A Few Notes on Seventeenth Century Fruit Carving Techniques
“After the Butler hath thus covered his Table, let him now begin to dish up his Fruit either in Plate or Cheyney, or such as he finds in the house.
And as I speak here of a Butler of consequence, I suppose him to be in the Service of some Prince or Crowned Head ; therefore it is but necessary that he should know how to order and adjust his Fruit, and disguise it into several figures ; as how to carve-peel it into many fashions, but because it is not to be learn’d ordinarily, but only by seeing and practicing of it by one’s own ingenuity and study, as serving only to be looked upon with admiration, for fashionsake, therefore I shall not give you any instructions for the doing of it, but only shew yon some presentations of it by Figures and Cuts in Fruits, which cannot be altogether unnecessary and useless …
Here follows the several forts of Cuts for all sorts of Fruits, and amongst the rest it is to be taken notice of, that this bunch of Grapes as you here see in Figure, is not to be laid in a Dish, but to be set artificially upright as if it were growing in the Earth, and were yet fast to its own proper stem where it first grew, &c.”
Giles Rose, A Perfect School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth (1682). Google Books
I stumbled across the rather intriguingly-titled A Perfect School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth a while ago, whilst browsing through a batch of downloaded historical cookbooks on the hunt for interesting additions to the archive of historical fruit recipes that I’m steadily building. At the time I picked out Melon Tart in Slices and Pippen Composte, posted them, and credited them to the stated author of the book, Giles Rose. The passage above also caught my eye, and I decided to come back to it at a later date. Now that I have, I’ve discovered that I’ve made a bit of an accreditation error. After some further research, it turns out that Giles Rose wasn’t actually the author of A Perfect School per se, but rather the translator.
The original work was published in France, and was titled L’escole Parfaite des Officiers de Bouche. The author of this volume is unrecorded, but whilst Googling around I did find a couple of potential candidates. The French antiquarian bookshop, L’Intersigne Livres Anciens has a copy of L’escole Parfaite for sale for €1,300 and according to their sales blurb, “Il n’est pas impossible que l’auteur en soit Massialot”, (it is not impossible that the author is Massialot). Although assuming they’re referring to François Massialot, who served as chef de cuisine to assorted noble patrons including two Dukes of Orleans, I’m afraid it would actually be tres impossible for him to have written L’escole Parfaite, as the book was first published in 1662, and Massialot wasn’t born until 1660.
A better suggestion was made by the American writer and cookery book collector Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who in 1903 penned and published My Cookery Books, in which she detailed her impressive collection of culinary literature. Mrs Pennell mentioned one volume which:
“… includes other works attributed to La Varenne. One is Le Maistre d’Hostel et le Grand Ecuyer Tranchant, a treatise originally published in L’Ecole Parfaite des Officiers de Bouche, which was appropriated and translated into English by Giles Rose in 1682 …”
Indeed, François Pierre La Varenne does seem a much more likely author of L’Ecole Parfaite. Born in 1615, he published his two best-known works in 1651 and 1653. The only question mark remaining is why would an author so well-known in his day have published a volume anonymously? Unless of course it was the publisher – one Jean Ribou, apparently in association with someone named only as “the widow Pierre David” – who misappropriated an earlier work and re-published it, without crediting La Varenne? Plagiarism by publishers was a well-known practice of the era in England, so it seems likely that the same shady activities also occurred in France. In the introduction to L’Ecole Parfait Ribou said that he had gathered together a set of useful texts on the subject of table service, so it’s also possible that not all of them were written by La Varenne. But we do know that Le Maistre d’Hostel was Varenne’s, as it was included in various editions of his Le Vrai Cuisinier François, such as the Nouvelle Edition of 1698, from p.3231A closer comparison between the contents of Le Vrai Cuisinier and L’escole Parfaite may reveal close similarities and confirm whether or not Varenne’s work was plagiarised entire for the latter, but that sort of thing lies outside the scope of this article..
It’s all a bit murky, but at least Giles Rose was honest about his own role in the project, when he said in the preface to the 1682 edition of A Perfect School – incidentally, a copy of which that was previously owned by Albert Roux was sold at auction by Christie’s for £3,024 in 2024 following the closure of Le Gavroche in January that year – that he had translated the work from the French at the behest of his publisher.
As I mentioned, whilst scrolling through A Perfect School I spotted the rather intriguing section of the book that I quoted above, which states that one of the “officers of the mouth”, the Butler, was responsible for not only bringing fruit to the royal table, but also for carving and peeling it into elaborate shapes and patterns. These elaborate fruit carving techniques weren’t something I’d come across before, despite browsing a great many historical cookery and pomology books, and so of course I was rather fascinated.
In Rose’s translation the illustrations of the carving patterns are a little confusing, as they lack any sort of labels to explain which fruits were supposed to be carved into which shapes. Luckily though, the French original included captions to inform the reader as to what’s what in terms of pommes, poires, oranges, sitrons [sic], melons, grapes, and even an artichoke. Here they are in all their seventeenth century woodcut glory:
Although the patterns are illustrated there are no accompanying instructions, such as what type of knife to use, how deep to make the cuts, whereabouts on the fruit to start, whether any chilling, warming, or other preparation of the fruit is required beforehand, and so forth. Rose just suggested using “one’s own ingenuity and study” and basically practicing until you got the hang of it. Personally speaking, I think I’d end up going through one heck of a lot of citrons before I managed anything even vaguely resembling the lobster on page 90, but perhaps seventeenth century butlers had a lot more time on their hands, better whittling skills, and more spare fruit on which to practice.
