ABSTRACT
Much scholarly attention has been paid to patrons of early modern visual art, music and theatre. Along with artists, they set the styles that were widely imitated, and indeed that imitation spurred on innovation as a way to maintain distance and sophistication. This is equally true of the culinary arts, although food is somewhat more ephemeral than painting or architecture. Nonetheless, just as there are musical scores and scripts for plays, printed cookbooks and banquet manuals offer a rich record of how powerful people ate. This chapter will discuss several major cookbooks from the courts of western Europe as well as how to interpret them.
