Category Archives: Series: Italian Studies

Rice Bread in Sixteenth-Century Italy

By Lena Breda

While scholars are broadening our understanding of food in early modern Italy, one curiously absent ingredient from such pictures is rice. Rice (or oryza sativa) is hypothesized to have been brought to Europe as early as 400 BCE [1], used more as medicine than as a culinary ingredient. The European consumption and cultivation of rice, however, increased rapidly in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as eastern trade networks faltered following the Ottoman Empire’s capture of Constantinople in 1453 [2]. Aided by contemporary improvements in irrigation, sixteenth-century Italian farmers from across the peninsula took to their soils to grow this increasingly popular grain.

Although there is much to be uncovered regarding the ‘Rice Renaissance’ of the sixteenth-century, one area for further research is its cause. While there may have been the necessary land and technology for rice cultivation, such features do not explain why Italians decided to start cultivating rice as opposed to any other crop.

One possible motivation yet unexplored by historians is the contemporary lack of wheat. Wheat—specifically wheat bread—was the cornerstone of pre-modern Italian diets; its absence was detrimental for urban society. Sixteenth-century Italy suffered a series of wheat shortages as a result of inclimate weather, forcing many to find suitable alternatives. Contemporary accounts praising the abundant harvest and agricultural fortitude of rice suggest these were considered important benefits, possibly indicating why rice’s cultivation grew in this period. Rice, resistant to soil erosion and cold weather, may have proved an appealing and reliable alternative to wheat during harvest crises.

Relatedly, grain fraud petrified sixteenth-century Italians during famines. As bread prices surged, fears that bakers substituted wheat with alternatives (but charged the same price) verged on paranoia. Many sixteenth-century Italians recount how contemporaries would make hybrid loaves during famines, combining numerous grains together including beans, millet, oats—and rice. Given the simultaneous shortage of wheat and increasing cultivation of rice, is it possible bakers made rice breads that would have passed as wheat?

Reading numerous such mentions of rice bread, I asked myself: is this even feasible? Would rice bread be a presentable or edible product? Could these accounts be merely impracticable exaggerations? Therefore, I conducted an experiment to see if rice bread could be crafted, and whether it would be aesthetically pleasing, delicious, and mistakable for a pure-wheat bread.

As other contributors have noted, it is impossible to recreate a historical recipe exactly given the difference in ingredients, tools, and training. Despite these deviations, my experiment would still allow me to observe whether rice bread could be executed in practice or whether such accounts were myth.

For this experiment, I based my recipe off of Giovanni Battista Segni’s Discorso sopra la carestia e fame (1591). In this text, Segni recounts famine in his life and in history, and describes various ingredients in terms of their role during food shortages. While he does not include a classic ‘recipe’ for rice bread, Segni describes the proportions people would use to increase the size of their bread loaves without more wheat flour. Segni writes that for every 30 pounds of “grain” (presumably wheat) flour, they would add three pounds of rice flour with hot water (41).

Based on this proportion, I modified a bread recipe to substitute 10% of the wheat flour with rice flour and see if that modified the final size, taste, and appearance of the bread loaf. For comparison, I also created a 100% wheat and 100% rice flour loaf.

Control Recipe

Segni-Hybrid Loaf

Pure Rice Loaf

      ●         200 g wheat

      ●         4 g salt (2%)

      ●         7 g yeast (2.5%)

      ●         120 g water (60%)

      ●         5 g sugar (.005)

      ●         Drizzle of oil

      ●         181 g wheat flour

      ●         18 g rice flour

      ●         4 g salt

      ●         7 g yeast

      ●         120 g water

      ●         5 g sugar

      ●         Drizzle of oil

      ●         200 g rice flour

      ●         4 g salt

      ●         7 g yeast

      ●         120 g water

      ●         5 g sugar

      ●         Drizzle of oil

 

While creating the loaves, I was forced to modify the base recipes due to the nature of the ingredients. While the control and hybrid loaves followed the planned recipes, the pure rice dough needed much more water. Likely due to the lack of gluten, the pure rice mixture was oilier and crumblier, creating a mass that felt more like wet sand than supple bread dough.

After letting the loaves rest, the two wheaten ones had risen nicely (the pure wheat somewhat more than the hybrid) while the rice loaf appeared the same after forty minutes. Once baked, the rice loaf was very white but very wrinkled, and had barely grown in size. The other two loaves, however, had risen, browned, and were nearly identical.

