Deconstructing Velázquez’s (Cooking) Masterpiece

Deconstructing Velázquez’s (Cooking) Masterpiece

I was standing in the crowd blocking the exit door from "El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III" – a spectacular exhibition organized by Boston’s MFA in the spring/summer 2008. The people around me were clearly mesmerized by the very last painting in the show – Velázquez’s “Old Woman Cooking Eggs”, 1618. The painting seemed like the Grand Finale to the exhibition as the artist demonstrated in it his virtuoso mastery assembling not only a still life of all various objects with their textures and colors found in a working kitchen, but adding to it two wonderful portraits of a cook and a boy, the kitchen subjects.

As I was enjoying the painting, I was glued to it by a different reason than everybody else – I could not believe my eyes.

No, this will not be an art review, by any means. My reason for surprise was in what I read in the curator’s notes to the painting. Explaining the art and historical background of the work, the notes mention rather matter-of-factly that it depicts an old woman frying her eggs in “hot oil”. Having read that, I looked at the painting again and said, “No way!”

Not that I was shocked by a 19-year old artist calling a woman, who looks like she is barely over 50, “old”, but in my years in the kitchen, I have a sense not only for how things are supposed to look, but how they transition through the time and space of a kitchen, and the Velázquez’s depiction had disrupted that little of my pride possession rather violently.

What drew my attention at first was that:

1. as depicted, the eggs look as they are being poached, not fried; nothing in the painting points to what we call today as deep-frying – a rather smoky and bubbly cooking technique associated with “hot oil”

2. I had never heard of deep-frying the freshly cracked eggs and could not imagine what this vigorous medium may do to this mercurial substance

3. even if I wanted, in no way I would be able to reenact what is shown in the picture in my home kitchen to prove my point, as I do not think I have enough insurance coverage to risk putting a clay pot filled with oil on fire

Coming out from the exhibition, I felt personally challenged. For a cook, a mere mention of “frying” and “hot oil” resonates immediately with a very specific kitchen reality in which certain things need to look and be in a certain way. When developed to a professional level, this perception allows writing recipes in a restaurant setting listing only the ingredients and without the instructions of how to cook them. And the Velázquez’s depiction did not ring of reality I knew.

I felt as I was onto something like a 390-year old error which I was obliged to point to for the art world known for its sensitivity to this sort of mistakes. How I was surprised when my enthusiastic desire to help returned a painful blow and not from the art world, but rather from the culinary world!

When I sent my observations to Boston’s MFA, they replied with a warm and attentive note indicating that my arguments made sense and they would communicate them to The National Gallery of Scotland which owns the painting. The “culinary blow” came from the Cook’s Illustrated magazine which I praised very highly not only for their well-deserved cooking authority, but for their reliably being called the American Test-kitchen where they perfect every recipe and verify every little culinary quirk which comes along. Being a subscriber to the magazine for many years and appreciating their style, I felt that it was a story which can ascend to the level of subjects they cover and may interest their readers.

Leaving aside a difficult process of contacting the magazine’s Editorial office as if it has been outsourced overseas, when their reply finally arrived, it blew two out of three of my points listed above, namely, that the deep-fried fresh eggs are a well-known staple of the Spanish cuisine, and that the Spanish restaurants routinely use clay pots for deep frying. The replier did not bother to elaborate any further and left my follow-up list of questions without a response and without an indication of why this story falls off their wagon.

I still think and hear from people with whom I share it that it is an interesting story. The reply from Cook’s Illustrated gave me an additional jolt to research it a bit further, but even though it has been confirmed that the Spaniards seem come close to deep-frying their fresh eggs, the Velázquez’s masterpiece cannot be used by the Cook’s Illustrated to depict how they go about it. Although every single object shown by Velázquez has a place in the kitchen, when looked at in aggregate they do not combine into a how-to for anybody who would want to reenact "Vieja Friendo Huevos" (Old Woman Frying Eggs).

