There are no Easter recipes to share this time. Instead of cooking a feast, I had the chance to meet up with friends to go to some of the amazing museums Munich offers. I still haven’t had the time for a proper recipe post, but while the battery lasts, I will try to share some food-related highlights from the Easter weekend museum tour with you.
I will begin with a piece of high culture from the Alte Pinakothek, an altarpiece painted in 1518 by Quinten Massys. The entire thing is fairly dull, but in this section we have a Good Boi bringing St Rochus a small round bread loaf that I am fairly sure qualifies as a semmel. This is a decent guide to the size, colour, and style we are looking for when we reconstruct them.
Another instance of good bread is provided by Albrecht Altdorfer, carried by the sexiest Saint Joachim at the Nativity of the Virgin I have ever seen. At least that is who I think he is. The whole painting is interesting, but this part is relevant to my specific interest: A rather long loaf with lobed ends, very light and well-risen, probably expensive, and likely soft and delicious.
Further in art from the Alte Pinakothek, here is an interesting seventeenth century genre study of two rather ragged boys eating a pastry. It is by Murillo and has all kinds of artistic merits I am not well placed to judge – I learned during my visit I have no appreciation of art for its own sake. What struck me was the way those two were eating their meal (called a Pastete in the German label and a pie in the English): they are detaching pieces of the filling from the crust. By the late 1600s, we assume pastry crusts would be universally edible, especially on open-faced pastries, but that clearly doesn’t mean they are eaten with the filling. At least not in this instance.
Incidentally, I do not know what kind of pastry this is meant to represent, but the way it can be scooped up with the fingers and dangled suggests it holds together rather well. Maybe an egg-based, quiche-like tart is meant. We have a number of recipes like that from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Another example of seventeenth-century deliciousness if Pieter Lastman’s ultrabaroque Odysseus before Nausicaa. The princess addresses the unexpected guest while her servant, suitably bare and shocked, recoils from the naked, shipwrecked mariner. Between them stands the picknick Nausicaa intended to enjoy alone and will now share.
Does it show I am no fan of Baroque painting? At least we are getting some useful detail from among the billowing fabric and rippling flesh. Along with fresh fruit, the meal includes white bread loaves, one of which looks like it was hollowed out from the side to eat the crumb. That is something I remember doing as a child and getting scolded for. Someone here got away with it, and I am not sure whether to read it as symbolic (the soft, pampered princess used to only the finest bits) or just as something people did. To the left, there is a closed pastry and some sugared nibbles to enjoy with the wine later. The beverages very likely are in the voluminous copper vessel the artist used to put his signature on.
A piece of woodcarving caught my eye at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. It is a small part of a larger altarpiece, a Nativity scene showing Mary in bed, Joseph cooking, and two angels serving the meal. The work dates to between 1513 and 1519 and this is how a wealthy woman was served at the time: wine poured from a decorative pitcher, warm food in covered dishes brought by a servant on a napkin. On the side table, we can see two small bread loaves, perhaps one wheat and one rye, as is described in a poem on table manners, or differing in some other way, and a plate that may be holding fruit or some other dish I am not sure about. Soups, cheese and hard custards were recommended for women in childbed, but this does not look particularly like any of these things.
The new Archäologische Staatssammlung also holds some beautiful pieces, and I was particularly struck by a set of grave goods from a Roman cemetery near Augsburg.
The point here is not the beauty or particular ingrnuity of any of these pieces. It is the sheer mass of the ensemble illustrating the possibilities a developed urban civilisation offered to some. This lady went to the afterlife fully equipped to throw some awesome parties. The Romans would not have understood the idea of “Das letzte Hemd hat keine Taschen” (Your final shirt has no pockets i.e. ‘You can’t take it with you.’).
Speaking of which, the Nationalmuseum also has a collection of silver originally owned by the bishop of Hildesheim. This is one of the most complete eighteenth century ensembles, displayed as a first-course table setting, and again illustrates what wealth and power could buy you even if you were really just a minor ecclesiastical prince in a dinky corner of the Empire with more history than it knew what to do with.
For the final image today – the battery is drawing down and the train is past Hannover – I picked another piece from the Archäologische Staatssammlung, a cup from Uffing that dates to the years around 600 BCE and a modern replica. This is an unprepossessing time, about when the Archaic period begins in Greece and a few centuries before La Tène culture gives us what we now think of as “Celtic” art. This particular item survives only by chance and would likely have been dismissed by excavators of earlier generations. After all, it is not made of precious metal, of no innovative design or artistic merit, ‘just’ wood. It shows beautifully what we often miss when we focus on traditions of written sources alone, on ‘great’ art and big names. True, this probably belonged to a wealthy person. We have no idea who its owner was. But objects like it, lathe-turned wood shaped expertly by local craftspeople, were much more common than golden cups and bronze krateroi, and represented a practical kind of luxury that is hard to reconstruct: the domestic comfort of our forebears.