Kitchens, Cooking, and Eating in Medieval Italy

(Hardback)

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The modern twenty-first century kitchen has an array of time saving equipment for preparing a meal: a state of the art stove and refrigerator, a microwave oven, a food processor, a blender and a variety of topnotch pots, pans and utensils. We take so much for granted as we prepare the modern meal not just in terms of equipment, but also the ingredients, without needing to worry about availability or seasonality. We cook with gas or electricity at the turn of the switch we have instant heat. But it wasnt always so. Just step back a few centuries to say the 1300s and wed find quite a different kitchen, if there was one at all. We might only have a fireplace in the main living space of a small cottage. If we were lucky enough to have a kitchen, the majority of the cooking would be done over an open hearth, wed build a fire of wood or coal and move a cauldron over the fire to prepare a stew or soup. A drink might be heated or kept warm in a long-handled saucepan, set on its own trivet beside the fire. Food could be fried in a pan, grilled on a gridiron, or turned on a spit. We might put together a small improvised oven for baking. Regulating the heat of the open flame was a demanding task. Cooking on an open hearth was an all-embracing way of life and most upscale kitchens had more than one fireplace with chimneys for ventilation. One fireplace was kept burning at a low, steady heat at all times for simmering or boiling water and the others used for grilling on a spit over glowing, radiant embers. This is quite a different situation than in our modern era unless we were out camping and cooking over an open fire. In this book Katherine McIver explores the medieval kitchen from its location and layout (like Francesco Datini of Prato two kitchens), to its equipment (the hearth, the fuels, vessels and implements) and how they were used, to who did the cooking (man or woman) and who helped. Well look at the variety of ingredients (spices, herbs, meats, fruits, vegetables), food preservation and production (salted fish, cured meats, cheese making) and look through recipes, cookbooks and gastronomic texts to complete the picture of cooking in the medieval kitchen. Along the way, she looks at illustrations like the miniatures from the Tacuinum Sanitatis (a medieval health handbook), as well as paintings and engravings, to give us an idea of the workings of a medieval kitchen including hearth cooking, the equipment used, how cheese was made, harvesting ingredients, among other things. She explores medieval cookbooks such works as Anonimo Veneziano, Libro per cuoco (fourtheenth century), Anonimo Toscano, Libro della cucina (fourteenth century), Anonimo Napoletano (end of thirteenth/early fourteenth century), Liber de coquina, Anonimo Medidonale, Due libri di cucina (fourteenth century), Magninus Mediolanensis (Maino de Maineri), Opusculum de saporibus (fourteenth century), Johannes Bockenheim, Il registro di cucina (fifteenth century), Maestro Martinos Il Libro de arte coquinaria (fifteenth century) and Bartolomeo Sacchi, called Platinas On Right Pleasure and Good Health (1470). This is the story of the medieval kitchen and its operation from the thirteenth-century until the late fifteenth-century.

Reviews

Katherine A. McIvers Kitchens, Cooking, and Eating in Medieval Italyoffers a multifaceted view of food preparation, consumption and organizationin Medieval Italy. It is well-written and well-researched. It is a delightful prequel to her earlier work, Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy. -- Andrew F. Smith, culinary historian
Combining a novelists eye for evocative detail with an historians close study of primary sources, many of which are unavailable in English translation, Katherine McIver transports us to Italys late medieval kitchens and dining spaces. From the material culture needed for a meal, through the foodstuffs and culinary techniques employed, to the persons involvedwhether as diners, supervisors, cooks, or scullery workersthe bustle, arduous labor, and often elegant results are vividly illuminated in this meticulous portrait of gastronomic life. -- Cathy Kaufman, president, Culinary Historians of New York; adjunct professor of Food Studies, The New School University
This remarkable book transports the reader's imagination back to the smells, tastes, and sounds of medieval kitchens. Focusing on the practical, technical needs of a late medieval cook, McIver reconstructs the fascinating world of practices, ingredients, and techniques used by cooks in a wide range of medieval kitchens. The book offers an especially valuable and detailed study of the kitchens and food ways of the Datini merchant family in Prato in the later fourteenth century. -- Alison A. Smith, Professor of History, Wagner College

Author Bio

Katherine McIver is a professor emerita of art history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520-1580: Negotiating Power (winner of a Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Award), the editor and contributor of Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy: Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage (2012), and has also written about dining in Gastronomica and New Perspectives on the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior. She is the author of Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy (Rowman, 2014).