So, folks, do not try it at home as yet before these questions have been answered:

1. The picture shows a cast-iron dish (brazier?) used as a burner under the pot in which the eggs are being cooked. Is it a customary heating device used for cooking in a Spanish kitchen of the 17th century? To use it for cooking, someone needs to load it with smoldering charcoals from the main stove or a fireplace and carry it away to the place where the cooking will be done (away from where it is usually done: the stove!). What would explain a need to cook something away from the main stove?
2. The burner dish has only two short knobs for carrying it around. To carry it loaded with burning coals is dangerous – you may trip and fall, burn yourself, and set off a fire. But even if you are careful, you need two rather huge clumps of rags to carry it over, and if it is any sizable distance, the rags may begin smoldering and you will be at risk of burning your hands, and then you would need to be ready to extinguish your rags. Did they have any special contraptions to transport the braziers?
3. I can see where it would be unavoidable had the braziers been used as the spot heaters in bedrooms and other areas remote from fireplaces and furnaces. But what would necessitate their use for cooking particularly considering their tiny capacity for the coals and a need to have a special size dish fitting on this burner as we see it in the painting and a total impossibility to control the heat under the pot?
4. As depicted, it makes it virtually impossible for the coals to burn – there is no openings for access of air and no way for the smoke to escape. If the braziers were to be used as cooking burners, wouldn't the cooks be concerned with maintaining a more or less permanent working temperature of the burner? I doubt that as shown, the burner would be capable of giving off enough heat even for 10-15.
5. It is hard to imagine what may attract the cooks to using the clay pots for deep-frying if as the Cook’s Illustrated testifies, it is a popular kitchen utensil for this purpose in Spanish restaurants. I wonder how to explain away an inevitable fear of putting a clay pot filled with oil on the fire – a pot which comes from the restaurant's dishwashing area where it has gone through all this banging and rough handling which may leave some micro-cracks, not easily visible, but which may lead to destruction of a pot and a fire. It must be a very good (culinary) reason to gamble with such a risk. What can it be?

6. On the subject of Fried Eggs, Spanish style, even a cursory look at the reference sites leaves no doubt that this was indeed a traditional way to cook eggs. I found many praises for the dish and read many passionate remarks. And yet, for someone who has never tried it, it remains unclear what gives this method an edge against, say, a simple poaching of the eggs. They talk of a creamy, runny yolk, but poaching and soft-boiling give you a runny yolk as well. They talk about brownish edges on the whites, but it does not sound like a gustatory breakthrough. Maybe, it is the olive oil? But they never mention how it is different compared with a simple drizzle of a fragrant, uncooked oil on a poached egg.

7. Some explain commonality of the dish by abundance of olive oil in central and southern Spain. But as every cook knows, frugality is the cornerstone of any kitchen. Definitely, the olive oil is not as plentiful in Spain as water. What attracts the Spaniards to cook their eggs in olive oil?
If we look at the Velázquez’s painting from this angle, it is practically obvious that the Old Woman started her cooking with a fresh batch of oil (if she cooks in oil), and when she is done with her measly three eggs, the oil is so muddled with egg whites that she will be throwing it away. This is not frugal!
Having read the original Spanish recipes for Fried Eggs, I can suggest a different version for attractiveness of this dish. It seems that the fried eggs are customarily served accompanied by more than a toast that is with potatoes and other veggies, sausages, bacon, etc. When this is the case, one can see that it would make sense to fry your veggies and sausages in the oil first, and then add some more oil to the pot and quickly fry your eggs saving time on a whole new routine of cooking the eggs from scratch in a new pot, and serving your dish nice and hot.

To cook such a dish, one would need a stove for an option to move your pot off the fire if it gets too hot and a working surface with the prep next to it. Looking at the Velázquez’s depiction, we do not see any of it. Where will the cooked eggs go? They will not survive re-plating!

8. Now, the cooking technique. As often with recipes, the multitude of variables determine the end-result, and one needs to try it out at least once to be fairly confident of what to expect. With Spanish deep-fried eggs, the closest which comes to mind is when we cook the fresh eggs in butter. The French call it Eggs Bercy, we call it Sunny-side up.

The technique for this dish canonized by A. Escoffier calls for just enough butter to cover the bottom of the pan. Actually, you take enough butter to be able to collect some in a spoon, when melted and very hot and the eggs are being cooked, to baste the yolks to speed up cooking and to prevent overcooking on the bottom before the eggs have been cooked through. Sometimes they call it “to caress the yolks”.

