | Abraham Bosse, after Claude Vignon, Title page to L’Ariane by Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin (1639) | Fitzwilliam Museum

fig. 1.7 | Philippe Mercier, Sense of Smell, 1744–7 Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

The festoons of fruit from Classical iconography, which decorate the title cartouche and the tapestry seen in the background, reference feasting and continue the theme of plenty. In contrast, the French text, recommends ‘taste without excess’ alluding to the traditional moralising framework of the senses where Taste can lead to the carnal sins of gluttony and greed.5 The French text also chimes with popular dietetic writing of the early modern period, which cautioned moderation in eating to promote health, influenced by the ancient Greek model of the Four Humours (fig. 1.3).6 Culinary developments in France in this period were characterised by a move towards refinement in both preparation and at the table. The single artichoke in the chafing dish exemplifies the so-called ‘delicate cooking’ of the early seventeenth century and the cutlery, napkins, and tablecloth, artfully folded into squares of ordered regularity, are emblems of table refinement and the spread of polite manners.7 The irony evident in the final lines of Bosse’s French text in which he refers to ‘luxurious tables’ which leave the diner ‘dying of hunger in the midst of plenty’ might be understood as a critique of such developments.8 But the modernity of Bosse’s scene belies its entrenchment within the traditional framework of the Five Senses. As one of the ‘lower’ senses, Taste was aligned with the body and closely associated with Touch.9 The acknowledged tactile character of

Taste made it doubly sensual. The image of a couple dining alone together is loaded with references to sensual love, the most obvious being the pulling with fingers of the artichoke bracts for consumption. The artichoke had exotic associations, having been brought to France from Sicily in the southern Mediterranean during the 1530s.

It was considered a curiosity and delicacy in Europe as well as a reputed aphrodisiac.10 The melon, presented by the servant and repeated in the festoon along the left border of the tapestry, had similar erotic connotations, its rounded form suggestive of sexual productiveness. A similar association is made in Crispijn I de Passe’s 1613 engraving of Terra (Earth) (fig. 1.8; where a large melon is placed on the table directly in front of the amorous couple making music together) and in Philippe Mercier’s 1744–7 Sense of Smell (fig. 1.7; in which a young girl presents ripe melons to her lover, who eagerly grasps one and holds it to his nose to inhale its delicious fragrance). The pairing of the Ottoman figure and his Western female companion in the background tapestry would seem to underline these romantic associations. In fact, the combination of the exotic with fruiting festoons as an accompaniment to love is a formula which Bosse also employed around this time in his design for the title page to Jean Desmarets’ romance, L’Ariane (fig. 1.6).11 Additional mirroring of facial features in the curling moustaches of the Ottoman and the

diner at the table invites comparison between the ‘real’ love scene and the woven one.

Bosse’s little lap dog, trimmed in the fashionable ‘lion cut’ and standing upon the title cartouche, is a nod to the long-established zoomorphic symbolism associated with the Five Senses and which, in relation to Taste, was traditionally occupied by the monkey.

The dog’s leonine appearance and its unrestrained eating, in contrast to the cautiousness of the humans at the table above, might establish a link to the lion’s symbolic association with gluttony through its perceived voraciousness.12 However, the dog’s stylisation as at once both fat and thin, luxurious furry head combined with bony hindquarters, would seem to enshrine the struggle between indulgence and restraint – the bestiality of gluttony versus the civility of the human experience – which was at the centre of the debates around the sense of taste during this period. RV 1. Paris and Tours 2004, p. 191; 2. Nordenfalk 1985a, p. 150; 3. McTighe 1998, p. 14; 4. ‘In terris quicquid sudat, quod defluit astris / Quicquid in æquoreis velificatur aquis; / Irrequieta mihi sine fine hæcuncta laborant / Jure igitur sensum Rex, hominumque vocor’: Goldstein 2007, n. 12, p. 192; 5. ‘Que le Goust sans l’Exces a d’honnestes appas! / Que Nature se plaist aux choses raisonnables! Et qu’elle monstre bien que le luxe des tables / Nous fait mourir de fain au milieu du repas!’: Nordenfalk 1985b, p. 2; 6. Cowan 2007, pp. 199–201; 7. Pinkard 2009, pp. 62 and 160; 8. Goldstein 2007, n. 12, p. 192; 9. Von Hoffman 2016, pp. 11–12; 10. Fitzpatrick 2016, p. 116; Gentilcore 2015, pp. 122–3; Evans 2014, pp. 101–2; 11. Blum 1924, p. 26, cat. 177; 12. Von Hoffman 2016, p. 51.

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fig. 1.8 | Crispijn I de Passe, after Maarten de Vos, Terra (Earth) and (opposite) Aer (Air), 1613 | cats 33–34

The Four Elements

Food appears prominently in a series of emblematic prints of The Four Elements published by Crispijn I de Passe after designs

by Maarten de Vos (fig. 1.8). Characteristics of the Four Elements – defined as Earth, Air, Fire, and Water – were codified by the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles and became the cornerstone of natural science and alchemy in the Renaissance, with refinements and elaborations by Aristotle, followed by Pliny the Elder in his encyclopaedic work, the Historia naturalis.