Upon tasting, it was clear that a 100% pure rice loaf would be unable to pass as wheat bread. The flavor was very bland, but the clearest problem was the texture. Incredibly hard and crumbly, the rice loaf was nearly impossible to slice. This result corroborates some sixteenth-century authors who remark on the heaviness of rice bread. Indeed, the rice bread was substantially heavier than the others: 318 grams while the wheat loaf was 306g and the hybrid was 304g. Its greater weight was likely caused by the additional water I added to form a workable dough. On the other hand, the hybrid was a near doppelganger of the wheat loaf. In fact, both were so identical I had to be attentive to not confuse them. Their interchangeability was underscored by the fact that there was no rice flavor in the hybrid loaf.

While my experiment was unable to corroborate Segni’s assertion that a 10% rice flour loaf would be larger or heavier, it did confirm that it would be possible to substitute without detection some rice flour for wheat in grain scarcity. This experiment also demonstrates that rice substitutions could not occur in a complete absence of wheat given the inability to create a successful 100% rice loaf. While these results do not prove conclusively that famines contributed to the rise in rice cultivation during the sixteenth-century, they do suggest that rice would have been an appealing alternative to wheat during such shortages. My experiment also confirms that rice flour substitutions could occur unbeknownst to the buyer, given that the hybrid and wheat loaves were near identical. Moreover, both findings present the value of remaking as a mode of historical analysis.


[1]: For more on rice’s history before its arrival to Europe, read: Chang, Te-Tzu, “Rice,” The Cambridge World History of Food (2000), 132-149.

[2]: For more on Italy’s historical relationship and cultivation of rice, consult: Bevilacqua, Piero, Tra natura e storia: ambiente, economie, risorse in Italia (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), 39-48.

Boiling hot oil: on the assessment of temperature in late medieval processing of linseed oil

By Indra Kneepkens

Indra Kneepkens is a technical art historian, specializing in the materials and techniques of late medieval panel painting. She is currently finalizing her dissertation, which is focused on the use of processed linseed oils and paint additives in the painting practice of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

Raw linseed – the basis for linseed oil

From art technological sources, such as recipes and manuals for the preparation of paints, and from the analysis of paint samples, we know that late medieval and early modern craftsmen heated oils for use as a binding medium in paints, as well as for the preparation of varnishes. As a technical art historian, I research and reconstruct these oils and varnishes, to be able to establish the effects they have on paints. My aim is to understand how the development and use of these materials influenced the painting process and the final appearance of art works. Unfortunately, 14th-  to 17th-century art technological sources that include heat-treatment of oil typically do not give absolute temperature indications. This is no surprise, because thermometers were developed in different stages between the late 16th and early 18th century. Therefore, craftsmen had to rely on their senses for the assessment of temperature.

Cennini’s handbook has been transcribed an translated repeatedly, most recently by Lara Broecke in 2015

That controlling temperature was important to late medieval craftsmen is illustrated by a remark in the Libro dell’arte (ca. 1390), that was written by the Italian painter Cennino Cennini. In his recipe for a heat-treated oil the writer almost personifies fire, warning us that it would willingly burn down the house if it got a chance to reach into the pan.[1] And indeed, it seems likely that the temperature of oil was sometimes raised pretty high, to the point where potentially explosive gasses form. So how did pre-thermometer craftsmen determine the temperature of their oils?

Even if not in absolute terms, early modern sources do contain clues about the kind of temperatures that were considered useful in oil processing. In most cases, oils were heated over fire, in ceramic, bronze or copper vessels. As wood or peat fires can easily reach temperatures over 500°C, and the vessels were able to withstand these, it was clearly possible to reach the auto-ignition point of linseed oil (ca. 343°C). Most likely, temperature would have varied from case to case, depending on factors like fuel type and the distance between the vessel and the heating source.[2]

Sometimes sources mention a strong reduction of the oil, or they describe the texture of the end result, comparing it to fluid honey for example. In varnish recipes a string-test reoccurs, in which a finger is dipped into, and then lifted from a cooled drop of the mixture of boiled oil and resins, to see if a thread is formed.[3]My own experiments have shown that to reach a sufficient thickening of an oil or varnish, and to dissolve most resins, the materials must be heated for quite some time and at a fairly high temperature. Finally, empirical tests that remind us of everyday cooking may have been used to keep an eye on the temperature of oils. In Arte de la Pintura (1649), Pacheco describes how bread, garlic and feathers were stuck in boiling oil; if they appeared browned or scorched, the cooking process was completed.[4]

During my experiments over the past few years, it has become evident that one can make a reasonably accurate temperature assessment based on how the oil behaves during heat-treatment. A swirling movement for example, was noticed in oils from a temperature of ca. 90°C, while repugnant fumes typically started to develop around 200°C.

