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And the winner for most fabulous dessert trencher display is....
The Arts of Living gallery in the Norwich Castle Museum in Norwich, England!
The Norwich gallery has nearly their entire collection of trenchers on display, AND they have placed the trenchers in context of the highly competitive Tudor banquet. The display includes spoons and a sampling of the cute little sweets one might have eaten at a (Dutch*) banquet.
They also have a really excellent website, that includes the one trencher they own that is not on display.
The excellence of the banqueting display continues into the other galleries and displays at the Norwich Castle Museum. They are the only museum (of the apx 39 museums/castles visited in the past three weeks) that actually bothered to put a piece of wood in their spindle-whorls to make the use of them obvious! They put pieces of bridles on a silhouette of a horse so even I could understand what the parts were!
Norwich Castle Museum, along with the Museum of London, are the two best museums I visited for putting their displays medieval and Tudor "stuff" in the context of how people used the stuff. Highly recommended.
*Yes, Dutch. While I've found many pictures of banquetting stuff by both English and Dutch painters, the letter-shaped sweets are only present in the Dutch paintings. The "Butter Letters" are still a Dutch holiday tradition and I can't find anything similar in the English recipe books around 1600ce. [Edited to add, I was wrong about this: Sir Hugh Plat mentions letter-shaped marchpanes in his 1609 Delights for Ladies.]
The Norwich gallery has nearly their entire collection of trenchers on display, AND they have placed the trenchers in context of the highly competitive Tudor banquet. The display includes spoons and a sampling of the cute little sweets one might have eaten at a (Dutch*) banquet.
They also have a really excellent website, that includes the one trencher they own that is not on display.
The excellence of the banqueting display continues into the other galleries and displays at the Norwich Castle Museum. They are the only museum (of the apx 39 museums/castles visited in the past three weeks) that actually bothered to put a piece of wood in their spindle-whorls to make the use of them obvious! They put pieces of bridles on a silhouette of a horse so even I could understand what the parts were!
Norwich Castle Museum, along with the Museum of London, are the two best museums I visited for putting their displays medieval and Tudor "stuff" in the context of how people used the stuff. Highly recommended.
*Yes, Dutch. While I've found many pictures of banquetting stuff by both English and Dutch painters, the letter-shaped sweets are only present in the Dutch paintings. The "Butter Letters" are still a Dutch holiday tradition and I can't find anything similar in the English recipe books around 1600ce. [Edited to add, I was wrong about this: Sir Hugh Plat mentions letter-shaped marchpanes in his 1609 Delights for Ladies.]