Tag Archives: material culture

A Handheld Cabinet of Curiosities: Kitchenalia, Social Media, and the Cultural History of Collecting

By Esther Martin

People love Stuff. They’ve always loved Stuff. For hundreds of years, humanity has made a practice of collecting the Stuff they love. These collections carry alternative implications, showcased and flaunted to establish both the status and identity of the owner. The act of collecting is easy to dismiss as a type of overconsumption, but it is deeply tied to a person’s need to establish their sense of self, and to identify where they fit into the social spectrum. Collectors become taste-makers, establishing what is worth collecting and showcasing. In the age of the internet, taste-making is done through content-making.

Britannica defines the term “collect” as “to get (similar things) and bring them together as a hobby.”Russell Belk, a Distinguished Research Professor and the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University, defines collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences.” Collecting is more than the act of acquiring, but rather gathering items together with a specific and intended purpose.

Collecting became more defined during the Renaissance when the wealthy began establishing cabinets of curiosities in their homes. Dating back to the 1500s, early incarnations of cabinets of curiosities involved a full-size room containing a collection of artifacts and specimens acquired by a wealthy family or individual. Practically, the room was a way of storing an often exhaustive accumulation of artifacts and specimens, usually containing wonders of the natural world–such as animal skulls, “exotic” textiles, and preserved flora from all over the globe–making cabinets a kind of pre-modern museum, though highly personalized and private.

Göttweig Musaei Contignatio, between 1743-1745. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However, the immediate intention of a cabinet of curiosities was to establish the elevated status of the owner and identify them as a person of intellect and good taste. A collection displayed in a cabinet of curiosities acted as a form of conspicuous consumption, informing visitors to the home of their host’s superiority. After all, not everyone could afford an entire room in their home dedicated to expensive objects, let alone the funds and means necessary to gather those objects.

Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (1599), the earliest illustration of a natural history cabinet. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

The construction of cabinets of curiosities continued to change over time as the delineation between classes diminished. The cabinets became just that – actual cabinets accessible to the less wealthy but growing middle-class. Still, a cabinet of curiosities in one’s home was an indication of good taste and a reasonably stocked bank account.

Today in the twenty-first century, cabinets of curiosity have now reached their next phase of evolution: social media. Visual-based social media platforms, chiefly Instagram and TikTok, serve as modern day cabinets of curiosities where anyone can become a content maker and set up their own virtual cabinet to share their real-life treasures. The images and videos establish their good taste, trend-awareness, and clued-in identity. The types of collections showcased have expanded from curiosities of the natural world to include all manner of interests including curiosities of the past, the grotesque, and the accoutrement of everyday life, past and present. For example, someone may fill their instagram grid with aesthetically pleasing photos of their collection of mid-century typewriters, hand-embroidered 20th century handkerchiefs, or artfully displayed primitive pickling jars. These pickling jars, stuffed with old wooden spoons and whisks that will never be used, fall under the category of kitchenalia.

Collecting kitchenalia (a catch-all term for kitchen objects) has become more prominent especially among women content creators on visual social media platforms. Accounts may highlight collections of a specific brand, such as @Vampyrex on Instagram, who collects and shares her extensive Pyrex collection; specific types of objects, like @nancysdailydish on Instagram, which features English transferware from the 19th and 20th centuries; and a general array of objects, like theinfluencedmillenial on TikTok, whose kitchen is full of thrifted items imbued with nostalgic stories. There is even a hashtag dedicated to collected and thrifted-style vintage kitchens–#grandmakitchen, honoring the aesthetic aspects of women and kitchens of our past.

A selection of the Instagram grid of @Vampyrex. Image Credit: Instagram.

The hashtag #grandmaskitchen evokes the nostalgia and emotional connection involved with  kitchenalia collecting. Content creators see themselves in their collections of kitchenalia and establish identities and expertise that are fabricated from trips to the thrift store. Since food, cooking, and the kitchen are evocative of personal history, content makers establish kitchenalia as an integral part of their personality and status. Kitchen objects, which may be considered traditionally mundane, gendered objects advertised primarily to women as part of their unseen labor as homemakers and providers, suddenly become elevated in value through their incorporation into content makers identities. By elevating kitchenalia to be worthy of collecting and redefining it as “of value,” the women showcasing their virtual cabinet of curiosities are also showcasing identities they’ve invented and advertise online.

Collections tell the story about the collector and what they value–pristine objects, name brands, and the status quo; or they have deep-held beliefs that they will one day make money off these objects and secure their future. Women content-makers and taste-makers who collect kitchenalia demonstrate that what is valuable is identities rooted in the appearance of a history and connection to the kitchen. Their Instagram and TikTok pages serve as a guide for future kitchenalia collectors to determine what material culture of the kitchen holds no value, and what items are worth the money and effort to acquire, enhancing their existing identity.


Esther Martin, MLA, is a food folklorist and writer who specializes in foodways, material culture, and online education. Her work has appeared in The Oxford Companion to Cheese, We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Regional Food, and An American Girl Anthology, with upcoming work in The Recipes Project. She has presented at The Museum of Food and Drink, the Association for Food and Society Conference, and the Rutgers Online Learning Conference. She holds an MLA In Gastronomy from Boston University. Find her at esthermartin.substack.com.

