Knives out – the fine art of carving meat, Thomas Marks, δημοσίευση Apollo Magazine [27/1/2023]
Skilful carving makes for better eating. That at least was the opinion of one 17th-century authority on the subject, who argued that the clumsy slicing of meat might cause offence at once visual and visceral. ‘The disorderly mangling a Joynt or Dish of good meat,’ he wrote, ‘is not onely an unthrifty wasting of it, but sometimes the cause of loathing, to a curious Observer, or a weak stomack.’
The anonymous author claimed that, with The Genteel House-keepers Pastime (1677; 1693 edn.), he was the first in England to set down in print principles for the proper carving of fish, flesh and fowl. This was an embellishment. In fact the earliest printed carving instructions in English date to 1508, when Wynkyn de Worde, a close collaborator of William Caxton, published a short manual called The Boke of Kervynge. This opens with a memorable catalogue of terms for dismantling birds and beasts, which would itself frequently be reprinted in later cookery books such as Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660): ‘Break that deer, leach that brawn, rear that goose, lift that swan…’.
What made The Genteel House-keepers Pastime original, however, was that it was accompanied by a deck of playing cards, issued by Joseph Moxon, which illustrated dishes and provided figure references that correspond to the text’s explanations of carving procedures. Each suit coincides with a discrete category of food: diamonds for fowl; hearts for ‘Flesh of Beasts’; clubs for fish; and spades for ‘Baked Meats’ or savoury pies. In some cases, the higher-value cards play host to the most flamboyant dishes. The king of spades shows an elaborate venison ‘pasty’ (a double-crust pie); the king of hearts, the ‘Sir Loyn of Beef’, the grand slab of meat barely contained by the edges of the card.
Carving was a skill that had encouraged innovative illustration in early printed books. It was a refinement deemed worthy of such endeavours, too, with the office of carver a distinguished position in many noble households across Europe. Il Trinciante (The Carver; 1581), a treatise by Alessandro Farnese’s carver, Vincenzo Cervio, includes woodcuts that depict carving knives, forks and a carving iron, some ostensibly to actual size – as though encouraging the practical reader to pluck a blade from the page. Another book of the same title, devised by Mattia Giegher in 1621, emphasises both performance and precision in plates that show skewered joints, in some cases as though brandished in the air, which are marked up with red lines to indicate the prescribed sequence of cuts.
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