Figure 1. Foam developing on oil heated in a ceramic vessel

I also realized that the development of foam, which is commonly mentioned in recipes, may have been a clear indication of temperature. But it is also closely related to the type of cooking vessel that was used. I did not see any foam until I exchanged my glass laboratory beakers for a glazed ceramic pot. Foam appeared when the oil reached a temperature of 100°C. It must have been caused by water evaporating from the clay body, as I had rinsed the vessel before use. Bubbles also formed when garlic and bread were boiled in oil, from ca. 61 and 80°C respectively, with a high point again around 100°C. Although the garlic started to darken earlier, both bread and garlic clearly browned around 180°C, and completely blackened between 230 and 240°C.

In another experiment thirteen feathers, of different size and from various birds, were dipped in hot linseed oil until they started to curl. Surprisingly, all feathers curled within a range of 27°C, between 237 and 264°C. These experiments not only support the relative accuracy of these empirical methods, but also indicates that temperatures of ca. 100 and 200-250°C were meaningful to early practitioners.

Figure 2. Raw linseed oil (far left) heated at 150 (1-4 hours, jars 2-5 from the left), 200 (8 hours, larger jar) and 300 degrees C (1-4 hours, jars 7-10 from the left).

In more systematic tests, linseed oil was heated to 150 and 300°C, for one, two, three, and four hours. Interestingly, the color and thickness of the oils that were heated at 150°C appeared more or less unaltered after the experiment. In tests where these oils were mixed into paints, they behaved very similar to raw linseed oil. At 300°C the oils thickened and darkened considerably. They affected paints in a very significant way, causing them to level, and making it possible to create smooth glossy films without any visible imprint of the brush. Paints with these oils were also less prone to yellowing. An oil that was heated at 200°C for eight hours however, still made paints level perfectly, but it also caused extreme yellowing.

So knowing how to assess temperature and balancing it over time must have been crucial skills for those who prepared heat-treated oils and varnishes. Experiments have shown that knowledgeable individuals would have been able to make a fairly accurate assessment of temperature, using their senses. They could note changes in the appearance and behavior of oil and indicator materials, and manually test its viscosity. Although there are several indications that temperatures of 200°C and higher were preferred, it makes sense that craftspeople would adapt the temperature to the materials at hand and the desired end result. The lack of unambiguous temperature indications in oil processing recipes reflects this adaptive use of temperature and a reliance on the senses that was expected of craftspeople before the invention of thermometers.

[1]Broecke, Lara. Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’ Arte: A new English translation and commentary with Italian transcription.London: Archetype, 2015, 127, chapter 91.

[2]Aldeias, Vera, Harold L. Dibble, Dennis Sandgathe , Paul Goldberg, and Shannon J.P. McPherron . “ How heat alters underlying deposits and implications for archaeological fire features: A controlled experiment” Journal of Archaeological Science67 (2016): 66.

[3]Broecke 2015, 127. Neven, Sylvie. The Strasbourg Manuscript. A Medieval Tradition of Artists’ Recipe Collections (1400-1570). London: Archetype, 2016: 132-135, no. 92-94.

Dyeing to Be Cured

By Ashley Buchanan

Slipped within Anna Maria Luisa’s recipe collection is a small bound pamphlet that instructs the user how to tint or dye white marble various colors. In just sixteen pages, the unknown author details the ingredients, processes, and necessary apparatuses needed to create three different reds, two blues, three yellows, three greens, and even fake the signature black or grey veining of “pavonazzo” marble. While the secret to tinting natural looking marble was certainly valuable artisanal knowledge, it is the last three pages of the booklet that are particularly interesting. Without explanation, the pamphlet suddenly shifts topics and details “a particular secret for a styptic water that quickly stops bleeding wounds and torn guts.” The descriptive title continues by suggesting that you can “try it on a rooster by piercing its head with a sharp needle, and the rooster will heal in fifteen minutes.”