Olfactory Notes: Integrating Embodied Research in Art History

By Madison Clyburn

In early modern Italy, perfumes were powerful substances whose therapeutic properties could generate pleasure and preserve or remedy one’s health if worn on or consumed by the body. In this post, I feature a typical Italian perfume recipe, “To make perfume for clothes,” from the Italian engraver and author Eustachio Celebrino’s (c. 1490-after 1535) printed vernacular pamphlet, Opera nova piacevole laqvale insegna di far varie compositioni odorifere per far bella ciaschuna donna…intitulata Venusta (Venice, 1550) intended for female consumers. Celebrino’s formulaic recipe books, typical of the genre, are printed records of socially important topics, like women’s health and adornment.

I made this recipe in Dr. Chriscinda Henry’s graduate seminar, Materiality and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Art, at McGill University in the Winter of 2023. Celebrino’s recipe allowed us to work through experimental research methodologies in our final week dedicated to Embodied Knowing and Experimental Methods, which I co-led with fellow seminar member Mahdis Mohajeri. Making this perfume recipe raised questions about what it means for art historians living in one sensorium and studying others, like early modern Italy, where smelling amber rosary beads during prayer might bring one closer to God, chewing myrrh pastilles could prevent plague or wearing musk might help conceive a healthy child.

“To Make Perfume for Clothes”

The first step toward integrating embodied research in our art history seminar was to choose a recipe with accessible ingredients that was relatively quick to make. Celebrino’s perfumed sachet was just right since it simply asks one to take “fresh rose leaves & dry them in the shade & then take two carats [or vials] of musk, and make it into a powder, & two coins of fine cloves, and mix together, & then put it [all] in one or two little bags in the clothes.” 

Graduate student, Em Grisdale’s sachet keeps sweaters moth-free and smelling fresh one year later!

Before our seminar, I assembled a recipe kit with instructions and ingredients for each participant. I found cloves and dried roses from a local herbalist shop, while I substituted musk root for musk, whose extraction from the musk deer’s preputial gland is primarily illegal today. 

Next, I transcribed and translated the recipe, placing that information in a PowerPoint. This left more time in class to examine primary texts like Pliny’s The Natural History and Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Commentaries (1565) to understand the varied classical and early modern uses of musk, roses, and cloves. At the same time, selections from Sven Dupré et al. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment (2020) and Pamela Smith’s From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022) grounded our entrance into an aromatic art history, offering insight into how hands-on historical recipe experiments can help make students more resourceful researchers and inform early modern health, hygiene, and beauty practices.

The final step consisted of interpreting the recipe through practice. Students opened their kits and began to crush, mix, and add the ingredients to a draw-string bag.

Some participants followed the recipe, and others adapted it; some used their hands, while others used a hammer or mortar and pestle to crush the musk root.

The recipe’s flexible ending tells one to put the sachet “in the clothes,” possibly in a chest, carried in a pocket, worn under a skirt or attached to a belt. Making the recipe together allowed us to pose questions, such as what types and materials of bags might be preferred, how much musk equals a carat or vial, and share reactions like musk stinks! 

Em Grisdale shows us how to wear Celebrino’s recipe on a belt loop.

Implications for Sensory Research in Art History

Embodied research welcomes questions about the sensuous relationships between the ephemeral body and its material culture. Things like perfumed sachets for clothes hinted at but not seen in visual media reveal how olfactory experiences in the early modern period are everywhere and nowhere. For example, middle- and upper-class women often had the luxury of owning multiple sets of clothes. When not worn, women stored their clothes in chests with sachets made from pure ingredients like musk or, for aspiring citizens, a counterfeit version made of spices and toasted breadcrumbs to preserve the fabrics’ quality and cleanliness. One can imagine only the finest ingredients perfuming Lambert Sustris’ Reclining Venus (c. 1548) in this wholesome atmosphere comprised of a downy mattress sprinkled with fragrant pink and white roses, sumptuous fabrics, and a woman playing a folding harpsichord, whose charming sounds vibrate through the clean air wafting through an open colonnade window.

Attributed to Lambert Sustris (c. 1515-20 -1584), Reclining Venusc. 1548, oil on canvas, 116 x 186 cm, Venice or Padua, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3479. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

But of course, we cannot see the physical sachet made from Celebrino’s recipe that may lie nestled inside the elegant cassone (chest) in the background of Sustris’ painting. We cannot sniff notes of rose, musk, and clove possibly escaping the fibres of the pastel pink dress that a woman holds above the chest. Only by reconstructing these sachets can we begin to sense smell’s critical role in preserving hygienic bodies and homes as well as in observing or challenging socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in early modern Italy.

Detail of Sustris’ Reclining Venus showing a young woman leaning over an open-lidded cassone. Image credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Embracing what we cannot see or smell through embodied research allows us to imagine how Celebrino’s recipe and Sustris’ painting document once fragrant interiors. An art historical approach to making recipes aims to recenter early modern sensuous practices and experiences in artworks so that teaching and academic scholarship can help us bridge two sensoria—that of our current moment and overlooked pasts.


