BEST goldthwaite The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica 1989

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE MAIOLICA 23
erence has already been made to the I 556 shop inventory of over
20,000 items divided into 6o categories. Unfortunately, the terminology
of the period is highly imprecise with respect to form, size,
and function; and there is virtually no visual evidence in Renaissance
art (in contrast to earlier art) for the appearance of a fully laid table.
Today anyone who wants to buy a set of dishes is prepared for the
vast array of items that constitute the complete place setting - serving
plates, dinner plates, luncheon plates, bread-and-butter plates,
salad plates, dessert plates; coffee cups, demitasse cups, chocolate
cups, tea cups, mugs, and so on. The Italians did not reach this degree
of specialization, but it was in the Renaissance that the long and
seemingly interminable process of proliferation of different kinds of
dishes began.
Why did Italians want more and more dishes, and new kinds of
dishes, on their tables? In part, it may have been a response to the
greater variety of foods they were eating. The decline in population
in the fourteenth century, already referred to as an explanation for
the increase in wages and per capita wealth, also had its effect on people's
eating habits because the agricultural sector, once it did not
have to concentrate on the basic staples to feed an excess population,
could diversify its production. In fact, the phenomenon has been referred
to as the first agricultural revolution. Quantity and variety of
foods increased, meat, for example, became more widely consumed
throughout the society than at any time before modern times. Moreover,
the quality of the preparation of food improved, as cooking
came in for more studied consideration by Italians. The increase of
the number of recipe books from the late fifteenth century onwards,
in fact, marks the beginning of the history of haute cuisine long before
anything similar is found elsewhere in Europe. Montaigne ridiculed
the pretentiousness with which an Italian chef he once met in
France insisted on talking about food:
He gave me a discourse on this science of supping with a grave and magisterial
countenance, as if he were speaking of some grand point of theology. He unravelle
differences in appetite for me: the appetite one has at the outset, and
that which one has after the second and third courses; the means of sometimes
appealing to it in simple ways, sometimes reawakening and stimulating it; the
rules regarding sauces, first in general and then particularising the qualities of
ingredients and their effects; the different salads according to their season, what
must be served hot and what cold, and the ways of decorating and embellishing
them to make them even more pleasing in appearance. After that, he embarked
on the order of courses, full of important and fine considerations. . . . And all
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