Mini: Food and Cooking in Early Modern England
Shakespeare features food all over his plays--he even names characters after food! Today, we are diving into the culinary landscape of Early Modern England and learning more about the foods (and foodies) of the time.
Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to another Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing.
Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because, well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.
KS: In today’s episode, we’ll be talking about food and drink in early modern England and Shakespeare’s plays.
ES: According to John Tufts, actor, cook and author of Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s TablES: “Shakespeare talks a lot … about food. He talks about food people eat, he talks about how people look like food, he insults people with food, he names characters after food, he bakes his characters into food!” And Tufts is not wrong.
KS: From Twelfth Night 1.3, Sir Andrew AguecheeKS: “I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.” Essentially Sir Andrew is, comically, saying that beef has contributed to his stupidity.
ES: From Macbeth 2.3, the Porter: “Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things … nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire but takes away the performance.” The Porter is listing all of the consequences of drinking (typically while quite drunk!)
KS: From As You Like It 3.2, TouchstonES: “Truly, thou art damned like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.” Oof. What an insult!
ES: Now, if Shakespeare is obsessed with food, it only makes sense that food was vital for people from his time. In the early modern period, health and food were inextricably linked. As we discussed in our four humours mini-episode, diet was an important component of health. The 12th or 13th century lifestyle and diet book The Regimen sanitatis Salernitatnum had been translated into almost every European language and saw nearly forty editions by 1501. In 1528, King’s Printer and Bookbinder for Henry VIII, Thomas Berthelet, published Thomas Paynell’s English translation of the Regimen.
KS: And so food was a tool for balancing out your body’s humours, which means that the food an early modern Englishperson ate was chosen in order to balance out their body. (Again, listen to our four humours episode if you have not yet!) For example, if your body runs cold, you would want to eat spicier food. If you served duck, which doctors said was cold, adding pepper, which was hot, would provide the spice your body required to balance out your cold humour. And you’d do the reverse if your body runs hot.
ES: And if you’re wondering what Shakespeare would have eaten for breakfast, according to Tudor and 17th Century Experience owner and founder Brigitte Webster, breakfast was not a meal eaten during the medieval times by most people. It was specifically children, old people, sick people and pregnant women who were entitled to this meal. However, working people, travelers, and the rich classes took up an early morning meal by the Elizabethan era. What did these people eat? Bread. The wealthy ate a bread called manchet; working people ate a bread called cheat. Shakespeare likely ate the latter.
KS: Fun fact: it wasn’t until Dutch workers immigrated to England in the late 16th century that the English spread butter on their bread – previously they used lard. And if you were wealthy, you might have added rosemary or sage to the butter for taste or medicinal purposes in order to eat and live healthily.
ES: The biggest meal of the day for an Elizabethan was dinner, which was eaten midday, or between 11 o’clock and noon. The dinner hour was strict and it was unusual for a dinner to be served later than noon. We know this because salty guests have written about how unusual it was for their host to wish to eat dinner at a later time, like one o’clock.
KS: Their final meal – what we today think of as dinner – was called supper. In the early modern period (obviously before electricity!) people had to prepare their meal before it got dark. Lighting your kitchen by candle was expensive; and the alternative, rushlights made from animal fat, was not ideal for a kitchen environment due to the smell.
ES: If you watch a period drama set in the Tudor and early Stuart period, you will likely see the food of this time depicted as meat-centric–lots of roasts and stews accompanied by crusty slices of bread; or King Henry VIII munching on a turkey leg. However, the cuisine in Shakespeare’s time was much more diverse than that. First of all, the church’s liturgical calendar dictated on which days meat could be eaten: Wednesdays and Fridays were meat free, as well as the seasons of Advent and Lent. Those found to be eating or selling meat on these days would be heavily fined, so having separate menus for these days was essential.
KS: And in Shakespeare’s time, people ate very spicy and intensely flavored food. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, there was an international European cuisine with imported ingredients from China, India and the Spice Islands (a small group of islands in the north-east of Indonesia) – so think cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom. And while myth claims that spices were used to hide the taste of spoiled meat, Wendy Wall, author of Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, debunks that myth. Spices were too expensive for that use and were, instead, used for their value. If an early moderner wanted to preserve meat, they could use salt, which was far less expensive.
ES: While medieval England had produced a useful range of culinary vegetables, new gardening technologies were brought over from Holland and Flanders by Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr. There was a growing demand for fresh vegetables which led to the establishment of market gardens in England. In turn, this led to more varieties of fruits and vegetables becoming available for use in the Early Modern kitchen. According to Peter Brears’s Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England, the following is a list of all vegetables, fruits, and herbs used in Robert May’s 1660 book of recipes entitled Accomplisht CooKS:
KS: Vegetables: artichokes (globe and Jerusalem), asparagus, beans (French and garden), beetroot, white cabbages, cauliflowers, carrots, chives, red coleworts, cucumbers, white endive, gourds, cabbage lettuce, musk melons, champignon mushrooms, onions, parsnips, crucifix peas, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, skirrets, spinach, turnips and watercress.
ES: Herbs: alexanders, balm, bloodwort, borage, burnet, camomile, chervil, corn-salad, wild garlic, marigold flowers, marjoram, mint, parsley, pennyroyal, purslane, rosemary, red sage, samphire, savory, scurvy-grass, sorrel, succory, tansy and thyme.
