Kitchen utensils, meat, and vegetables This painting celebrates local autumnal produce, including pumpkins, cabbages, apples, and a late pea crop, sown in July and harvested and dried in October for the store cupboard. Herring, a mainstay of the Dutch economy and diet, await gutting. Rabbits, caught in snares as their ankle wounds reveal, await skinning. A slab of beef sirloin awaits roasting. The differently coloured pots and pans indicate different metals and uses. Those with blackened sooty exteriors were used over an open wood fire for general cookery. Those with shiny exteriors were used over more expensive but controllable burning charcoal for cooking at precise temperatures, for example, when making preserves.

Floris Gerritsz. van Schooten (1585/88 –1656)

Haarlem, Netherlands, c.1620 – 30 Oil on canvas Given by Prof. C. Hague, 1820 (96)

Conserved by Victoria Sutcliffe at the Hamilton Kerr Institute