Enfilade

Montiño’s cookbook appeared in new editions throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Carolyn Nadeau’s English translation was just published in November. Her Instagram account is immense fun (and I’m grateful to Ivan Day for noting it on his account). –CH

From the University of Toronto Press:

Carolyn Nadeau, edited and translated, Francisco Martínez Montiño, The Art of Cooking, Pie Making, Pastry Making, and Preserving: Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023), 760 pages, $150. Bilingual edition.

In 1611 Francisco Martínez Montiño, chef to Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV of Spain, published what would become the most recognized Spanish cookbook for centuries: Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería. This first English translation of The Art of Cooking, Pie Making, Pastry Making, and Preserving will delight and surprise readers with the rich array of ingredients and techniques found in the early modern kitchen. Based on her substantial research and hands-on experimentation, Carolyn Nadeau reveals how early cookbooks were organized and read and presents an in-depth analysis of the ingredients featured in the book. She also introduces Martínez Montiño and his contributions to culinary history, and provides an assessment of taste at court and an explanation of regional, ethnic, and international foodstuffs and recipes. The 506 recipes and treatises reproduced in The Art of Cooking, Pie Making, Pastry Making, and Preserving outline everything from rules for kitchen cleanliness to abstinence foods to seasonal banquet menus, providing insight into why this cookbook, penned by the chef of kings, stayed in production for centuries.

Francisco Martínez Montiño was a Spanish cook and writer of the Golden Age.
Carolyn A. Nadeau is a Byron S. Tucci Professor of Spanish at Illinois Wesleyan University.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  The Cookbook as Cultural Artefact
2  Martínez Montiño’s Biography and the Early Modern Spanish Kitchen
3  Cookbook Organization
4  Ingredients
5  Taste at Court and the Emergence of Spanish Cuisine
6  Curiosities of Martínez Montiño’s Cookbook
7  Martínez Montiño’s Legacy
8  Previous Editions
9  This Edition and Commentary

Arte de cocina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería
Tasa / Certificate of Price
El Rey (Privilegio) / The King (Privilege)
Prologo al lector / Prologue for the Reader
Advertencia / Notice
Tabla de los banquetes / Table on the Banquets
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

Appendix 1: Kitchen Furnishings and Equipment
Appendix 2: On Measurements
Appendix 3: Images from Recipes Recreated

Glossary
Bibliography
Index  

From Rizzoli:

Nicolas Cattelain, with photographs by Bruno Ehrs, Bagatelle: A Princely Residence in Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 2023), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-2080247520, $85.

In 1775, the Comte d’Artois, brother of Louis XVI and future King Charles X, purchased the Bagatelle estate in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris. The sumptuous château he constructed there—designed by François-Joseph Bélanger and modeled on a neo-Palladian villa—along with its picturesque gardens were lauded by prestigious European and American visitors, including Thomas Jefferson. Spared by the Revolution, Bagatelle became the setting for many important moments in European history and was acquired by the city of Paris in 1905. While the park with its magnificent rose garden remained open, the Mansart Foundation, with a team of experts, oversaw an extensive renovation of the château to restore the architectural jewel to its former glory. This beautifully illustrated volume recounts the fabulous history of Château de Bagatelle and its various owners, with spectacular new photography, unpublished archival documents, and insightful text.

Philanthropist and art collector Nicolas Cattelain worked in finance before dedicating himself to art, history, and heritage. He is involved with many international museums and is chairman of the Fondation du Château de Bagatelle. Bruno Ehrs is an award-winning Swedish photographer whose work has been published in Jacques Garcia: A Sicilian Dream, Villa Elena; Vaux-le-Vicomte: A Private Invitation; Château de Villette; Villa Balbiano; A Day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte; and Chaumet: Parisian Jeweler Since 1780, all published by Flammarion.

From Éditions Faton:

Sébastien Boudry, Louis-François Chatard et les peintres doreurs du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne sous Louis XVI (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2023), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-2878443318, €36.

