De kok
<strong id="docs-internal-guid-eb27d475-7fff-94e8-9eaa-7c87d15ad1e5" style="font-weight:normal;"><span style="font-size:10pt;text-decoration:none;font-family:'Helvetica Neue';font-variant:normal;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap;font-weight:400;color:#000000;font-style:normal;background-color:transparent;">Though this painting certainly belongs to the tradition of kitchen scene's of Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer, there are some important differences. First, Bloemaert did not paint a religious scene in the background, and second, he did not paint raw meat. The moralizing or erotic nature of kitchen scene's has often been pointed out. Despite the lack of a religious element, the cook, as a corpulent ‘life-giver’, might still provide a deeper, more vulgar meaning to the painting. However, it is quite unlikely that a genre painting such as this one would belong to such a moralizing tradition. <span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">A cook stands in front of a wooden counter, holding a spit with a roast chicken. On the left, we can see part of the fireplace, while on the right two unplucked birds hang from the ceiling. According to a cookbook published in 1683, chicken was the tastiest of all poultry. When roasted it was ‘extremely tender and easy to digest, whether with rice or otherwise’.</span></span></strong>