In Terra (Earth), an elegantly dressed couple sits at a table laden with a dessert course, including a pie studded with comfits, sugar-coated dragées (bite-sized confectionery with a hard outer shell), and a cake on a footed stand, as well as a variety of fresh fruits. An assortment of musical instruments and music books shares the spotlight with these earthly delights. The man strums a lute while looking intently into the eyes of his consort, who has put her viol down to

return his gaze. In the background, a man climbs a ladder to pick fruit from a tree and hands it to a companion to put in his sack (left) while a group of social superiors enjoy some open air revelry (right). The Latin verse that accompanies the image is taken from Lucretius, De rerum natura. It describes Mother Earth’s generosity, which is thus contrasted with sensual overindulgence – in food and drink as well as in the implied lascivious relationship between the musicmaking couple: Our fostering mother earth receives liquid drops of water, And then teeming brings forth bright corn and luxuriant trees And the race of mankind, brings forth all the generations of wild beasts, Providing food with which all nourish their bodies And lead a sweet life and beget their offspring;

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Therefore she has with reason obtained the name of mother.

Beware therefore, that which does not know the luxury of these gifts from God, For this leads to an abuse of mother Earth.1 The image for Aer (Air) also contains an allusion to food and is equally multi-sensory and highly sexually charged. A finely dressed couple dominates the composition. A bird perches on the finger of a man who is clearly a hunter as signalled by the dead songbirds strung from his belt and his bulging waist pouch no doubt filled with other slain game.

His female companion, sitting between his provocatively splayed legs, embraces him whilst fingering his doublet, perhaps with an eye to its removal. Indeed, the Dutch word for birding, vogelen, is a vulgar expression for sexual intercourse. A chameleon, symbol of Air, lounges on the woman’s sleeve.

Around the couple, birds in a variety of states animate the image. A hunting and

trapping party cavorts in the upper right, while a squadron of birds soars overhead.

Several cages holding birds sit at the feet of the pair, and a number of dead birds lie on the bench in the foreground. The Latin inscription, like the one in the image of Terra, describes the scene in poetic language alluding to the emblematic tradition, and includes a reference to the many birds as being ‘the most acceptable foods for our tables’: Behold! The wandering Breath descends into thin breezes, And air extends through the middle of the empty universe: And as no land is orphaned by its own animals, Waves were granted for living with shining fish, Earth produces animals, Air has thus clouds.

All kinds of birds, which were celebrating with melodious, heavenly songs,

They soothe lonely places (for those) with wandering grievances: Hence they come as most acceptable foods for our table.2 Similarly, food is the subject-matter of Aqua (Water), in which fish abound, both dead and alive, in the vicinity of an amorous fisherman and his lover. The only one of The Four Elements in which food does not appear at all is Ignis (Fire), as this is dedicated to alchemy.

Though modern science has taught us that the world is made of up many more than four basic elements, the organising principle pro vided by this compelling idea still engages the minds and palates of many viewers. DK

1. Lucretius–Rouse and Smith 1924, pp. 172–3. With thanks to Suzanne Reynolds for her translation of ll. 992–7.; 2. No source for this has been identified. Translation from Evertsberg 2014, p. 39, with additional contributions from Suzanne Reynolds.

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The Four Seasons

fig. 1.9 | Maarten de Vos, Spring, 1587 (top) and Summer, c.1587 (bottom) | cats 29–30

A set of drawings depicting The Four Seasons

by Maarten de Vos (figs 1.9–1.10) echoes many of the themes in the French book of hours (figs 1.1–1.2) and demonstrates another interpretation of the Labours of the Months.

Executed in pen, brown ink and ink washes, the artist’s signature with the date of 1587 appears on three of the four drawings.

Venus, goddess of love, is at the centre of Spring (fig. 1.9), holding a bouquet of flowers and gently restraining her son Cupid, who appears to be up to some mischief, whilst a pair of amorous doves canoodle on her thigh. A stately country house stands in the background, with a kitchen garden before it that would have provided herbs and vegetables. Around the figure of Venus, people are engaging in leisurely pursuits such as dancing, stag hunting and fishing.

The cow being milked suggests abundance and fertility, unmistakable markers for springtime. Signs of the zodiac governing the spring months – Aries, Taurus, and Gemini – hover overhead, but in reverse order indicating the drawing’s intended use as a model for an engraving.

Ceres, goddess of agriculture, presides over the labours for Summer (fig. 1.9). Wearing a crown of wheat, she has taken a rest from the industrious work of harvesting, sickle in hand, and reclines on a wheat sheaf around which various luscious ripe fruits and vegetables are strewn. She looks on as some labourers cut wheat while others rake the gleanings to make sure nothing goes to waste. Above her head are the zodiac signs that hold sway over the summer months – Cancer, Leo, and Virgo – again in reverse order.

In de Vos’ image of Autumn (fig. 1.10), Bacchus, god of wine, is shown adorned with a garland of grapevines and leaning on a cornucopia overflowing with ripe seasonal fruit. In his right hand, he demonstrates the proper way to hold a delicate wine tazza – from its foot rather than its stem or bowl.

A stream of wine flows from the grape-filled glass suggesting an appropriate state of inebriation. Tazze when filled must have been challenging to hold even in the most sober moments! To the right, a labourer ploughs with a pair of sturdy oxen whilst another climbs a ladder propped against a large vat in which wine is being made. Wooden wine casks litter the ground near the vat, while full

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ones are carted off. To the left, a swineherd beats the branches of an oak tree to bring acorns to the ground to delight and fill the bellies of his sounder of swine. Zodiac signs Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius hover above the scene.

Winter (fig. 1.10) is personified by Aeolus, god of the winds, who holds a bridle, symbolic of the fast horses that traditionally represented the powerful winds. At his feet, winter vegetables, gourds and edible roots are strewn. To his right, skaters glide over a frozen pond, while in the background ships, probably including cargo vessels and fishing boats, are tossed on a stormy sea by a winter tempest. On his left, animals are led to the slaughter.