Title page of the pamphlet

The first step of the recipe instructs to dissolve a quarter of an ounce of rock alum in one ounce of “acqua rosa” (rose water), which was then added to a quart of “allume bruciato,” or calcined aluminum sulfate. This mixture was then placed in a “digestione,” which was an alchemical apparatus for distillation that dissolved a body in water or alcohol over mild heat. The recipe calls for the mixture to be heated for an hour and until clear. The second step in the recipe is to dissolve a quarter of an ounce of lead acetate in an ounce of distilled vinegar with one forth of pulverized candied sugar. For the third step, a fourth of pulverized copper sulfate from Cyprus is added to an ounce of “acqua di piantagine.” The fourth step calls for calcined red, or Roman vitriol (sulphuric acid) to be boiled with two ounces of urine from a healthy creature. The fifth and final step is to combine an ounce of strong lime into an eight of sublimated and pulverized mercury, which is “digested” to a clear heat for an hour. Once these five steps are completed, everything is to be mixed together in a flask for sublimation and to “digest” for twelve hours.

When I first came across this recipe I was unsure what to make of it, and its inclusion in a pamphlet dedicated to the act of tinting marble perplexed me. But as it turned out, this funny little pamphlet held the key to better understanding Anna Maria Luisa’s recipe collection as a whole. Recipes collected by women are traditionally viewed as domestic manuals used to safeguard the health of the home and treat commonplace illnesses. In general, and as previously discussed here on the Recipes Project, recipes were “repositories for useful knowledge” and share a desired goal to unlock nature’s secrets.[1] In the case of Anna Maria Luisa, however, useful knowledge extended beyond the preparation of simples and household medicines. Her recipe collection reveals an interest in collecting and amassing experiential alchemical knowledge. The creation of styptic water used the same ingredients, apparatuses, and alchemical processes detailed and drawn in the recipes for marble dyes that preceded it.

Detailed illustration showing how to set up the necessary alchemical apparatuses to create the marble dyes and styptic water.

In addition to highlighting one Princess’s interest in alchemy, this pamphlet also speaks to two important issues when studying early modern recipes from a modern perspective. First, science, medicine, and technology at the late Medici court existed in a world in which our modern categories of knowledge simply did not apply. In eighteenth century Florence, artisanal practices, science (or natural history), and medicine were closely connected thanks to alchemy. For the late Medici court, alchemy was not associated with the mysterious or the occult. Alchemy was an applied science that used experimental activities to investigate and transform nature. These practices produced experimental activities in metallurgy, refining salts, producing dyes and pigments, the manufacturing of man-made gemstones and stones, glass and ceramics, and the creation of chemical medicines. Each of these seemingly disparate pursuits were united by process rather than the specific product produced.

This early modern emphasis on process over product brings me to the second issue concerning the studying early modern recipes. While recipes are certainly important historical objects, they are often closely associated with or celebrated for the product they produce. This emphasis on product over process, however, can belie the true value of many recipes. As is in the case of the styptic water. Was Anna Maria Luisa interested in tinting marble or was she interested in better understanding complex alchemical processes that could transform nature and the human body? Thanks to this pamphlet, I now argue the latter.

 

[1] I am borrowing a working definition of early modern recipes from the Recipes Project post, “What is a Recipe?”

Medieval Makeup ‘Artists’. Painting Wood and Skin

by Marjolijn Bol

What there is stays the same. That she can never change.                                                                        Jan van Boendale (ca. 1280 – ca. 1351)

For art historians, one of the most important and best-known ‘recipe books’ is  Cennino Cennini’s (c. 1370 – c. 1440) Il Libro dell’arte (The Craftman’s Handbook). The Italian treatise is famous because it offers the reader many detailed recipes that explain how to make a panel painting. These include the preparation of wood so that one can paint on it, how to make paint from egg and pigments, how to make brushes, how to paint draperies, faces and beards, and, finally, how to varnish the finished work with a mixture of oil and resin (the ‘tears’ from trees such as amber) so that it becomes it shiny and is protected from dust and dirt (fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Giovanni Boccaccio, Marcia painting her self-portrait from De Claris Mulieribus (Of famous women, written 1361), early fifteenth century illumination, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, ms. 13420, f.101v
Fig. 1. Giovanni Boccaccio, Marcia painting her self-portrait from De Claris Mulieribus (Of famous women, written 1361), early fifteenth century illumination, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, ms. 13420, f.101v

Little known, however, is the fact that Cennini also writes that painters were sometimes asked to be ‘makeup artists’:

In excercise of your profession, you will sometimes have to stain or paint on flesh, chiefly to paint the face of a man or woman.1

Cennini explains that there are three methods for painting faces. You can have the colors or pigments tempered with egg, or, when you want to make the face more brilliant, with linseed oil or varnish (the oil-resin mixture). Cennini writes furthermore that in order to clean the face, one takes egg yolks and, gradually rubbing them on the face with the hands, this removes the face paint. The fact that panel painters were asked to be make-up artists, begins to make more sense when we consider the fact that for painting on wood and the face many similar materials were used (figs. 2 and 3).