Madison Clyburn is an Art History PhD candidate at McGill University. Her thesis focuses on the material culture of women’s wellness in late medieval and early modern Italy. Her research combines art and gender history, the history of medicine, material culture, and sensory studies to determine how perfumes were used to observe, challenge, and invert socially constructed gender and class hierarchies in the early modern period.

Do Objects Lie? Teaching About Food, Material Culture, and Evidence

Carla Cevasco

During my most recent move, I observed (while sweating, and swearing, and trying to keep the packing tape from sticking to itself again) that kitchen items occupied more boxes than any other category of my possessions. Not even books could compete with the weight and bulk of my kitchen, from a sturdy stand mixer to far more glassware than any reasonable person should own.

It was a vivid illustration of how objects for storing, cooking, and eating food surround us. They are intimately related to our bodies, containing the food that we will incorporate into ourselves; some of them, eating utensils like forks or chopsticks, actually enter our bodies. Kitchen and dining items are powerful, and they are part of us.

In my teaching on American food history, I argue that food-related objects offer a rich site of interpretation, as part of my greater mission of teaching with things. Even if I can’t always bring physical objects into the classroom—like gingerbread made according to Fannie Farmer’s 1896 recipe, or a bottle of the Silicon Valley food replacement beverage Soylent—my students engage with visual or material culture in every class. Elaborate tea services illustrate tea’s value as an imperial luxury good for eighteenth century Americans—and emphasize its potency as an instrument of protest in the leadup to the American Revolution.[1] Racist images advertising baking powder and tinned meats in the late nineteenth century demonstrate both the growing business of industrial food, and the ways that stereotypes pervade everyday life, past and present.[2] Trays from mid-twentieth-century university dining halls reveal the shift to military-style dining after the second World War, and the growing concern about public health and nutrition for institutions, governments, and researchers in that period.

My students sometimes argue that material and visual culture are more inscrutable than texts, until I point out to them that they are the most visually-literate generation perhaps in all of history, spending hours navigating completely image-based social media applications. And, in fairness to my students, I didn’t encounter material culture as a field of study, or learn about the methodological rigor of art history, until I arrived to my PhD program and studied with an art historian and other scholars of material culture. But why do objects—despite the many many many examples of wonderful material culture scholarship on this site—seem so untrustworthy to students raised on Instagram and Snapchat?

So, when given an opportunity to make a pedagogical film at the Chipstone Foundation, a center dedicated to, among other fascinating things, research on early British and American ceramics, my colleague Christopher Allison and I decided to confront these questions head-on. How should we use objects as evidence? What can they tell us about the everyday lives of people, and the creation of archives? What if these objects are lying to us? (You can read more about the process of making the video here.)

The result is a Youtube video called “Do Objects Lie?” In it, Chris and I examine a variety of food-related items, from teapots shaped like fruits and vegetables, to pitchers depicting famous battles; from anthropomorphic teacups to, uh, chamber pots. These objects misrepresent the truth, or leave out important details. These omissions and elisions are, in fact, the most interesting part of the story, enabling us to ask questions about how history is made, how collections and archives are formed, and what these processes can tell us about ourselves. We have to engage mindfully with sources (textual or material), look for as many pieces of evidence as possible, and ask questions about how we know what we know. Teaching these practices to our students has taken on a fresh urgency as issues of history, media literacy, and truth itself dominate the news cycle.

I’ll be showing the video as I teach about questions of evidence and interpretation in classes on early American studies, American Studies methods, food history, and material culture. I hope it will be useful to teachers and students across disciplines, from history and art history to food studies and beyond. How might you use this video in your classroom? I look forward to hearing your ideas.

 

[1] Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Chapter 5.

[2] Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

Workshop Notice: “Kitchens in Britain and Europe, 1500-1950” (London, 18th Jan 2017)

For all of you interested in kitchens and material culture – this workshop sounds like it’s a must-go! Take note: Registration closes 11th January, 2017.

kitchen-graphic
Koch unnd Kellermeisterey (1550). Image courtesy of the Welcome Library.

The Centre for the Study of the Body and Material Culture is hosting a one-day workshop, ‘Kitchens in Britain and Europe, 1500-1950’, 18th January 2017 at Senate House, University of London.

In recent years the home has come to be the focus of multidisciplinary and cross-period inquiry, yet the kitchen, although seen as the ‘heart’ of the home in some places and periods, is still a relatively under-explored space. Studies of material culture, technology and domestic work all point to the kitchen’s wider social and cultural importance.  Since the early modern period, kitchens have been a nexus of class interaction, and the place of domestic food production. Subsequently, studies of the kitchen have the potential to contribute to social and cultural histories of everyday life. This workshop brings together scholars researching the histories of the kitchen from a range of geographical and chronological perspectives.

The deadline for registration is Wednesday 11th January. For more details, including the programme and how to register please see:

https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/history/research/researchcentres/csbmc/kitchens-cfp.aspx

Questions? Get in touch with the organiser Katie Carpenter @ Katie.Carpenter.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk.