A couple of random book notes:
The Banquet:Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe was a book I plucked from the “New Arrivals” shelf. Of course. I gave it a quick read last week, and enjoyed it on a variety of different levels. First, it’s interesting and thought-provoking to consider what people in the past ate and enjoyed. A pie made of veal eyes? An emphasis in the books was to look at the food and rituals associated with banqueting across cultures, with special attention paid to Italy, France and England. The case the author makes is that the late Renaissance was a transition period in cooking, from the heavily spiced, essentially mashed-together cuisine of the Medieval period and the more “refined” and nationally defined cuisines of the Early Modern period – of great interest is watching those national cuisines gradually take shape. Due notice is given to those who criticized the excesses of banqueting, who were not only religious figures and moralists, but physicians as well. Much of the medical critique was related, not just to issues of weight and such, but to the consequences of imbalance for the humours.
Keeping with the food theme (and I made a great lentil soup yesterday, btw – I liked it, anyway. So did Katie, surprisingly.), I skimmed through many of the pieces in Best Food Writing of 2007 , some of which were sharp, most of which were not. The most interesting and (in the context of the subject matter) most important was a piece on St. Francis’ Table – an apostolate of Capuchins in Toronto, which is something more than a food kitchen – it is a restaurant (patrons are asked to pay a dollar) serving the poor of the city.
Hmmm…a dollar a head. Not bad. Or maybe those guys could just save their pennies for 275 days and grab the prix fixe at Per Se. Whaddya think?
The Banquet continues…