In popular culture all over Catholic Europe, the agricultural calendar was linked to the custom of naming each day of the year after a particular saint. For example, if it rained on St Swithun’s Day (15 July), it would rain for the next 40 days, whereas a fine day would portend 40 days of fine weather. If it was sunny on St Vincent’s Day (22 January), the wine harvest would be particularly good the following autumn. This kind of knowledge was often couched in rhyming proverbs such as this, ‘If the sun smile on St Eulalie’s Day [12 February], It is good for apples and cider they say’; or ‘If it thunders on All Fool’s Day [1 April], ‘Twill bring good crops of corn and hay’. Many of these sayings are still invoked today despite the increased accuracy of modern weather predictions. DK

fig. 1.10 | Maarten de Vos, Autumn, 1587 (top) and Winter, 1588 (bottom) | cats 31–32 FOOD C YCLES AND FEAST SYSTEMS & FAST 21

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Arcadia

From the seventeenth century, English pictorial domestic embroidery was frequently dominated by images of royalty, characters from the Bible and the history and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome.

Almost invariably these were set against a pastoral background usually enhanced by a multitude of oversized motifs of flora and fauna. During this century of turbulent politics, these images often reflected personal or familial allegiances to Crown or Commonwealth or to a particular Christian denomination. However, with the gradual increase in female education, they some-

times subtly emphasised the power exercised by women in popular stories from the Old Testament and ancient Greek and Roman myths. This pastoral or ‘Arcadian’ embroidery (fig. 1.11) is unlike more typical figurative works in that the content is overwhelmingly dominated by an array of real and mythical beasts and birds: a boar leads a unicorn and a deer chases a rampant lion lifted from a coat-of-arms.

The Arcadian idyll was popularised in seventeenth-century Europe by such artists as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine, expressing not only a love of landscape but

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fig. 1.6 | Abraham Bosse, L’Ariane, 1638

fig. 1.7 | Philippe Mercier, Sense of Smell, 1638

also the concept of man living in harmony with nature. In this embroidery, the obvious emphasis is on the creatures of the natural world rather than scenic beauty. Although landscape hardly features, with just the suggestion of a hill crowned by an oak tree with giant acorns, there is an evident delight in flora, with a rose, cornflower, cowslips, thistle, and honeysuckle all depicted. Moreover, one essential aspect of country life is portrayed: the production of food. At the top, strawberries, peas-in-pods and bunches of grapes are shown. In the very centre, a shepherd is realistically worked with a crook

and flock of sheep, but he is also playing a pipe, hinting at the embroiderer’s probable familiarity with the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus charming the animals. Nearby, a female companion feeds her hens, kept by many as everyday sources of eggs and occasionally meat.

Both the embroidery, with its varied threads and stitches, and the composition are complex. The latter clearly alludes to the natural world and the provision of sustenance for man, and possibly even to contemporary politics with the inclusion of a heraldic lion and unicorn. CH

fig. 1.11 | Embroidery of Arcadia, England, mid-17th century | cat. 27

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Two Production and sourcing For many people today the source and methods used to produce the food they eat are increasingly important concerns. The welfare of farm animals and labourers, the use of pesticides, transportation distances, and genetically modified seeds are all factors taken into consideration when deciding what to purchase and eat, and from whom. One factor that unites these legitimate concerns is the physical distance between the industrial production of food around the globe and consumers, who in wealthy countries overwhelmingly live in cities. Agriculture is now so highly mechanised that in the UK, for instance, it employs less than 1.6% of the labour force and accounts for less than 1% of GDP. Few, unless they come from a farming background, have any direct experience of modern farming techniques. Some movements, such as Farm to Table, work to overcome this by sourcing locally produced foodstuffs, providing detailed information about the production methods, and encouraging meaningful contact between producer and consumer.

To understand the early modern world of production, we have to reverse this situation. This is not to assume that everyone was involved in farming, as this was far from the case. Many families were involved in the manufacturing and service trades. By 1700, only 45% or so of the English population worked directly in agriculture.1 It was the most advanced ‘industrial economy’ at the time, but in other countries many people also worked outside of agriculture.

Most of the people involved in non-agricultural employment lived in towns and cities, and this required commercialised farming, whereby surpluses were sold to specialist middlemen, such as ‘badgers’ and ‘brogers’, who dealt in corn and transported it into towns.2 Very large cities survived on waterborne shipments of grain from distant ports.

London, which grew in population from 200,000 in 1600 to

950,000 in 1800, relied on imports from the south coast and East Anglia,3 while Paris imported from the Île de France, and Rome and Naples from Sicily. Cities in the Netherlands could not be adequately supplied from the surrounding largely pastoral coastal land, and therefore had to rely on annual rye imports from much more rural Poland to survive.4 Urban areas meant markets and farming for profit became a regular feature of both the economy and the division of time, as weekly markets increasingly became meeting places.

By the late sixteenth century, many farms were able to produce much of what they needed as well as surplus food for selling onto townspeople and rural artisans and traders.5 As a result of the expansion of farming, most wilderness was lost.

This meant that in 1700, England had fewer forested areas than it does today. In early modern Europe, hunting for wild game was something that only a privileged elite could indulge in.6 Long before 1500, hunting was a privilege granted by the monarch to favoured subjects, as can be seen in the charter of free warren of 10 June 1291 (fig. 2.2), in which Edward I granted the nobleman Roger de Pilkington and his heirs the right to hunt – or to ‘free warren’ – on his demesne lands.

