Essay About Dinner Table And Fifteenth Century France

French and English Foods, 13-1500’s
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Subtleties, Power and Consumption: A Study of French and English Cuisine
from 1300 to 1500
While it is difficult to fix precise dates to the Fall of Rome on one hand
and the beginning of the Renaissance on the other, one thing is sure:
referring to the time period as the Dark Ages ignores a rich history that
includes innovations in art, architecture, fashion, the production of
illuminated manuscripts, public spectacle, and cookery. However, some
academics still make dark connotations when writing about medieval Europe.
Historian Johan Huizingas influential book, Autumn of the Middle Ages, for
instance, persistently employs the image of decay and decrepitude when he
refers to life in fourteenth and fifteenth century France and the
Netherlands. Even England, he claims, continued to hold onto
disintegrating traditions well into the Renaissance. Many medievalists
have contested this perspective in their works, as I will attempt to do
through the examination of an often overlooked aspect of medieval feasting
in France and England between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries known
as subtleties. Elaborate edible sculptures produced in noble households,
these creations often took the shape of human or animal figures but could
also include edible castles and ships in which performers would entertain
diners. While the phenomenon of subtleties have much in common with other
art-forms of the period, there are also many ways that they differ. By
examining these similarities and differences I hope to demonstrate not
only that food studies can extend medieval art-related discourse but also
how by studying food in general, subtleties in particular, the school of
thought that believes that the late Middle Ages is more a dawning of an
age rather than the waning of one, will have another weapon in its
arsenal.
Making art out of edible material for the dinner table did not
begin or end in the Middle Ages. Petronius, a companion of the Roman
emperor Nero, reports in his book Satyricon, of being served a rabbit that
was made to look like Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology (Scully
1995: 107). In the eleventh century, an Egyptian caliph reportedly
celebrated one Islamic feast day with one hundred and fifty seven figures
and seven table-sized palaces made of sugar (Mintz 1986 88). In the early
nineteenth century, the French chef Antoine Careme became famous for his
pieces montees, confectionery creations which he modeled after ancient
Roman architecture. An indirect descendent of the subtlety can be seen
today with the wedding cake. While the creation of food sculptures has a
long history, what is important for the scope of this paper is that
between 1300 and 1500 A.D. these creations have a name and share certain
characteristics that allow them to be placed into a single category.
Referred to in contemporary English as a soteltie and in French as an
entremet, subtleties were originally intended as entertainment for diners
between courses. A simple subtlety might consist of a set piece while the
more complicated ones known as entremets mouvants included live
participants and automatons.
The subtlety is a genre of performance: the food is the actor; the
host is the producer;