As I say, I’ve not come across this sort of elaborate fruit manipulation anywhere else, and so I have to wonder: was this was a common practice in high-status dining settings that has gone largely unrecorded, at least in the historical cookery and pomology books I have access to? Or was it written up in L’escole Parfaite mainly, or even purely, with the intention of making its author’s skills seem impressive, when it was actually something that any self-respecting butler would laugh out of their buttery in short order?
Always a fan of a deep-dive rabbit-hole, I went looking for more fruit-carving source material, and by far the most useful source I found was an article entitled ‘Vegetable Carving: For Your Eyes Only‘ by Julia Abramson, which was published in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008. Abramson mentioned Il Trinciante (1621) by one Matthias Jäger, who published under his Italianised name Matthias Giegher. Abramson described this work as “the most influential carving treatise published in Continental Europe” and said:
“Copied and imitated in a plethora of other volumes, Giegher’s diagrams provide the paradigm for every illustrated Western work on meat carving published since 1621. At the very end of his treatise, Giegher tacked on a few pages of striking illustrations for carving ‘Frutti’ or fruit. These figures show the imaginative, largely abstract transformations that can be performed on the round and ovoid geometries of an orange or a citron. A few figural carvings charm fruits into shellfish and four-legged animals. The detail on the double-headed eagle (the east- and west-facing symbol of the Habsburg Empire) would have been even easier to realize using a large, hard vegetable.”2Julia Abramson, ‘Vegetable Carving: For Your Eyes Only‘ in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008.
I managed to track down a copy of the 1629 edition of Il Trinciante di messer Mattia Giegher Bavaro di Mosburc via David Mitchell’s Public Paperfolding History Project at origamiheaven.com, and here are Giegher’s fruit-carving illustrations:
There are a more illustrations in L’escole Parfaite, although the later sketches aren’t direct copies – indeed, they seem to be of inferior quality – but Giegher’s Il Trinciante is clearly a direct source of inspiration, particularly for some of the suggested forms of carved citrons: turtle, crocodile, lobster and the aforementioned double-headed, Imperial Habsburg eagle.
I also found another volume titled Il Trinciante (1636) by Mattio Molinari, which seems to be one of that plethora of copies of Giegher’s Il Trinciante that were mentioned by Abramson. Here are the three pages of fruit illustrations from that work:
Once again, although the illustrator is different, there are a number of direct copies that have presumably been taken from Giegher, including five of the six oranges (Melarance), all four of the citrons (Cedri), albeit with the addition of a scorpion tail to one of them, and both the spiral-cut and swan-shaped pears.
Continuing to search for other volumes on carving from the period, I found an earlier book titled Il Trinciante, this time by Vincenzo Cervio, published in 1581. The final section of the volume describes in great detail various methods of carving fruit, but it seems Cervio wasn’t interested in producing decorative figures. Cervio was much more interested in producing perfect slices of melon to serve to the diners on whom he was waiting, and so there are no fruit-carving illustrations in the book.
Does this suggest that the decorative forms of carving citrons, oranges, melons, pears and apples weren’t introduced, or didn’t become popular, until the early seventeenth century, or just that Cervio was more interested in the essential skill of properly delivering food to the table than in the theatre of fancy knife-work? With such a limited evidence base it’s hard to say for sure.
It’s also difficult to say for certain why the practice of decorative fruit carving didn’t seem to catch on in England following the publication of Giles Rose’s volume in 1682, at least if the source material I’ve seen is anything to go by. I wondered if perhaps English butlers and their English masters turned their noses up at such Continental fripperies as swan-pears and citron-lobsters? Or did the succession crisis and the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain mean the nobility had more important things to worry about than their dinner table decorations?
Julia Abramson provided a much more scholarly conclusion in her Oxford Symposium on Food article: that there was a much more essential, societal change behind the disappearance of these diagrams and methods from the cookery books of the eighteenth century onwards:
“Fruit and vegetable carving largely disappeared, both from European carving manuals and from cookbooks having specific sections devoted to the art of carving. The near-total disappearance reflects changing values in early modern society … Aristocratic display, with its ostentation and redundancy, is no longer essential. rather, values of comfort, quality, taste, practicality, and enjoyment gain the upper hand.”3Julia Abramson, ‘Vegetable Carving: For Your Eyes Only‘ in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008.
Today though the art of carving fruit into beautiful and fantastical shapes is thriving, if the hundreds and hundreds of fruit-carving videos on YouTube are anything to go by. And it’s particularly nice to see that at least one of Mattia Giegher’s original concepts is still going strong:
I wonder if the person who made that video had any idea that they were continuing a tradition that dates back to at least the early seventeenth century?
How about you? Are you a regular maker of fruity table-decorations? Do you feel inspired to grab yourself a citron and start carving? Are you aware of any historical sources that I’ve missed that might help fill in some of the blanks in my research? If so, please do let me know, via the comments.
Footnotes
- 1A closer comparison between the contents of Le Vrai Cuisinier and L’escole Parfaite may reveal close similarities and confirm whether or not Varenne’s work was plagiarised entire for the latter, but that sort of thing lies outside the scope of this article. ↩︎
- 2Julia Abramson, ‘Vegetable Carving: For Your Eyes Only‘ in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008. ↩︎
- 3Julia Abramson, ‘Vegetable Carving: For Your Eyes Only‘ in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008. ↩︎