This deed is beautifully illustrated with imagery appropriate to hunting: trees, a crossbowman and various animals which were hunted at the time, including a kingfisher, boar, wild cat and various deer, although both the cow and sheep represent agriculture and the peacock an exotic import.

Poaching from private parks and land owned by the Crown became a growing problem in England from the seventeenth century, and was increasingly criminalised by Acts of Parliament, culminating in the Black Act of the early 1720s. Created in response to a series of raids by poachers known as the Blacks (from their custom of blacking their PRODUC TION AND FEAST SOURCING & FAST 25

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 fig. 2.1 | Master of the Prayer Books from around 1500, Frontispiece from Virgil, Opera: Eclogae, Georgica, Aeneis, c.1500 | cat. 51

fig. 2.2 | Charter of free warren granted to Roger de Pilkington by Edward I, June 1291 | cat. 60

faces when undertaking poaching raids), this established the death penalty for the unlawful killing or maiming of animals.7 In many ways, by the seventeenth century, hunting was a form of elite nostalgia for an imagined pre-arable ‘lost’ past of provisioning – so far past that it could draw on Classical tropes of gods like Diana the huntress and notions of Arcadia (fig. 1.11). This non-commercial emphasis on an idyllic countryside can also be seen in Francesco Bassano’s Landscape with Shepherds (fig. 2.3). Recently cleaned, this large canvas portrays a scene of prosperous country life with sleeping shepherds and a mixture of pastoral animals (cows, goats, and sheep) in a hilly setting dotted with fruit trees and with a mountain range in the far distance.8 The only mildly disturbing element is the building on fire in the distance, but it is so far removed from the shepherds and the viewer that it is hardly a cause for concern, and more a pictorial device to add interest and colour. The early dawn setting and the sleeping shepherds are characteristic of other paintings by the Bassano family, and this secular image may be meant to recall Christian subjects like the Annunciation to the Shepherds of Christ’s birth. Whatever the case, there are many naturalistically observed details that tell us much about food production, such as the young shepherd-boy who is peering into the stone trough to check the level and quality of the fresh spring water that his lamb is about the drink, and his older companion in the foreground, whose kneeling position and proximity to a pair of large wooden milk-tubs indicate that he is in the act of milking his ewe.

Putting children to work was necessary in order to supply the labour needed in a world without automation.9 The

world of commercialisation is much more part of the eighteenth-century economy as represented by the Coney Catching plaque (fig. 2.16). The subject is derived from an etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, itself taken from Francis Barlow’s Coney Catching image, which was published in Several Wayes of Hunting Hawking and Fishing, according to the English Manner (London, 1671).10 Although at first glance it seems similar to the late thirteenth-century charter of free warren, by the late sixteenth century, the term ‘warren’ had come to refer only to enclosures where rabbits (coneys) were kept and bred for fur and meat – usually on a hill where they could burrow.11 In the glazed image, we see dogs and ferrets being used to drive the rabbits into the nets, while the etching on which it is based contains a verse with a direct reference to the market: The warrener for Coneys pitches Netts, with dogs and ferrets many Couples gets, To furnish Poulterers shops which doe afford, returnes of moneys for to pay his Lord.

It is also significant that the scene is presented on Delftware, a more affordable, locally-produced imitation of imported Chinese porcelain, and as such intended for a wider market.

However, even by 1750, despite commercialisation, only a very small number of the world’s inhabitants living in the centres of cities like London, Paris or Rome would have been able to live their daily lives with little or no contact with the way in which the food they ate was produced. Even in densely populated areas, livestock would have been herded alive into cities and butchered at markets like Smithfield in London.

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fig. 2.3 | Francesco Bassano the Younger, Landscape with shepherds, c.1570–85 | cat. 53

The relatively small scale of most urban conglomerations meant that fields and gardens were easily accessible for the vast majority of Europe’s population; it has been calculated that most people in mid-eighteenth century towns would have been able to get out to a food-producing stretch of land within a twelve-minute walk or less.12 For villages and smaller regional centres, most basic food would have been sourced and bought from local farmers. Almost all vegetables would have been sourced locally, and almost all rural families grew their own in gardens. Some food capable of being preserved was shipped over longer distances. Hard cheese, such as parmesan from Italy and cheese from Cheshire and Suffolk, could be shipped, as could salted butter.13 Samuel Pepys famously buried his parmesan cheese when it was feared the Dutch would invade England in 1662.14 Meat, in the form of live cattle, was driven in herds from Scotland and the north down to London to supply its huge population; but in other metropolitan areas, such as Rome, cattle were permitted to graze in neglected areas as seen in Swanevelt’s painting of the Roman Forum, whose nickname was Campo Vaccino, or ‘cow field’ (fig. 3.1). In the south of Britain, by the late seventeenth century, most farms practised so-called convertible husbandry, which involved planting nitrogen-fixing crops on fallow land, as well as turnips, which animals could eat.15 The seasonal variations in the supply of all sorts of food stuffs – from March Ale (a strong beer brewed before the weather turned warm, but kept for drinking the following winter) to winter root vegetables and summer salads – remained crucial to people’s lives. The extra labour needed during the summer months, and especially in October when

