Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy

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.

McIver sets her culinary history in the late-medieval period and concludes in the 1600s. The author explores the roles and duties of cook, steward, under cook, and apprentice. She takes readers through upper- and middle-class kitchens, pantries, wine cellars, and dining spaces. McIver cites historical documents to highlight how favored foods were prepared and served. . . .McIver’s research is impressive. She does a does a good job recounting culinary changes across time, such as how, in the 16th century, a festive meal’s 'sweet pastries, candied fruit, confectioneries, and sweet wines' were replaced by a cold salad course; her descriptions of wedding feasts and banquets are also remarkable, especially the one held in honor of Emperor Charles V in 1536.

• List of Illustrations1: The Renaissance Kitchen and the Experience of Dining, an introduction2: From Kitchen to Table in the Late Middle Ages3: The Renaissance Cook and his Kitchen4: Meals, Mealtimes and Menus5: From Kitchen to Table: The Art of Dining6: The Next Century in the Kitchen and at the Table, a final wordEndnotesBibliographyAbout the Author