A feast for the senses

Co-curator Dr Victoria Avery, Keeper of the Applied Arts Department at the Fitz, explains: “We’re aiming for visceral reactions: ‘Oh, how delicious, I’m actually salivating’ or ‘No way! That’s a terrible way to trap a crane!’ Some exhibits are very beautiful, others profoundly disquieting.”

In many ways, this is what the early modern artists had always intended. They regularly infused their still life subjects with social, moral and religious symbolism from the fidelity of rosemary to the fertility of pomegranates, the masculine carnality of sausages and the stupidity of woodcocks.

At the same time, these works of art offer an invaluable snapshot of food production, marketing, preparation and consumption. One of the stars of the show is a gigantic studio copy after Frans Snyders’ The fowl market (after 1621).

The painting depicts a Flemish market stall enveloped by the carcasses of deer, wild boar and hares, as well as a swan, pheasant, partridge, peacock, kingfisher, bittern, snipe and an array of other game and songbirds.

The curators have gone to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate that images like this were firmly rooted in gastronomic reality.

“Some visitors might assume that there’s artistic license at play here, that surely no one actually ate peacock,” Avery says. “So we’re showing these scenes with a smorgasbord of other sources and objects to show that they really did.”

These items include rare account books, bills, recipes, prints and utensils, but also three astonishingly realistic recreations of an English Renaissance sugar banquet; a Baroque feasting table; and a late eighteenth-century confectioner’s shop window. The last of these accompanies a bittersweet section on sugar, arguably the most influential food item in the entire exhibition.

Cultural historian and co-curator, Dr Melissa Calaresu explains: “Sugar is notoriously delicious and beautiful, when it’s used decoratively, so we wanted to explore that. But then visitors have to confront sugar’s dark side, from its addictive power to the misery caused by its production in this period.”

The exhibition features an engraving showing enslaved Africans working on an eighteenth-century Caribbean sugar plantation; archival material including a list of slaves owned by one wealthy English planter in Jamaica; and a small early nineteenth-century sugar bowl displaying the gilded message: East India Sugar not made by Slaves.

By purchasing the bowl and the sugar it contained, consumers publicly demonstrated their morality in a new form of ethical capitalism from which the exhibition traces the origins of today’s Fair Trade movement.

Another big ‘take-away’ from the exhibition is that veganism and vegetarianism have such a long and complex history. Calaresu explains: “We’re encouraging people to reflect on the fact that many of our current concerns about our relationship with food aren’t new. The debate about veganism and vegetarianism has been bubbling away since at least the 1500s.”

Religion exercised a particularly powerful influence over eating habits in early modern Europe, and made food a source of bitter religious controversy and conflict. The practice of fasting was particularly divisive and one of Calaresu’s favourite items in the exhibition is a pipkin, a modest English earthenware cooking pot. Made in Harlow, Essex, in 1650, this inexpensive but now extremely rare object is marked with the words ‘Fast and pray’.

“Unlike feasting, very little material culture survives from fasting, so this pipkin is special because it’s so rare but also because it’s burnished on the bottom so we know it was used,” Calaresu says.

Later in the century, the Anabaptist English merchant Thomas Tryon challenged ‘that depraved Custom of eating flesh and blood’, which he argued made humans ‘worse than the worst of Beasts’. His Wisdom’s dictates of 1691 recommended dishes which could be made without ‘the Dying groans of God’s innocent and harmless Creatures’.

Tryon’s inclusion highlights an increasingly international circulation of ideas in this period. Having travelled in the ‘New World’, he praised Indian vegetarianism. Early modern Europeans were sometimes encouraged to consider what it would be like if the tables were turned. In the mid-sixteenth century, Virgilius Solis the Elder created a satirical image of hares spit-roasting a hunter alive and boiling his hounds. Translated into English, the German inscription reads:

Feast & Fast examines the historical roots of much of the guilt and anxiety that people have about food today, but it also celebrates the power of food to unite people across time, place, class and faith.

Avery’s favourite exhibit is a mid-eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain statuette of a German cook. She enthuses: “You look at it and wonder what on earth is this woman doing? She’s got a board on her lap and she’s holding this weird looking thing. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an octopus but it’s the skinned hind legs and body of a hare.” It turns out that the cook is sewing small pieces of lard into the hare to prevent it drying out when cooked.

To accompany the statuette, the curators borrowed a contemporary set of larding needles and case, as well as a late sixteenth-century painting depicting the same work being done in a Dutch kitchen. Avery says: “These women are united by their labour, and when you see them together, something that initially seems obscure and mundane suddenly comes to life. Food isn’t just a big part of our lives, it’s a big part of who we are.”

Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 runs from 26 November 2019 – 26 April 2020

Watch the exhibition film which follows three groups of local people handling museum objects and talking about their own relationship with food.