the grain was harvested, affected the way that work was organised.16 The quite exceptional hand-painted frontispiece in the Holkham Hall manuscript copy of Virgil’s Georgics – a poem about agriculture over the course of a year – illustrates many of its themes (fig. 2.1). It is a scene from winter, probably late winter, with ploughing, harrowing and seeding taking place as well as pollarding and planting of new trees or a hedge. The livestock (comprising horses, cows, and sheep) is carefully segregated into separate pens, diligently fashioned from woven willow branches. One of the most interesting features is the representation of the bees: a man and woman near the farmhouse are shown ‘tanging’ or beating drums, a time-honoured way of getting swarming bees to return to their hives. While the bees are clearly part of the farmyard scene appearing within its frame, their unnatural scale (which makes them almost life-size), naturalism and placement on the page make them appear real, as if they had just landed on the page. Their prominence may be due, in part, to their importance in the text: in Virgil’s Georgics a whole book is devoted to beekeeping; the hives are described as homes where the bees survive over the winter.17 Perhaps the bees are also intended as a foretaste of spring; certainly, the trees in the far distance are turning green.

There was clearly a demand for practical farming manuals given the large numbers that were printed in the early modern period for both men and women, demonstrating the importance of labour for both sexes. Most of these early ‘how to’ guides took some inspiration from another classical source: Xenophon’s treatise on the gendered division of household management, Oeconomicus, from which we derive our term ‘economics’.18 One such guide was The PRODUC TION AND FEAST SOURCING & FAST 27

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 fig. 2.4 | Frontispiece from Richard Bradley, The Country Housewife, 1736 | cat. 52

Country Housewife, first published in 1732 by Richard Bradley, the first Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge.

In common with other books aimed specifically at a female readership, this highly popular manual includes many recipes for cooking foods and home medicinal remedies, as well as advice ‘in the management of a house, and the delights and profits of a farm’, and ‘instructions’ on the housewife’s responsibilities including ‘managing the Brew-House, and Malt Liquors in the Cellar; the making of Wines of all sorts’ as well as ‘Directions for the Dairy, in the Improvement of Butter and Cheese upon the worst of Soils; the feeding and making of Brawn; the ordering of Fish, Fowl, Herbs, Roots, and all other useful Branches belonging to a Country Seat, in the most elegant manner for the Table’. It also contains ‘Practical Observations concerning Distilling; with the best Method of making Ketchup, and many other curious and durable Sauces’.19 The frontispiece of Bradley’s book (fig. 2.4) recalls the illumination in the Holkham Georgics (fig. 2.1), with a radically foreshortened view of an estate with a manor house and formal gardens in the far distance, in front of which is a meandering river with a water wheel, boat, punt and a fisherman. But rather than showing the typical activities associated with winter, it shows those of autumn. The middle ground is dominated by scenes of harvesting: grapes are being gathered from the vineyard and pressed while ripe corn is being cut with sickles and the sheaves bundled and tied into stooks. Longhorn cows are being milked, and a resting harvester, with a scythe over his shoulder, is smoking a pipe. In the foreground, fresh milk is brought by an old man struggling with milk pails hanging from a ‘milkmaid’s yoke’ to the spotless dairy, where industrious dairy maids are preparing cheese. In the very foreground a woman is fetching water from a well, while another resting harvester quenches his thirst from a bottle probably containing small ale or beer, and smokes. He rests on a pile of flails (used for threshing grain) and a harrow (used to break up clumps of soil), stockpiled for use in the winter season to follow.

Wine growing in southern England was practised until the late Middle Ages, when the temperature dropped and it no longer became viable.20 However, wine was imported in large quantities for a middle-class clientele from grapegrowing regions, as it could be shipped over long distances, although sweeter or fortified wine tended to travel best. In cooler weather, some citrus fruits could also be transported from Portugal to northern Europe and, as sea transport

increased through the straits of Gibraltar in the late sixteenth century, many hundreds of tons of dried currants and prunes, as well as North African sugar, began to be exported every year.21 Dried spices from South East Asia were a staple import into Europe throughout the period, although their sourcing was changed massively by Portuguese and Dutch expansion in the Moluccas.22 The European encounter with the American continents famously transformed food cultures around the globe with native plants such as tomatoes, potatoes, maize, chilli peppers and cassava becoming popular foodstuffs.23 Potatoes undoubtedly had the greatest effect on European diets, although not until the eighteenth century when they were commonly adopted by the poor as a garden vegetable which could provide the abundant carbohydrates needed to do hard work.24 They also became incorporated into popular folk beliefs, as witnessed by their use as charms with apotropaic powers by the nineteenth century.25 Potatoes were eaten as substitutes for grains, which became increasingly expensive as populations grew after 1750, causing popular protests against the rise in the price of these basic foodstuffs (figs 7.34–7.35).

Other exotic foodstuffs such as chocolate, tobacco (which was thought of by Europeans as akin to a food), and cane sugar became increasingly important but, unlike the tropical pineapple which was eventually grown in the temperate climes of Europe, these were never competitively cultivated on the continent.26 Nonetheless, however culturally and socially important old ‘exotic’ imports like pepper remained, and new ones became, the core of people’s experience remained based on animals and plants that would have been grown and raised close by. JCM 1. https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/occupations/overview/findings/ (accessed 11.7.19); 2. Gras 1915; 3. Fisher 1935; 4. De Vries and van der Woude 1997, pp. 415–19; 5. Muldrew 1998, pp. 51–9; 6. Manning 1993; Sharpe 1999, pp. 179–88; 7. Thompson 1975; 8. This painting was expertly cleaned for Feast & Fast by Molly Hughes-Hallett, supervised

