Throughout the long eighteenth century, chocolate remained a drink of distinction, associated with gallantry and respectability. Early modern images of chocolate can reveal fundamental aspects of its fabrication, preparation and consumption. The article starts with iconographical clarification to avoid confusion between coffee and chocolate, as in J.B. Charpentier’s portrait of the Family of the Duke of Penthièvre (1770s). The complex process of transforming cacao into a sweet paste, from colonial to domestic environments, is essential to understanding the semi-luxurious status of early modern chocolate. Production was fraught with exhausting labour, colonial exploitation and enslavement and potentially bad quality or adulteration. Yet, elitist purchasing power, excellent taste and refined manners characterize visual representations of chocolate, contextualized here with a focus on France. Rendering effort and hardship invisible or aestheticized, art also exoticized, eroticized and enlivened consumption with sensorial stimulation. One type of anxiety around chocolate, spilling, triggered novelties in material culture and decorum.
Les registres financiers tenus par la trésorerie de l’administration génoise de Caffa aux XIV e et XV e siècles constituent une source incontournable pour les historiens cherchant à explorer les pratiques d’hospitalité des élites de l’Europe de l’Est à la fin du Moyen Âge. Reconnue par les Génois du XV e siècle comme la capitale par excellence de la mer Noire, Caffa s’imposa à cette époque comme un grand emporium où se mêlaient diversité culturelle, intrigues et rencontres diplomatiques, espionnage, vie fastueuse et effervescence commerciale. Les grandes célébrations religieuses et laïques, les triomphes militaires et les rencontres diplomatiques étaient marqués par des réceptions officielles, des collations ou des banquets, organisés aux frais du gouvernement pour l’élite dirigeante et pour ses invités de marque. S’appuyant sur de nombreuses sources inédites, la présente recherche s’attache à étudier l’alimentation de l’aristocratie génoise de Caffa lors des repas festifs organisés pour marquer ces occasions spéciales.
Based on a case study of the scientist Max Rubner (1854–1932), this article analyses the interactions between the production of scientific knowledge and public policies in a wartime context. It examines Rubner’s little-known influence on the selection of authorized flour substitutes and on the development of legal regulations. The article first explores the impact of his statements and actions at the beginning of the war, before addressing the limitations he faced in the context of a bread policy aimed at “filling stomachs” at all costs. Finally, it examines the alternative strategies mobilized by Rubner to shape nutritional standards and food choices related to bread and flour, notably through media engagement and the dissemination of his scientific research on flour substitutes.
In Belgium, liberal philanthropists, usually freemasons, started fostering social reform in the 1860s with a stress on social catering. Breaking with older charity models, they strove to create a co-operative type of institution offering “on the spot” or “take-away” consumption of cheap cooked food, where meals were not donated but paid for. The industrial city of Liège offers one of the first and more sustainable cases of this type of philanthropy in Belgium organized not only by bourgeois philanthropists but also (skilled) working-class people. The provision of affordable meals allowed the elites to gain control over the duration of lunch breaks and over workers’ nutrition. Social catering ventures were also an answer to the almost general absence of eating facilities in the factories. The co-operative goals of the initiative remain ambiguous. This Liège social catering eventually disappeared in 1905, after two decades of slow decline coinciding with the changing food-related needs of factories and factory workers.
This article examines the functions and modalities in which eating habits and metaphors appear in the works and notes of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74). Food is employed as a lens to illuminate how this poet chose to live and to represent the world, faith, life and its enjoyment. Petrarch’s poetic approach to the food world reveals his judgments and feelings about life, which both come from the ethical and moral impositions, beliefs and attitudes of late medieval society. This aspect of Petrarch’s work unveils an unobserved facet of his personality that represents him as a careful consumer, a judicious producer and procurer of his own sustenance, a lover of the most fertile landscapes and a keen agriculturalist. The meticulous attention paid to his diet in the construction of his auto-ethnography dissolves the boundaries between frugality and opulence, revealing a growing interest in being human. This provides a pivotal, pioneering insight into the subsequent eras of Humanism and the Renaissance.
