I Made a Pocket!

Did you know that enormous pockets were the norm in the Renaissance?  Neither did I before I started doing serious research on 16th century clothing.  They started to appear in the late 14th century, and remained in fashion at least through the 18th, but went out when sheer dresses came into style around 1800.  Ladies' pockets tied on around the waist, rather than being sewn into the garment, and would look a little funny under a sheer gown!  I have no idea if they came back in under the more modest dresses of the Victorian period or not.  So if you've ever wondered, like I did, why medieval people usually have purses or pouches but Renaissance people usually don't, this is why!

So, naturally, I had to have pockets!  Or rather, pocket, singular, since one is more than enough space to hold everything I need with me at Renfaire!  I made one last year when I was just getting into historical sewing, and it works well, but the tie- which will show under my open bodiced Venetian dress- is red, so I'm making another using the same method.  The pocket and its tie are made of a midweight white linen that matches my camica well so it hopefully won't be too obvious.

I decided to embroider my pocket, mostly for fun and to practice my embroidery on something that won't actually show when I'm wearing it.  First I outlined the front piece of the pocket on the fabric, making sure I gave myself enough room to store the essentials- phone, lip balm, wallet, sunscreen, etc.  Then I drew a simple, Italian inspired but not quite historical spiral pattern on the pocket in blue tailor's pencil and put the whole piece of fabric in my embroidery hoop.  doing the embroidery before cutting helps prevent your pattern piece from fraying while you embroider it!  Since this piece isn't actually going to be seen while I'm wearing it, I didn't do anything too elaborate.  It's pretty much all stem stitch with a little satin stitch, all in 3 strands of wine red DMC floss.

Once the embroidery was done, I folded the fabric over and cut out the front and back pieces together, leaving a double seam allowance so I can do French seams.  I pinned the two pieces together, wrong sides together, stitched using half the wide seam allowance, trimmed the seam allowance, flipped them right sides together, and stitched again to create a French seam.  I usually prefer flat felled seams for garments, but the bulk of a French seam doesn't matter on a pocket.

I stitched up the bottom and both sides of the pocket with French seams and then made a tie by sewing together thin strips of linen to make a total length long enough to wrap around my waist and tie a bow.  I sewed this to the pocket, right sides together, then flipped it, tucked in the raw edges, and whip stitched the entire length.

This project was really quick and easy, apart from the embroidery, which took some time.  I really like how it turned out, though I realized after the fact that I accidentally made it a lot smaller than my other pocket.  It still has enough room for everything I need, though, so this doesn't matter much!  I also tried it on with my Venetian dress, and the tie blends in with my camica well enough that it's not really noticeable.  So that's one more small piece ready to go for this year's RenFaire!

Fifteenth Century Pasta!!

Renaissance dinner!  This is what happens when I'm not allowed
to go to restaurants to try new things...

I write this blog because I'm curious not just about the major events of history, but about what life was like in the past.  Honestly, I care less about who was on which European throne in a given year than about how people lived.  Obviously, this covers a wide range of topics, and the one that interests me most is generally fashion, but I also really love food, so I decided to investigate some historical cooking!

I've been as bored as everyone else in quarantine, so I recently subscribed to The Great Courses, because what else is a housebound amature historian to do, and watched a lecture series on the history of food by Dr. Ken Albala.  One of the recipes from Renaissance Italy featured in this series is for pasta with pancetta (Italian bacon- you can use regular bacon instead), sugar, cinnamon, and cheese, and I was intrigued, so I tried it.  And it was really good!  And easy!  I would definitely do it again, and even my very picky brother liked it!

If you've delved into medieval and renaissance cuisine at all, you're probably aware that sugar and spices were used all the time, on or in practically every dish on upper-class tables.  This is because these ingredients came from far away (Asia and the Indian subcontinent, mostly), making them both exotic and very expensive.  This was a cuisine based around conspicuous consumption, and the spice trade was the main source of Venice's wealth in the Renaissance.  In fact, the spice trade was so lucrative in this period that the age of exploration was sparked in large part by Portugal trying to break Venice's monopoly on spices!  And no, despite what you may have been told in school, the spices were not needed to mask the taste of rotting meat.  Gross!  If that were the case, we probably wouldn't have survived the middle ages because everyone would have died of food borne illnesses! 

This particular dish is pretty typical of fifteenth century Italian cooking in its use of spices and sugar.  Keep in mind that what we today think of as traditionally Italian tomato sauce isn't available yet, since tomatoes are a new world plant, and weren't really seen in European cooking until the late sixteenth century.  It's weird to think about, isn't it?

This dish was really easy to prepare.  Dr. Albala made his own fresh pasta for this dish, but I didn't feel like taking the time to do that this time, so I used store bought fettuccine.  I cooked and drained my pasta.  Then I cooked some cubed pancetta in a saucepan, adding a bit of sugar (I was cooking for just me, and used maybe a tablespoon?  I just grabbed a small handful and didn't measure) and a generous amount of cinnamon, plus a dash of nutmeg when it was nearly done.  I did cheat a little by adding the nutmeg and using a tiny splash of heavy cream when I thought it needed a little more moisture, but both those ingredients are seen in these sorts of dishes in period, so I'm ok with it!  Finally when the pancetta was cooked, I added a generous amount of grated parmesan cheese and then mixed in my pasta.  I served it with more grated cheese and cinnamon on top.  

I know this sounds weird to modern tastes, but it was really good!  The sugar and spices glaze the pancetta, and the sweetness goes really nicely with the creamy, salty cheese.  I would definitely recommend trying this if you're at all curious about Renaissance dining!  I also highly recommend the lecture series I got the recipe from, Cooking Across the Ages, from The Great Courses, if you're quarantined and looking for something cool to watch.  He covers everything from ancient Rome to the 1980's, giving cooking demos from each period.  It's a really interesting look into one of the most basic human activities through history.