by Alice Tavares da Silva, at the Hamilton Kerr Institute; 9. Muldrew 2011, pp. 233–46; 10. For the Hollar etching: https://hollar.library.utoronto.ca/islandora/object/hollar%3AHollar_k_1947 (accessed 11.7.19); 11. Bailey 1988; 12. This is based on how long it takes to walk a kilometre. In London, c.1750, it probably would have taken about 30 minutes to get from St. Pauls to the outskirts of the city, by my own calculation; 13. Willan 1967, pp. 84–7; 14. Pepys–Latham and Mathews 1995, vol. 7, p. 274; 15. Kerridge 1967, pp. 181–221; 295–310; 16. Muldrew 2011, pp. 267–71; 293–4; 17. For a discussion of the influence of the Georgics in early modern England, see McRae 1996, pp. 198–228; 18. For the first English translation, see Hevert 1532; 19. On these books, see DiMeo and Pennell 2013. Ketchup was originally a Cantonese word for a fish sauce which English traders encountered in Malaysia, but which was developed in England into something made with mushrooms, although often eaten with anchovies (Collingham 2006, pp. 148–9); 20. Phillips 2000, p. 85; 21. Williams 1988, p.176; Millard 1956, table 3; 22. Freedman 2008, pp. 193–226; 23. Crosby 2003, ch. 5; 24. For a recent history of the potato, see Earle 2019; 25. Potato charms were carried in each pocket to ward against ailments like gout; see the two charms collected in Winchester in 1911: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Z 45048 A–B; 26. Extraction of edible sugar from the native sugar beet was developed by French scientists and farmers during England’s blockade of the continent during the Napoleonic wars: Spary 2014, pp. 287–90, 298–308.

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Grains

fig. 2.5 | Jan Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with mill and carts, c.1611 | cat. 41

fig. 2.6 | Jug, Staffordshire, 1812 | cat. 44 30 FEAST & FAST

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Grains including, wheat, rye, oats, barley and (to a much smaller extent) spelt and rice formed the bedrock of the early modern European diet in the form of bread, beer and all kinds of porridge. The energy supplied by grain in these forms was needed by men, women and children to do the hard physical labour required by most tasks. The type of grain and the manner of its preparation differed across Europe according to the local climate. Oats predominated in the far north, for example in Scotland, where they were rolled and eaten as oatmeal. In other northern but warmer and less wet areas such as Poland and northern Germany, rye was grown to be baked into bread. Wheat was grown in most of central and southern Europe and was the most expensive grain. It was milled to produce flour which, depending on how finely it was milled, would retain more or less of the fibrous husk, with the most refined – and therefore the most expensive – flour being eaten by the wealthy. Flour was baked into bread or made into noodles or pastry for pies (pasta is Italian for ‘paste’ or ‘pastry’).

However, wheat could also be consumed in the form of a porridge with milk, in English called ‘furmity’, with ‘gruel’ being a more liquid version intended for those with weaker stomachs, namely children, the elderly and the sick, as a recipe published by Thomas Tryon suggests.1 The great demand for milled flour explains the ubiquitous presence of mills across the landscape of early modern Europe. These iconic buildings were frequently portrayed by artists, with a characteristic example being the windmill that dominates Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with mill and carts (fig. 2.5), which shows the importance of the kinetic energy that was required to grind the large quantities of wheat and rye into flour for bread and pasta. Although windmills are picturesque and thus popular with landscape painters, most European mills were, in fact, water mills, as seen in the background of the frontispiece to Richard Bradley’s Country Housewife (fig. 2.4), of which there were tens of thousands.2 Millers were also often middlemen who bought grain and sold flour and were often accused of profit-seeking in years of poor harvests. For this reason, grain markets and milling were regulated in different ways by governments across Europe, both to keep the price of processing to a minimum and to try to mitigate the effect of high prices on the poor in years when adverse weather produced poor harvests.

Barley is an especially resilient grain which can grow in many climates. In early modern Europe, most was grown to be malted and

brewed into beer, although barley bread existed and it was a popular grain for pottage, a nourishing stew of grains and vegetables, which appears frequently in workhouse accounts for the poor. The process of malting barley involves heating the kernels to create the sugar used for germination and then stopping the process. This meant that sweet beer was the most common form of early modern sweetener before slave-produced sugar started to be imported from the Caribbean. Many oatmeal recipes, for instance, include beer. However, barley was less common in Mediterranean Europe, as vineyards could produce wine to drink and also to use as a sweetener.

Although beer was certainly consumed in great quantities as a leisure activity in alehouses, most beer was drunk as a source of quick liquid energy for rehydrating and re-energising during bouts of hard physical and manual work, and nowhere more so than during the long arduous days of the annual harvest (fig. 5.60). The inscription on the 1724 Devon harvest jug make this clear: ‘Now I am come for to supply your workmen when in harvist dry when they do labour hard and sweat good drink is better far than meat’ (fig. 2.7).3 The Staffordshire earthenware jug, given to Hannah Robinson on the occasion of her marriage to Gabriel Store in 1812, contains verses to celebrate Plough Monday, the first Monday following the Twelfth Day of Christmas when farm labourers traditionally returned to work and started ploughing (fig.

