Contents

Page 1/5

Section One: 
Food in the 1500s
Spices
Animal Products
Gold leaf

Section Two:
Display Tableware
Cups
Water sprinkler
Tazza & Salt
Shell Spice Box

Section Three:
Drapers' Company Feast
Drapers' Feast

Section Four:
Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous

A précis and commentary on the C.16th portion of the "London Eats Out - 500 Years of Eating Out in London" exhibition, Museum of London   (1999/2000)



The Exhibition was sectioned into centuries. Each century had 2 or 3 small displays of objects, and one or two 'staged' scenes - a set restaurant table, coffee shop, etc. 
The notes were all (as far as I could tell) excellent, accurate and informative. A bit more detail would have been nice, but on the whole I believe were at the right level for their target audience. Now, on with the show...

Food in the 1500s...
At the entrance to the 1500's exhibition a case displayed spices and other foodstuffs that were used in Tudor cuisine, but which are no longer commonly found in traditional English cuisine.

Spices being displayed were saffron threads and turnsole clothlets. Saffron threads are the red stigmas of the autumn flowering crocus, Crocus sativus. Saffron was an ever-present culinary flavoring throughout the middle ages in Europe, used for both taste and it's beautiful yellow coloring. It is still, per weight, one of the most expensive spices in the world, due to the enormous amount of flowers - about 70,000 - needed to render 1 pound (454 gm) of the spice (fortunately however, a very small amount of it goes a very long way). Originally imported from the East, the Arabs introduced the cultivation of saffron to Spain in the tenth century, and from there it spread to Italy, France, and England (north-west Essex and Cambridgeshire, and namely the town of Saffron-Walden) by the fourteenth century.¹

Clothlets are small cloth squares which have been soaked in a saturated solution of a flower (here turnsole) or plant - a technique that was also frequently used by medieval painters for easy storage and transportation of colourants. The material soaks up the colored solution and dries. When added later to water (or another liquid) by the cook or painter, the dye for colouring food or parchment is released into the new carrier. The turnsole flower clothlets displayed would have been used to produce blue or green coloured foods.

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Bibliography
1. Saffron: Ellen Szita's Guide to Saffron  - comprehensive & educational site on saffron.

WILSON, C. Anne  "Food and Drink in Britain from the Stone Ages to recent times"  Penguin 1973, ISBN 014046.5464

 
Click on the title or thumbnail photo below to view the larger photo.

 

Spices et al
L-to-R; a bottle of saffron threads, two turnsole clothlets, a pile of cochineal beetles & bottle of ground cochineal and a lump of ambergris.