Les peintres et doreurs du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne ont participé à la création des plus beaux sièges du XVIIIe siècle. Leur production illustre la diversité et l’excellence des métiers d’art qui ont fait la réputation de Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Leur travail apporte finition et éclat au décor des bois après le travail du menuisier et du sculpteur qu’ils mettent en valeur.

Sous Louis XVI, Louis-François Chatard en devient le principal fournisseur. Peintre et doreur, il est également parfumeur. Ses confrères peintres et doreurs comme Julliac ou la famille Chaise tiennent également boutique à Paris en tant que marchands et restaurateurs de tableaux. Cet ouvrage nous fait découvrir cette profession et ce savoir-faire, ceux qui l’exercèrent avec excellence, tout en illustrant les mutations des corporations et de l’artisanat à Paris à la veille de la Révolution.

Historien de l’Art spécialisé en mobilier et objets d’art, Sébastien Boudry obtient un DEA (Master) à l’Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne en 2001. Chargé d’études au Centre des Monuments nationaux depuis 2003, il est en charge de la conservation-restauration des collections de plusieurs monuments depuis 2010. A ce titre il a participé aux projets de restauration et de présentation des collections de l’Hôtel de Sully à Paris (2012), du château de Champs-sur-Marne (2012–13), de la villa Cavrois à Croix (2014–15), du château de Voltaire à Ferney (2017–18), de l’Hôtel de la Marine à Paris (2018–2021), et du château de Bussy-Rabutin (2021–22).

Part of the Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series from Cambridge UP:

Meghan Kobza, The Domino and the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade: A Social Biography of a Costume (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 75 pages, ISBN: 978-1009468244 (hardcover), $65 / ISBN: 978-1009045551 (paperback), $22. Also available digitally through Cambridge UP.

This Element presents new cultural, social, and economic perspectives on the eighteenth-century London masquerade through an in-depth analysis of the classic domino costume. Constructing the object biography of the domino through material, visual, and written sources, Meghan Kobza brings together various experiences of the masquerade and expand the existing geographical, chronological, and socio-economic scope of the entertainment beyond the masquerade event itself. The book examines the domino’s physical and figurative movements from the masquerade warehouse, through eighteenth-century fashionable society, and into print and visual culture, drawing upon masquerade warehouse records, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, and physical objects to establish a comprehensive understanding of the domino and how it reflected contemporary experiences of the real and imagined masquerade. Analysing the domino through interdisciplinary methodologies illustrates the impact material and visual sources can have on reshaping existing scholarship.

Meghan Kobza is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University, where she completed her PhD in 2020. As a social historian, she is particularly interested in the history of eighteenth-century leisure culture in the British Empire and transatlantic world.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  The Masquerade and the Domino
2  Three Dominos
3  The Domino as a Commodity
4  Everywhere and Nowhere
Conclusion

References

Distributed for the Royal Asiatic Society by Yale UP:

James Tod and Norbert Peabody, with contributions by Brian Cannon and Ramya Sreenivasan, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 1728 pages, ISBN: 978-0300270525, $1,000.

The two volumes of James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, first published in 1829–32, remain to this day the first port of call for anyone interested in the history and culture of Rajasthan and the early colonial encounter in India. Written by the first East India Company official to the region, the text was also seminal for the early figures in India’s independence movement who reworked Tod’s imagined ancient Rajput national identities into a call for India’s national liberation from British colonial rule. Now available in a numbered limited edition of 750 copies, this re-issue of the original text including over 80 original copperplate engravings, woodblock prints, and lithographs returns the text to its original state, while the accompanying companion volume critically reframes this monumental, but often misunderstood, work. The new volume shows how Tod’s Annals is not merely the product of the singular voice of a Western ‘orientalist’ imagination, instead revealing a richly complex work in which Rajasthani voices provide a ‘multi-authored’ heterogeneity to the text which is often discordant and unpredictable. Re-articulating the variety of voices that simultaneously inhabit Tod’s Annals, the revised volume argues for a more conjunctural, contingent, and open-ended reading of colonial history.

