Power and Consumption: A Study of French and English Cuisine from 1300 to 1500

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; the chef, the director; the dining hall, the stage;

the guests, the audience; and the servants, the ushers. As food historian

Barbara Wheaton explains, entremets were amalgams of song, theater,

mechanics, and carpentry, combined to convey an allegorical fantasy or

even a political message (Wheaton 1983: 8). The stories these not very

subtle subtleties told were analogous to the plot of a one act play. The

play commences upon its presentation, and the moving edibles or the action

around the stationary edibles enact the plot. These displays also provided

an opportunity for a host to dine conspicuously thus demonstrating to his

guests the marvels that wealth can buy. A medieval affinity for allegory

can be seen in many art-forms including the plots of urban public

spectacles, the making of illuminated bestiary manuscripts, which were

second in readership to the Bible (Mermier 1989: 70), and in the stories

told on the stained glass windows of various cathedrals. Aside from

subtleties, power displays can be seen in contemporary architecture, the

proliferation heraldic emblems that saturated any free space from church

facades and coffins to goblets and knives at the dinner table, clothing

and in public spectacles. By examining these art-forms, it will become

apparent why subtleties existed; they are mere extensions