Good morning all!

A fairly abstract Fem Fri for you today – a series of links about abundance – and there's some incredible stuff under that capacious umbrella. Enjoy.

Let's start in the early modern era. They really understood the luxury lifestyle in the early modern era, as this article about cookbooks demonstrates. If you fancy trying this yourself, do let me know how it goes:

Make the likeness of a Ship in Paste-board, with Flags and Streamers, the Guns belonging to it of Kickses, bind them about with packthread, and cover them with close paste proportionable to the fashion of a Cannon with Carriages, lay them in places convenient as you see them in Ships of war, with such holes and trains of powder that they may all take Fire; Place your Ship firm in the great Charger; then make a salt round about it, and stick therein egg-shells full of sweet water, you may by a great Pin take all the meat out of the egg by blowing, and then fill it up with the rose-water, then in another Charger have the proportion of a Stag made of course paste, with a broad Arrow in the side of him, and his body filled up with claret-wine; in another Charger at the end of the Stag have the proportion of a Castle with Battlements, Portcullices, Gates and Draw-Bridges made of Past-board, the Guns and Kickses, and covered with course paste as the former; place it at a distance from the ship to fire at each other.

The thing that I love about this is how much it mixes its metaphors. I can just about get behind ships and castles fighting each other – one can buy chess sets on this theme – but there's also an enormous stag full of claret in the mix. Where does he fit in. Is he as big as the ship and the castle? If no, is that enough wine? Turns out you aren't really meant to worry about these questions because:

printed cookery books were socially aspirational culinary fantasias that claimed to offer a window onto the life of the most privileged by purporting – usually quite spuriously – to be making available the secret recipes of a particular noble household. The idea is not that the reader might prepare any of these dishes as home; rather that, conversely, they might be imaginatively transported into a world of luxury, abundance and multi-sensory pleasure that itself constituted a lavish work of fiction.

https://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/2020/05/31/seventeenth-century-cookery-dont-try-this-at-home/

Now, in the modern modern era, here's artist Barbara Iweins who has taken a photo of everything she owns as an art project. I have to admit that I am impressed by this project while also finding it exceptionally stressful to think about:

in the ‘katalog’ project, barbara iweins shares photographs of all the 10,532 objects in her house, isolated and classified according to specific criteria. for two years, 15 hours a week, the belgian photographer spent time in voluntary isolation, documenting all her possessions as an experiment to help her face the value of her belongings in total honesty.

https://www.designboom.com/art/barbara-iweins-photographs-objects-house-katalog-06-23-2020/

Finally, in an era so far away it's not at all modern, here's the Ivory Bangle Lady, a Black Briton of the past who was buried with some lovely objects that tell us so much about her:

The coffin contained a skeleton of a woman, laid to rest with a range of unusual objects. She wore bangles of elephant ivory as well as bangles made from Whitby jet. Ivory and jet are both types of jewellery associated with high status women. She was also wearing a large necklace of blue-glass beads and a pair of yellow-glass earrings.

https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/18512013.object-week-roman-yorks-ivory-bangle-lady/

I hope your weekend is a time of plenty,

A xxx.