2.6). The words are drawn from a traditional English song based on fifteenth-century ballads: Let the wealthy and great Roll in splendour and state I envy them not I declare it I eat my own lamb My own chickens and ham I shear my own fleece and I ware it I have lawns I have bowers I have fruits I have flowers the lark is my morning alarmer So jolly boys now Heres God speed the plough Long life and success to the farmer It is a pouring jug rather than a drinking jug and it contains a number of agrarian images mostly concerned with the growing of grain, from the preparation of the soil through to ploughing. Although the song celebrates what appears to be self-sufficiency, it is really a celebration of work against idle rentiers with another inscription in capital letters proclaiming: ‘INDUSTRY PRODUCETH WEALTH’. JCM

fig. 2.7 Harvest jug, North Devon, 1724 | cat. 45

1. Tryon 1691, p. 148; 2. It has been estimated that by the fourteenth century there were over 12,000 mills in England of which less than a quarter were windmills: Langdon 2004, pp. 11–19; 3. Muldrew 2011, pp. 37; 57–65; 119–21.

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fig. 2.8 | Tile panel depicting buckwheat milling, Netherlands, 1780 | cat. 42 32 FEAST & FAST

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Buckwheat milling

Composed of twenty earthenware tin-glazed tiles, this colourful and eye-catching ceramic picture represents a state-of-the-art Dutch buckwheat mill in 1780 (fig. 2.8).1 This is not a romanticised rendition of rural industry but rather a highly accurate record of a particular milling process, and a celebration of Dutch modernity, cleanliness and industriousness.

It shows the typical layout of the interior of a rosmolen (horse-powered rotary mill) used for the milling of buckwheat. Almost every stage in this drawn-out process is represented: the grains were dried upstairs on a refractory surface (generally tiles) using the heat provided by the tall white ceramic stove shown against the left wall, fuelled by the chaff of the buck-wheat. Once dried, the chaff was separated from the grain by the rotary fanning machine (mechanical winnowing became common in Europe in the 1750s) shown to the left of the stove. It was then broken on the gritstone on a four-legged wooden structure in front of the stove. The resulting groat (the hulled grain) was sorted by degree of fineness through mechanical sieving (bolting) in the oblong wooden case attached to the front of the gritstone. The finer grits were then further sifted manually (as the man sitting on the chair is doing) and ground into flour on the second millstone on the far right and directly packed in jute sacks (by the man in white smoking a pipe) for commercial distribution.

These sacks are marked ‘S.V. LEYDEN’, probably indicating that the mill owner was called ‘S. van Leyden’ or that his initials were ‘S.V.’ and that his mill was based in Leiden, the second largest city in the Dutch Republic after Amsterdam. The existence of a buckwheat mill in Leiden is documented in the mid-eighteenth century and, as this mill seems to have been demolished in 1780 – the year recorded so prominently at the bottom of the tile picture – it is possible that this large tile picture was commissioned as a commemorative plaque.2 Commemoration or not, the pride in mechanisation, efficiency and the resulting contribution to the common wealth is evident in the lengthy didactic and self-congratulatory title at the bottom, which (in translation) says: ‘The groat trade is shown here: the buckwheat is first brought in, dried

and crushed. It is then sifted, weighed, ground, and sorted in the bolter. Finally, it is packed in sacks which are taken to the market and traded for silver. This is how goods and industry are paid for’.3 This same process of milling is described and illustrated in a contemporary entry on milling in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.4 But, if these tiles were a popular equivalent to the Encyclopédie, and if they were meant to be a visual rhetoric of modernity, why was buckwheat – the cereal of the poor – chosen here, and not wheat? First, buckwheat accounted for a fifth of all grain consumed in Holland in the 1790s, so it was in no way a marginal industry at the time.5 That said, this choice is probably better understood in the context of the political economy of the late eighteenth century. From the 1740s, the Low Countries experienced a period of episodic popular unrest and, in the last third of the century, of relative industrial decline. Both were partly attributed to the existence of a heavy indirect taxation on flour (impost op ‘t gemaal).6 As buckwheat was the least taxed of all the cereals, it is possible that the tiles should be interpreted as a popular discourse about taxation and industry in the 1780s. This and other ceramic pictures of mills (both exteriors and interiors) were not made for rich merchants or an urban elite, but more likely for the millers themselves or their guild as a visual defence of the moral economy of their industry. This is also what the didactic title, the presence of luxury products (such as the tobacco being smoked and the blue-glazed Delft tiles decorating the back wall) and the insistence on cleanliness (symbolised by the broom at the forefront, the tiled floor area, the opened windows for ventilation) suggest. ADL

1. Rackham 1935, vol. I, p. 353, cat. 2847; 2. https:// www.hollebeek.nl/leiden/ldnmolen.html (accessed 3.7.2019); 3. The original Dutch inscription reads: ‘Boekweyt draagen, droogen, breeken/al wat Agter word gedaan,/ word hier duydelik vergeleeken/toond het Grutters Ambagt aan./ziften, wayen, maalen, buylen,/Zakkenbinden, weggehaald/om er Zilver voor te ruylen,/dus word Waar en Vlyt betaald’; 4. For Louis-Jacques Goussier’s entry on ‘Moulin’, see Diderot 1765, vol. 10, pp. 792–5; 5. de Vries 2019, p. 311; 6. Most famously by the Scottish economic and moral philosopher Adam Smith: Smith 1776, pp. 875–6.

