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Detroit museum celebrates European food festivals of yore

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‘The Pastry Shop,’ 1600s, Abraham Bosse, hand-colored etching, engraving, gouache and gold. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

 

DETROIT – Foodie alert! The Detroit Institute of Arts is hosting “The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals” through April 16. Visitors will enjoy viewing images of delectable monuments and sculptures made of food in 16th through 19th century Europe.

The exhibition provides a detailed look at elaborate sculptures and monuments made of food for street festivals and royal banquets in Europe. “The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals” is organized by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles and includes 140 prints, serving manuals and rare cookbooks from the Getty and private collections. It is free with museum admission.

“This exhibition will delight fans of cooking shows and chef competitions, which are so popular today,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, DIA director. “It’s amazing to see the ingenuity of chefs and food designers who created these elaborate edible monuments 300 to 500 years ago, and visitors will also enjoy seeing some of the earliest cookbooks and food etiquette manuals.”

The exhibition also includes a monumental sugar sculpture based on an 18th-century print. Palace of Circe by British sculptor and culinary historian Ivan Day is set on an 8-foot table and features sugar paste sculpted into a classical temple with sugar statues and sugar-sand gardens. The figures were meant to show the consequences of gluttony with a story about the ancient Greek hero Ulysses. When he landed on the island of Aeaea, his men were so greedy that the sorceress Circe turned them into pigs.

On Feb. 4 at 2 p.m. Day will give a free illustrated talk that outlines the evolution of sugar sculpture and decorative table art from the Renaissance to the 18th century.