Food & History

The present paper deals with baking techniques and tools for the production of bread from Ancient Near Eastern archaeological contexts. The aim is to understand when grain doughs started to be cooked in the Near East, how they were produced and what they looked like. Ingredients, ancient utensils, and baking techniques are investigated as well as ethnographic analogies suggested. The analysis is further enriched by a comparison with techniques and tools attested in historical periods and in ancient texts, including baking moulds and recipes. This contributes to the identification and understanding of the technological differences between varying bread-baking installations existing in the Ancient Near East that often are not differentiated in the literature, for which we instead suggest distinct contexts of use.

This paper is based on studies of the central accounts of the Count and, later, the Duke of Savoy Amédée VIII in the early fifteenth century. It describes the organization of the kitchen office between 1391 and 1434 and the hierarchy of the various members. This organization is compared to those in other European courts. The chef who would make the kitchens of Amédée VIII famous is Maître Chiquart, author of the cook-book Du fait de cuisine. This paper, based on unpublished sources, provides an overview of the career and biography of Chiquart, including his position as chef at the court of the Counts of Geneva between 1388 and 1400, the conditions of his arrival at the court of Savoy, as well as his true identity.

Cet article repose sur les études des comptabilités centrales du comte, puis du duc de Savoie Amédée VIII, au début du XV^e siècle. L’organisation qui régit, entre 1391 et 1434, l’office de la cuisine ainsi que la hiérarchie des différents membres du personnel sont mises en lumière et comparées à celles des autres cours européennes. Le queux qui va faire la renommée des cuisines d’Amédée VIII est Maître Chiquart, auteur du livre de recettes intitulé Du fait de cuisine. Cet article, fondé sur des données inédites, propose une vue d’ensemble de la carrière et de la biographie de Chiquart, notamment son poste de cuisinier à la cour des comtes de Genève entre 1388 et 1400 et les conditions de son arrivée à la cour de Savoie, et dévoile même sa véritable identité.

The purpose of this paper is to present both literary and archaeological evidence that concerns the consumption of Aegean wines in central Tyrrhenian Italy (Latium and Campania in particular) in the Roman age. An attempt has been made to outline the time frame in which the drinking of Greek beverages was practised by the Romans. Moreover, the qualities of these wines are described and the scale of the consumption of different varieties is estimated. It has been noticed that the literary evidence suggests that wines from Chios, Lesbos, and Thasos were very famous in Rome; however, amphoras from these islands are rarely attested in Roman Latium and Campania. Some explanations for this are proposed.

The aim of this article is to stress that a moral of temperance tried to oppose the early modern French culture of inebriation. Moral criticisms were made before the nineteenth century. Ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, etiquette books, moralist tracts or books of political economy explained that drunkenness was a vice, a corruption, a disorder that disrupted society, and increasingly a ruinous expense. But not all these norms came from above. Some of these criticisms had their origin in the basic common sense of popular morality.

Cet article souligne qu’une morale de la tempérance tente de s’opposer à la culture de l’enivrement des Français à l’époque moderne. Il ne faut pas attendre le XIX^e siècle pour voir se développer une offensive morale contre l’ivresse. Du XVI^e au XVIII^e siècle, des manuels de savoir-vivre, des écrits de moralistes ou des traités d’économie politique expliquent que l’enivrement est un vice, une corruptio, un désordre et de plus en plus une dépense ruineuse. Mais toutes les normes ne viennent pas d’en-haut. Le bon sens commun de la morale populaire participe aussi à ce mouvement d’opposition.