Un recoin de liberté artistique au fémininla cuisine dans le couvent

Abstract

Eighteenth-century women found creative freedom within convents. In Enlightened and Catholic Spain, these places of female confinement flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Within them, religious women devoted themselves to several arts: writing, music, painting, sewing and cooking. The “art of food” reached every corner of the secluded internment and the convent turned out to be a magnificent laboratory of gastronomic art, from the kitchen garden to the farm, via the kitchen, the canteen, the infirmary, the cells, the tower, and the library. The nuns developed their artistic interests thanks to a culinary savoir-faire that improved throughout the eighteenth-century thanks to the arrival of overseas products as well as the impact of its evolution beyond their walls. Finally, it may be considered as the sociological reflection of a female elite that found refuge in spaces far away from heteropatriarchal society