Cookery, Visual Knowledge and Urbanity in Safavid Iran

This paper explores the visual representations of cooking and objects of eating and drinking as means for the transmission of cookery methods and of culinary cultural practices and memories in Safavid Iran. Scholarship has elaborated on culinary arts and their dissemination through discursive means — mainly of medieval and early modern cookery treatises. On the evidence of the objects — the utensils and vessels for serving as well as eating and drinking — art historical studies have also greatly advanced our understanding of materials, shapes and decorative specificities of the corpus of luxury objects of utility. The intersection of the two branches, for instance, has contributed to our understanding for the emergence of vast serving plates in Safavid Iran when rice became a main food staple mainly in elite circles. And in both cases of scholarship, we have often drawn from depictions of such objects in mural and book paintings to support general assumptions about status and utility of vessels. Neither group (cookbook or art), however, has explored the objects or their representations as visual meditions in the processes of making culinary knowledge and of its transmission as cultural memory. This investigation builds upon two sets of observations underlying recent research I have undertaken: 1) Safavid urban-court production of culinary objects represent statistically greater typological diversity than we find in surviving objects from comparable environments in Ottoman and Mughal realms; 2) 'taste' is among the sense perceptions that are evoked not only in poetic terms but more importantly in Persian painting and culinary objects. At the intersection of food, object and taste lies, this paper suggests, the cultural transmission of a historically situated sensory experience. With a focus on urban elite in Safavid Iran, this paper treats visual representations of cookery, and their related objects, as a collective of non-inscribed practices for the 'popular' transmission of culinary knowledge.