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.

• 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

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 McIver cites historical documents to highlight how favored foods were prepared and served.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.