[Sca-cooks] Sixteenth Century Turkish
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Tue Apr 6 22:28:03 PDT 2010
Regarding the feasting and food offerings during
Ottoman royal circumcision festivals and
accompanying parades of sugar sculptures,
Stephane Yerasimos wrote, in ''A la table du
Grand Turc'' (my rough translation):
The common people ... had the right to two public
demonstrations that mixed spectacle and
sustenance. One of them was the parade of
sculptures made of sugar. Plants, animals, and
human figures, too - another example of the
transgression of an interdiction of Islam made
possible by the festival - sculpted sometimes in
monumental sizes, were carried to the Hippodrome.
The account of 1539 catalogs the inventory: 64
castles, 2 tents, 1 tightrope walker, 1 cannon, 1
water wheel, 18 Imperial daisies, a vendor's
stall, 1 cypress, 6 violets, 5 peacocks, 1 stork,
11 rooster, 3 mermaids, 2 fountains with jets of
water, 10 galleys, 5 galleons, 9 lanterns, 10
giants, 4 elephants, 2 rhinoceroses, 43 horses, 3
donkeys, 2 oxen, 2 goats, 3 rams, 16 popes, 1
churches, 53 galaxies, flowers, 872 small birds,
and plants, 308 narcissus, 281 roses, 141 fish.
[my note: many sugar sculptures were life size or close to it]
A similar list drawn up on the occasion of the
circumcision festival of 1582, shows few
differences: one of the rhinoceroses was replaced
by a giraffe because between the two dates one of
these animals brought to Istanbul caused a
sensation, and the popes disappeared - the list
specifies "church without popes" - because
between times the society, become more
conservative, rejected human representation The
consistency in this catalog, which might appear
at first glance to be by chance, shows that the
plan of festivals followed not only sacrificed
nothing to form, but also to taste. Besides
sugar, of which 9,595 kg were dispensed, a total
weight of 5,644 kg of musk, anise, bitter
oranges, lemons, coriander, almonds, and
pistachios were used for the confection of the
statues. All this cost more than 6,000 pieces of
gold, of which 1,200 constituted the remuneration
of the Jewish guild of confectioners, charge with
the fabrication.
After having made the tour of the Hippodrome,
these figures were delivered as [pâture = lit.
pasturage, grazing land] to the population, who
thus divided up more than 15 tons of sweetmeats.
== End Quote ==
Note that at that time the cost of a kilo of
sugar was approximately 20 times the cost of a
kilo of sheep meat
--
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM]
the persona formerly known as Anahita
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