Norbert Peabody is an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. Ramya Sreenivasan is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Brian Cannon is a PhD student in South Asian history at the University of Pennsylvania.

This publication is one of the outcomes of the research project The India Museum Revisited, which aims to reconstruct the museum’s history (c.1800–1879) with special reference to V&A’s collection. From the V&A’s description of the project:

At the dispersal of the India Museum in 1879 the 20,000 objects transferred to the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A) were inventoried in a catalogue printed for internal use in the following year. That list forms the basis of the analysis and reconstruction presented here, augmented where appropriate by objects surviving in the collections, in order to reunite the contents and their supporting documentation in virtual form and to set them in context.

From UCL Press (and note that digital copies of the book are available free of charge) . . .

Arthur MacGregor, The India Museum Revisited (London: UCL Press, 2023), 472 pages, ISBN: 978-1800085725 (hardback), £60 / ISBN: 978-1800085718 (paperback) £45 / ISBN: 978-1800085701 (PDF file), free.

The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections—with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent—as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.

Arthur MacGregor is Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Research Institute.

c o n t e n t s

Foreword by Tristram Hunt
Preface
Acknowledgements
The India Museum Revisited Project

Part I | Historical Introduction
1  An ‘Oriental Museum’ at the India House
2  The Objects Themselves: Restoring an Identity to the Collections

Part II | The Collections of the India Museum
3  Historical Relics: Their Role in the Collection
4  Trading with and within India: Material Culture of Commerce and Control
5  Industry and Technology: Inorganic Materials
6  Industry and Technology: Organic Materials
7  The Mirror of India: Clothing, Dress, and Ornament
8  Making War: Weapons and Defensive Armour
9  Religious Observation: Introducing Indian Devotional Practice
10  Culture and Recreation
11  Imaging India
12  Collections of Individuals and the Emergence of Ethnography
13  The India Museum (partly) Recollected

Appendix: Glossary of Indigenous Terms as Transcribed in the Catalogue of 1880
Bibliography
Index

From Princeton UP:

Sylvia Houghteling, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0691215785, £58 / $68.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast array of textiles circulated throughout the Mughal Empire. Made from rare fibers and crafted using virtuosic techniques, these exquisite objects animated early modern experience, from the intimate, sensory pleasure of garments to the monumentality of imperial tents. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India tells the story of textiles crafted and collected across South Asia and beyond, illuminating how cloth participated in political negotiations, social conversations, and the shared seasonal rhythms of the year. Drawing on small-scale paintings, popular poetry, chronicle histories, and royal inventory records, Sylvia Houghteling charts the travels of textiles from the Mughal imperial court to the kingdoms of Rajasthan, the Deccan sultanates, and the British Isles. She shows how the ‘art of cloth’ encompassed both the making of textiles as well as their creative uses. Houghteling asks what cloth made its wearers feel, how it acted in space, and what images and memories it conjured in the mind. She reveals how woven objects began to evoke the natural environment, convey political and personal meaning, and span the distance between faraway people and places. Beautifully illustrated, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India offers an incomparable account of the aesthetics and techniques of cloth and cloth making and the ways that textiles shaped the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia.

• Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association
• Shortlisted for the R.L. Shep Memorial Book Award, Textile Society of America

Sylvia Houghteling is assistant professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College.

c o n t e n t s

Note on Transliteration

Introduction
1  Landscapes of Cloth in the Mughal Empire
2  The Tell-Tale Textile: Fabric and Emotions in Mughal Hindustan
3  The Moving Walls of the Amber Court
4  The Fame of Machilipatnam Cloth
5  The Flowering of Mughal Textiles in Britain
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Image Credits