Fig. 2. Shared materials panel painter and face painter, left to right: Egg, linseed oil, resin tears, dried resin (mastic) and below: two pigments: white lead and vermillion.
Fig. 2. Shared materials panel painter and face painter, left to right: Egg, linseed oil, resin tears, dried resin (mastic) and below, two pigments: white lead and vermillion.

Fig. 3. Bernardo Daddi, detail Virgin Mary's face, 14th century. Egg-based paint on panel Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (inv. nr. 1064)
Fig. 3. Bernardo Daddi, detail Virgin Mary’s face, 14th century, egg-based paint on panel, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, inv. nr. 1064.

There are in fact many more painter’s recipe books that include instructions for making face paint. The fifteenth century German Strasburg manuscript for instance, a collection of recipes for painting in books and on panel, also provides us with an instruction for making a face paint from the resin mastic.2

Another interesting  source that reflects the similarities between panel painting practice and face painting practice is the fourteenth century poem Jan Teesteye (ca. 1330-1334) written in Middle Dutch by Jan van Boendale (ca. 1280 – ca. 1351). In the section of his verse that deals with ‘women and their bad habits’ Van Boendale compares the crèmes and ointments used by women to cover up facial irregularities to the painter’s varnish:

They (the women) grease and anoint their faces, to appear beautiful, and admired by many;but as a painter varnishes an image with all its deceiving decoration, shining beautifully as if though it were solid gold, it is, on the inside, still wood; So a woman, has varnished her skin to make it look beautiful and shining, it is, however, still a futile thing; What there is stays the same. That she can never change.3

Thus, for Van Boendale, women who varnish their faces are like the painter who has varnished his work, embellished with fake jewels, glistening beautifully like gold but, ultimately, on the inside still made from wood (fig. 4). This way, Van Boendale uses the practice of make-believe in painting to compare it to another aspect of fourteenth century material culture; how women sometimes fool us with their counterfeit beauty created with face paint. What makes van Boendale’s comparison even more interesting is that he synonymously uses the Middle Dutch word ‘vernis’ for both the cosmetics used by ladies to smooth their faces and the final varnish layer applied by painters to make a painting look smooth and shiny (and protect it).

Cennino Cennini, like Van Boendale, also had some critique on the practice of painting faces. Contrary, however, to Van Boendale’s moral critique on the trickery involved in face painting, Cennini, as a painter, was well aware of the health risks involved in using some of the painter’s materials for painting the skin:

But I will tell you that if you wish to keep your complexion for a long time, you must make a practice of washing in water – spring or well or river: warning you that if you adopt any artificial preparations your countenance soon becomes withered, and your teeth black; and in the end ladies grow old before the course of time; they come out the most hideous old women imaginable.4 

Cennini was certainly right to warn against face paint. At least since antiquity many of the materials used on the face included toxic ingredients, such as the pigment lead white for applying a ‘foundation’, or vermillion for making one’s cheeks look red and blushing. Such pigments poisoned the person using it, and, eventually, could even lead to death. Here the old Dutch proverb – that one has to suffer for beauty – applies a little too well.

___________________

1. Daniel Varney Thompson (ed.), The Craftsman’s Handbook: the Italian “Il libro dell’ arte”. Cennino Cennini, New York, 1960, p. 123 and for the Italian see: Fabio Frezzato (ed.), Il libro dell’arte. Cennino Cennini, Vicenza, 2004, p. 203 [nr. CLXXIX].

2. Rosamund Borradaile and Viola Borradaile, The Strasburg manuscript: A medieval painter’s handbook/Das Strassburger Manuskript: Handbuch für Maler des Mittelalters, München, 1976, p. 83.

3. Gerrit Komrij, De Nederlandse poëzie van de twaalfde tot en met de zestiende eeuw in duizend en enige bladzijden, Amsterdam, 1994, p. 103, English translation by author

4. Thompson (ed.), The Craftsman’s Handbook, p. 123.