A couple of weeks back I noted the connection between food and sin in religious art of the late Middle Ages — clearly the business of eating was riddled with spiritual pitfalls. It’s hardly surprising, then, to see the devil commonly cast as a cook.

This 13th century mosaic set in the grand dome of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence depicts the devil in his hellish kitchen roasting, boiling and devouring the damned. In a recent visit to Florence, I imagined the devout looking up to see the implements of their own domestic lives — roasting pots, skewers and spits — turned against them in this chilling representation of life alienated from God.

The connection between cooks and the devil lingered in Western culture. The 17th century English Bishop John Earle wrote, “The kitchen is his hell, and he the devil in it, where his meat and he fry together.” In the same era, the novelist Thomas Deloney declared, “God sends meat and the Devil sends cooks.”

I wonder what it is about the process of turning raw ingredients into a delicious repast that elicits such grim associations. Granted, I’ve met a few cooks who could, where character is concerned, give the devil a run for his money. And others who revel in the association. Marco Pierre White’s autobiography The Devil in the Kitchen and the late Anthony Bordain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly play on it. But to associate the depravity of hell with a spit roast or a stew pot simmering in the kitchen seems like a slap in the face to those who feed us, let alone those who, like the angelic Babette, open up vistas to things eternal through the act of cooking.