Hell’s Kitchen: Cooking as Eternal Punishment
When medieval artists were called upon to depict eternal punishment, the imagery they most often turned to was culinary. Hell was frequently envisioned as an immense, malevolent kitchen in which devil-cooks tormented the damned using the same tools and technique as any household cook would recognize from her own hearth.
One early fourteenth-century picture Bible depicts a dishonest baker and an equally dishonest ale-wife suspended to stew together in a single pot above the flames issuing from the maw of Hell, alongside other condemned who bubble in a nearby cauldron. A particular illustrated moral tract, intended to instruct the illiterate in the nature and significance of the seven deadly sins, chose the punishment of gluttony with a certain precision: Dives, the wealthy man of Gospel of Luke who had refused, despite his riches, to grant even the crumbs to the beggar Lazarus at his gate, is shown eternally stewing in one of the cauldrons that dot Hell’s landscape, condemned to the precise reverse of the riches he had hoarded so selfishly and exclusively in his lifetime.
Not all such scenes of kitchen-torture were portrayed exactly as they might have been. One particularly arresting picture shows St John the Evangelist being boiled in oil on the orders of a Roman emperor — his cooks visibly flinching and protecting their faces from the heat of the flames, the saint himself reclining idly in the bubbling oil as if at home in his own bath, hands raised in a mildly infuriating gesture of prayer.
It is a telling observation that even the equipment of Hell’s kitchens — the cauldrons, spits and blazing fires — bore sufficient resemblance to their earthly counterparts to be instantly recognizable to medieval eyes, no matter whether or not the holy figure being boiled, grilled or seared happened to be in a particularly ecstatic state of spiritual contentment or not.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.