Taste/Gusto/Smaakzin

  • Florentine Merchandise and Customs Document (13v), 1411 (Florence, Italy), Ink on vellum, Harry C. Cochran History of Business Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

This customs document page reveals several important food items that were significant to the palates of Florentine individuals, including wine (vino), saffron (zafferano), and sugar (zucchero). 

Wine was (and still is) a common local product in Italy with variations depending on the region, temperatures, and processes in making. The red threads of saffron were both grown in Italy as well as imported from Asia to season foods and for medicinal properties. Sugar is an exceptional item here. It was an expensive and luxurious commodity for many centuries in Europe, eventually culminating in the creation of slaved-worked sugar plantations in the Americas after the 16th century. However in 1411 Florence, sugar was likely imported from Sicily with financial backers from the nearby port city of Pisa who ran the export operations; otherwise, Venetian traders would import the delicacy from the eastern Mediterranean.¹

M.R.P.

¹Lucie Laumonier, “Treat… or Treat? How Did Medieval People Get Their Sugar Fix,” Medievalists.net, October 2020, https://www.medievalists.net/2020/10/medieval-sugar/; Mohamed Ouerfelli, “Production et commerce du sucre en Sicile au XVème siècle: la participation étrangère” in Food and History, vol. 1, no. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 103-122.

  • Still Life with Fruit and a Dead Hare, Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657), 1630s, oil on oak panel, 2013.89, Gift of Raymond and Jane Cracchiolo, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

The tantalizing detail Frans Snyders painted in this still life evokes an undeniable hunger in his audience. The ripened fruits are spilling out of a wicker vessel and bursting open onto the crimson-clothed table. In the top and bottom corners of the panel, hunted game and fowl are tressed and bleeding but still wearing their skin and feathers indicating that this tempting feast is only in the preparatory stages. The meats may later be coated in imported spices and consumed alongside foreign wines and ales. 

The expensive tastes for imported delicacies were made abundant in this period because of the expansion of trade and establishment of colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. These luxuries came at an unimaginable cost for those suffering under European colonialism.¹

J.S.

¹Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age, (New Haven Conn. ; London: Yale University Press, 2007).