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The farmyard and country garden

fig. 2.9 | David Teniers the Younger, Interior, with an old woman peeling apples, c.1640–60 | cat. 150

Sara Pennell has successfully argued that the modern kitchen emerges as a distinct space between 1600 and 1850 in England.1 However, this recently-conserved painting of a midseventeenth-century Dutch ‘interior’ by David Teniers the Younger (fig. 2.9) suggests the fluidity and multi-functionality of spaces linked to kitchen work, but not necessarily located within the physical confines of the kitchen.2 If Teniers’ Interior depicts an urban context, then it is likely to be what Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson have described as the ‘backside’ of the house, a series of detached buildings, divided by yards, behind the house.3 A man opens a door, presumably from inside the living quarters of the house, onto a scene of busy, food-related activity in which an elderly

woman peels apples ready for cooking, preserving or distilling, and an elderly man carries in a large wooden tub, which might be used in this connection. A pig peeks out of his poke, and some hens and a cock peck and scratch on the earth floor. An owl, tethered to a perch, oversees the scene from above and, like the old woman directly below, engages the viewer with a beady eye.

This painting is a reminder of these kinds of liminal spaces – neither strictly kitchen nor farmyard – where the dirtier or messier work of food and remedy preparation, such as making cheese or distilling cordials and flavoured waters, was done and where animals were kept. It is also a reminder of the proximity of farm animals to humans living not only in the countryside but also in

the city where many animals were raised and butchered within the city walls, until concerns about hygiene and health in the nineteenth century relegated the keeping and killing of animals to the periphery.4 Animals, such as those portrayed by Teniers, were essential actors within a household economy, providing important nutritional benefits on a daily basis in the form of eggs and milk and the essential repurposing of food scraps and food preparation by-products, such as whey, to feed the ‘family pig’.5 Bees were sometimes kept by early modern households, not only for honey but also for beeswax, and they were lauded as exemplary workers whose industriousness was to be emulated, as seen in this woollen sampler diligently worked in polychrome silks by

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fig. 2.10 | Honey pot, Staffordshire, c.1670–1700 | cat. 43

Mary Brooks in 1792 (fig. 2.11). Below a hive and a swarm of bees are stitched the words from a song ‘against idleness and mischief’ from what became known as Divine and Moral Songs for Children by Isaac Watts, first published in 1720 and republished through to the twentieth century: How doth the little busy bee improve each Shining hour, And gather honey all the day, From every open flower: How skilfully she builds her cell.

How neat she spreads the wax; And labours hard to store it well, With the Sweet food she makes.

In works of labour or of skill I would be busy too; For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.

In books or work, or healthful play, Let my first years be past, That I may give every day, Some good account at last.6 ‘How-to’ manuals addressed directly to housewives, such as Tryon’s The good housewife made a doctor of 1692 and Bradley’s The Country Housewife of 1736 , provided advice, recipes, and remedies for rural and urban households alike. Honey often appears as a key ingredient in the culinary and medicinal repertoire of this period. In Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplish’d lady’s delight, in preserving, physick, beautifying, cookery, and gardening of 1675, there are recipes, using honey, for mead and gingerbread, and cures for jaundice, worms (in children) and piles.7 However, the details of the production and consumption of honey in this period are less evident in contemporary accounts and in the

surviving material culture.8 The purchase of honey is rarely mentioned, for example, in the household accounts of the two Willoughby estates between 1520 and 1604, suggesting that the family might have had its own beehives.9 Beekeeping manuals were published in English from the end of the sixteenth century, and William Lawson included a chapter on the ‘Husbandry of Bees, published with secrets very necessary for every House-wife’ in The Country House-Wifes Garden of 1631.10 Early modern ceramic honey pots such as this late-seventeenth-century example from Staffordshire with three hounds chasing a hare (fig. 2.10) are rare survivals because they appealed to collectors, such as Dr J.W.L. Glaisher, in the early twentieth century.11 Even fewer are those with their original ceramic lids, which must have been used to keep both dust and insects out.12 While contemporaries like Tryon noted the increasing taste for sugar in England, the continued use of honey as a sweetener is less clear.13 William Lawson gives us a clue as to why so few ceramic honeypots have survived, when he explained his preference for wooden ones:

1. Pennell 2016; 2. This painting was expertly cleaned for Feast & Fast by Ellen Nigro, supervised by Christine Kimbriel, at the Hamilton Kerr Institute; 3. Hamling and Richardson 2017, pp. 71–72; 4. Almeroth-Williams 2019; 5. On the mythology of the ‘family pig’ which was more likely to have been found in urban environments in France, see Hémardinquer 1979; 6. Watts 1761, XX, p. 29; 7. Woolley 1675, pp. 55, 100, 131, 135, and 136; 8. My thanks to Matthew Phillpott and Catherine Richardson for sharing what they know about bees, beekeeping, and honey pots in early modern England; 9. Dawson 2009, p. 160; 10. Lawson 1631, pp. 98–102; 11. Calaresu 2015; 12. For examples of honey pots with lids in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection, see C.230 & A-1928 and C.282 & A-1928; 13. Tryon 1692, p. 137; 14. Lawson 1631, pp. 106–7.

Usuall vessels are of clay, but after wood be satiated with honey (for it will leake at first: for honey is marvellously searching, the thicke, and therefore vertuous.) I use it rather because it will not breake so soone, with fals, frosts, or otherwise, and greater vessels of clay will hardly last.14 Whether in the countryside or the city, households provided for themselves, and the farmyard and country garden remained important sites of food production as well as inspiration for artists. MTC

fig. 2.11 | Mary Brooks, Sampler, 1792 Fitzwilliam Museum PRODUC TION AND FEAST SOURCING & FAST 35

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Feast and Fast explores food-related objects, images, and texts from the past in innovative ways and encourages us to rethink our evolving relationship with food.

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