Inadvertently Sharing the Harvest - 1600s Food for hungry dogs, cats, monkeys, squirrels, & a random parrot

Adriaen van Utrecht (Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1599-1652) Still Life with Dog and Monkey (and parott) 1644

Unknown Dutch artist, The Cat's Meal. 1625-50

Frans Snyders (Dutch artist, 1579-1657) Monkeys Stealing Fruit

Adriaen van Utrecht (Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1599-1652) Still Life with Dog and Cat (and squirrel)

Frans Snyders (Dutch artist, 1579-1657) Still Life with Lobster, Poultry, & Fruit (and cat!)

Giuseppe Recco (Italian, Neapolitan, 1634–1695) Cat Stealing Fish

Balthasar van der Ast (Dutch Baroque painter, 1593-94–1657) Still Life with Macaws 1622

Food & Marketing in the 1940s

Yesterday we drove up to the Amish market in Pennsylvania to buy some plants for our garden. It looked so much like the City Market in downtown Indianapolis; where my mother took me, when I was a toddler. Although the 1940s grocery store above was similar to our supermarkets today, the City Market was a place unto itself.















Images from Life Magazine


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Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard 1702-1789 either adored chocolate or the chocolate serving girl

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789)  The Chocolate Girl 1743


Food historian Patricia Bixler Reber tells us in her blog Researching Food History - Cooking and Dining, that chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao tree.  Seed pods were picked, opened, & fermented for a few days, as they dried.  In the 18th-century, the beans were roasted in a pan, pot, or roaster on the hearth.  The shells were removed leaving the usable chocolate "nibs."  The nibs were ground down into a paste by using a stone or steel metate & mano or in a choclate mill.   Further grinding, conching, resulted in a smooth texture.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789)  Madame Liotard and her Daughter


Marylander Pat Reber shared 2 primary sources from the 1700s explaining chocolate preparation.  "The Cacao...a Seed...when they have been divested of their Shells by Fire, and are afterwards peeled, and roasted in a Bason, before a moderate Fire, they are pounded in a very hot Mortar. The Americans bruise them with an Iron Cylinder, on a flat Stone made very hot; they are then formed into a Paste, which is afterwards boiled with Sugar; and this is called plain Chocolate. But if it is to be enriched with a fine Odour, four Pounds of this Paste, and three of powdered Sugar, are worked together in a Mortar, or on some Stone..."  (Spectacle de la Nature. Noël Antoine Pluche. 1766)

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789)  Le Petit Déjeuner


"The Cacao seeds are roasted like coffee...When the kernels are perfectly purified, they are pounded in a mortar of heated iron over burning charcoal, and thus reduced to a coarse paste, which is set to cool on a marble slab. A second rolling is bestowed with a steel cylinder on a smooth freestone, and as soon as the paste becomes sufficiently smooth, it is mixed with sugar in a hot basin and poured into tin moulds..."  (The Encyclopædia of Geography, Hugh Murray. Phila: 1837)

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) La Chocolatiere c 1744

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) La Chocolatiere