For a mere purpose of cooking the eggs through, it should not be any different to cook them in oil from how we cook them in butter. It is not apparent what would suggest a need for a larger amount of oil as depicted by Velázquez. I can see a difference with oil as a cooking medium. If butter sizzles at around 210 deg F which signals you to slide the cracked eggs into the pan, then with oil you will be uncertain until it is very, very hot. However, if the technique you use is the same as that with butter (just the amount to cover the bottom), then you will probably be okay as putting your eggs in the pan will bring the temperature down rapidly. But if I am to demonstrate the effect of the super-hot oil in the quantity depicted by Velázquez on raw eggs, I would ask for a full firefighter’s gear.

9. Be it butter or oil (much more so with oil), one incontestable fact is that your eggs get cooked in seconds, not even in minutes. Escoffier says, “Great attention should be given to the cooking process, a few seconds more or less than required time is sufficient to spoil the eggs”.

Now, looking at the picture, can anybody say that the (not so) Old Woman pays any attention to her cooking? She is fully engaged in a conversation with the boy and says something to him which puts him in a dreamy mood. The woman definitely knows that she’s got time before her eggs are done. Does she know it better than Escoffier does?

10. It is not my goal here to dig out the story of the painting’s travels in these 390 years. It is known as “Old Woman Frying Eggs” in all the art books. Yet someone at some point renamed it into “Old Woman Cooking Eggs” and as such it is displayed at MFA. Has someone noticed that the title does not quite reflect the contents of the picture?

Despite the new title, the curator’s notes still talk about cooking the eggs in “hot oil”. What may make the oil “stick” is the boy in the picture holding a giant flask half-filled with a transparent liquid which looks like oil. The depicted action could be laid out like this: the woman asked the boy on his way to pick up a pumpkin to bring over some oil to fry eggs. The boy returned with a flask of oil and before walking back with it, he and the woman stroke a pretty intense conversation.

For a viewer, the flask in the boy’s hands serves as a comfortable support point corresponding with the painting’s title. It would have explained the “frying”, had there be no other questions to the kitchen dynamics.

Some suggested that the flask may contain not the oil, but some wine for the table, and the boy has nothing to do with the woman frying the eggs except for distracting her at the risk of burning her cooking. The wine version seems a bit tipsy here as well because one would ask inevitably what sort of wine it would be. If we dwell on this for a minute, the transparent wine in the boy’s carafe can be either a dry white or Jerez. If we assume that the wine goes with the meal then it is most likely a beginning of breakfast or early lunch and the eggs yet to be served to the table in a minute or two. Therefore, it is unlikely for the wine to be Jerez enjoyed usually at the end of the meal and hardly for breakfast and not from such a giant and plain flask. It is also unlikely that the diners sent the boy to bring some dry white wine as it has never been the Spain’s claim to glory. Spain is famous for its reds, but the white wines “are still atrociously boring” (R.M. Parker, Jr. “Parker’s Wine Buyer’s Guide”, 1999).

Summarizing all of the above points, I remain unconvinced that Velázquez depicted the particular cooking technique of the eggs. If that is the case, I would still bend towards poaching rather than deep-frying. But more than anything else I think that the painter created his picture without any strong references to the method of cooking, but to show off his magnificent skill. I believe that the title “Old Woman Cooking Eggs” (I still have an issue with the “Old”) conveys the subject of the painting more accurately: that is an artificial and artful staging of random objects for a painting session happened to take place in a kitchen to bring about all sorts of textures and colors. This explains the sparkling new cooking clay pot and the shiny mortar and pestle – realities of a day-to-day kitchen were not Velázquez’s focal point, and emphasis on “frying” or use of “hot oil” in the curatorial notes seems somewhat unwarranted.

From the standpoint of the cooking realities, to attribute the Velázquez’s depiction specifically to “frying” (“deep-frying” considering the amount of the oil shown) would be the same as to agree with the critics of the famous painting by E. Manet “Luncheon on the Grass” who savaged the picture in 1863 for seemingly realistic depiction of human behavior - The Frenchmen don’t behave like that on picnics!

In our case, to believe that one can fry her eggs as shown by Velázquez is the same as to think that the Spaniards may sometimes appear in the nude in a working kitchen in real life.