Food and the Senses

Holly Shaffer, Brown University

Plants, Gardens, Markets, Delicacies: Food and Art in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century India

Food is ephemeral. Produce can last at most months, while cooked foods remain for a few hours or, with conservation, a few years. Yet artists, cooks and writers have developed methods of preservation – from documenting the cultivation of plants to transcribing recipes – that acknowledge continuity through memory and repetition as well as change through colonial and environmental factors, artistic ingenuity and loss. In this paper, I will align botanical, ethnographic and narrative manuscript paintings, recipe books and vessels produced by artists and chefs in north India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with oral histories taken primarily in Lucknow in the twenty-first century. How does thinking through a framework of ephemerality allow multiple items to co-exist and perishable objects to survive? Does art history as a discipline offer a method to study ephemeral arts such as cultivation or cuisine? What might the intersection of food and art – and their different temporalities – offer us as art historians?

Sussan Babaie, The Courtauld, University of London

“Adorning the delicious food is to say grace for the blessings”: Persian Art and Cookery in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

This talk is about rice. The history of rice and its adaptation from a staple food in East Asia to a culinary canvas for innovative recipes, objects and ceremonies is, I claim, an altogether Iranian story. Thanks largely to the Mongol rule in West Asia, rice was made a widespread agricultural product, just as Persian spread across West, Central and South Asia as the language of literary high culture, and being a shah, and not a caliph, gained ascendency as the legitimate mode of rulership. Rice, however, does not command its central role as a marker of Iranian cuisine and a source of effect in food – a style nowadays called “fine dining” – until the early modern period and especially in Persianate Asia. From the late fifteenth century onwards cookbooks, written by chefs not chroniclers, indicate a form of professionalisation in the cookery crafts. Vessels, amongst which the large, wide, shallow platters are distinctive products of the ceramic arts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Safavid (1501–1722) Iran, indicate a specialised function, namely for serving rice dishes in a particularly “artistic” manner. The cooks write on how to arrange food in a dish and the dishes carry epigraphic sayings about specific functions of the vessels and the food they were to serve. These – the recipes, the objects for food and the visual representations of foodways – act as mediators marking the food and the dish as a multisensory experience of rice as art.

Listing image caption: Painting attributed to Muzaffar 'Ali, from The Coronation of the Infant Shapur II, Folio 538r from the Shahnama (Book of Kings) of Shah Tahmasp by Abu'l Qasim Firdausi, ca. 1525–30, opaque watercolour, ink, silver, and gold on paper.