Frontispiece of the first (1547) edition of Balthasar Staindl's Künstlichs und nutzlichs Kochbuch held at the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek. The image shows a woodcut of a richly equipped and busy kitchen. The master cook is standing to the left of the large masonry hearth, tasting the contents of a large cookpot stood next to the fire while a cauldron is suspended above it. Two men in the background seem to be addressing him. In the right foreground, another man is cutting meat on a work surface set up atop a wooden trough on trestles. Carcasses and a large sausage are shown suspended on the wall in the background.
Everything about this image - the size, the range of equipment, the exclusively male staff, the amounts of meat on display - signals wealth. This is the kind of kitchen you would expect to find in the house of a rich burgher or landed nobleman. The motif recurs in many German cookbooks of the fifteenth and sixteenth century.
From Balthasar Staindl's 1547 cookbook, the #Renaissance ancestor of the #Dutchbaby #pancake
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