Good wine keeps the chills out?
Week 4 WolfCrawl
On the table week 4
Empty house
On the table week 4
‘Cardinal Morton eating turnips! What are you thinking?’
What a rich table we are offered after the lean last week, everything an episcopal household can offer: Songbirds, strawberries, fresh loaves of bread, meat, cheeses, sugared fruits, marzipan figures and spiced wafers. The cardinal's pages wait at the table, carrying the food and drinks with their white hands from the sideboards to the table. One of them is Thomas More.
The storage cellars are bursting with wheat flour, dried beans, barley and duck eggs. You almost want to be in this household, but then there's the kitchen...
Hohenemser Banquet Table by Anthony Bays, 1578
‘A boy washing dishes in the kitchen is as pleasing to the eye of God as a preacher in the pulpit or the apostle on the Galilee shore’
The longer I look at this painting, the sadder it makes me feel. Plucking songbirds, that's what it looks like. The boy is tired, he's probably been sitting here for hours, he's already managed a few birds. Can barely keep his eyes open. His face is young and almost deathly pale like the feathers of the dead birds in the background. His hands are those of an hard-working adult.
From the festive table they get what you can't give anyone else except the pigs, in the evening they sleep in sacks in the kitchen. Thomas Cromwell is one of them, helping out, if there is work. I don’t think More knows that Cromwell was one of those boys. But Cromwell remembers it as if it were yesterday. Two different worlds in one house.
Still Life with Game-Birds by Gottfried Libalt, first half 17th century
Deadly stew
The Duke of Suffolk, the Duke of Norfolk, Earl George Boleyn and Thomas Lord Darcy are brewing a stew pot. They throw everything into it, their bitterness, the hatred, the anger, the envy - it will be a deadly stew for the cardinal, if the King orders him to eat it.
Detail Hexenküche (Witches' kitchen ) by Frans Francken, around 1610
Empty house
This week I don't feel like wandering around apart from taking stock of the food we've had. I was very moved and touched by the losses Cromwell suffered, that was probably the week I got fully into the story. When I look at this painting, I think, this is what it used to be like when Cromwell came home late at night. Liz and he were sitting together, the house was already quiet. Cheese, butter and a glass of wine together. Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke1, and Cherries by Clara Peeters, around 1625.
This is for Rafe Sadler. I probably won't be able to get the image of the freezing, soaked little hedgehog out of my head until the end of the year. If he's still around then. Please. A Hedgehog by Hans Hoffmann, before 1584
Boy or hedgehog? One of the novel’s most endearing lines.
This week was such a good week for edibles!