KS: Fruits: apples, apple codlings, pippins apples, apricots, barberries, cherries, damsons, gooseberries, grapes, lemons, medlars, melons, oranges, pears, plums, quinces, raspberries, strawberries and wardens.
ES: The most important of these, according to Brears, were the recent additions of citrus fruits and potatoes to the English diet. Oranges and lemons went from being a rare delicacy to being imported in much larger quantities. They provided an alternative to vinegar in many recipes and could be combined with sugar for banquet sweetmeats. Their juices made excellent sauces for meats such as capon. Both the sweet potato and the Virginian potato (for those horticulturalists out there, that’s Ipomoea batatos and Solanum tuberosum, respectively) were grown in and imported into England during this time, though they remained comparatively rare throughout the period.
KS: And, if you lived in London, you could get any and all of your food from a large or small market that would be open daily until dark; in a small brick and mortar food shop; or go to an Elizabethan cookery shop and buy what Brigitte Webster calls “an Elizabethan takeaway”. That includes ready-made meats, pies, tarts and soups. Unless they were chefs, men didn’t cook; so Inns with restaurants were options for single or working men.
ES: Additionally, the shift from medieval feudal society saw changes in the running of noble households that affected the national diet. As the newly wealthy entrepreneurial class grew and acquired estates, they did not inherit the same responsibilities or established relationships with those that lived on their property compared to the more established families. This new generation of estate owners did not need or want to provide employment to an extensive number of serving men, which were now seen as more of a drain on finances than a symbol and source of power and status. They favored a smaller number of staff and cut back on medieval hospitality traditions. Gentlemanly serving men who were loyal companions to their employers were gradually replaced by fewer low-status servants who provided only basic domestic services.
KS: This left a vacuum in the lesser noble and gentry houses, which still required someone to oversee the running of the household. The obvious replacement for these new estate owners was the unpaid labor of their wives. While royal and noble wives had previously been provided (and were in charge of running) entirely separate households, while the main household was left to the care of servingmen who reported directly to their masters, noblewomen of early modern England saw their role expanding into domestic management of their husband’s estates.
ES: This shift was not without some misogynistic panic. Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, protested that the kitchen, buttery, or pantry “are not places proper for [women]” and that men should keep command over their servants in their own hands instead of handing it over to their wives. He was convinced that if a wife were given control over the household accounts, she would cut essentials in order to spend on her own vanities. However, these misogynistic views were anathema to the beliefs of many of the Earl’s contemporaries. For example, in Thomas Fuller’s 1642 book, The Holy State, the first chapter of the first volume is entitled The Good Wife and details the benefits of wifely care.
KS: These noble women kept diaries that confirm their expanding role and show that they not only instructed their servants in all household manners, they led them by example. According to Peter Brears’s Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England, “around 1600, Lady Margaret Hoby recorded her days spent in supervising the sowing of wheat, measuring corn in the granary, catching trout or crayfish, gathering apples, pulling hemp, potting honey, preserving and candlemaking. These and a whole series of other tasks were of paramount importance in this age of domestic self-sufficiency.”
ES: And despite the Earl of Northumberland’s misgivings, many noble ladies were excellent practical cooks and more than capable of running a kitchen and a household. While the household cook would take care of everyday meals, the lady of the house would focus on specific high-quality dishes for their own tables and banquets. They collected recipes and carefully transcribed them into manuscript recipe books. According to Peter Brears, “some of these are of exceptional size and quality, far exceeding any of the man-authored printed recipe books of Elizabetahn or Jacobean date” and their instructions, including “how to determine the desirable qualities of most foodstuffs, show that they had a deep understanding of raw materials and knew how to obtain the best value for their money.”
KS: Wendy Wall recounts that, as she was reading through approximately 150 recipe collections manuscripts, she had found that the authors did not segregate medical recipes from food recipes. For example, one early modern cookbook had an epilepsy recipe followed by a dessert. In addition, some meals might have benefits nutritionally and medicinally. According to Wall, one was a cough syrup said to help your lungs, but it could also be served at a very fancy dinner party for dessert.
ES: The recipe manuscripts are also a window into the women cooking in an early modern English kitchen. And some of these manuscript authors had a sense of humor. One manuscript contains marginalia that says, “How to make a right Presbyterian: you combine malice and pride and ambition, and you mix it up.”
KS: Other recipes included in these manuscripts were transcribed from printed cookery books. As publishers recognized wealthy women’s growing interest in recipes and culinary information, they began to issue more titles to meet this growing new market. England had its most active cookery and recipe publication between 1550 and 1650.
ES: And the published cookbooks also tell us a lot about what was happening in the early modern English kitchen. First and foremost, these published books tell us who was cooking what and when. In addition, one of the recipe books, Delights for Ladies by Hugh Plat, had a poem in the preface that says the housewife is like the eternal artist or like a god who can take things out of nature and make them immortal in time. During this time, we also see new words entering the English language to describe the people who are now performing kitchen worKS: “woman-cook” first appeared in 1530, “kitchenmaid” in 1550, “kitchen-wench” in 1590, “scullion-wench” in 1602, and female “Housekeeper” in 1607.
KS: Now let’s pivot back to Shakespeare’s plays to see where early modern English food and cooking show up in his plays.
ES: For instance, in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth makes something called a posset – a drink made of hot, spiced milk made into a drinkable curd with wine or ale – which she drugs and gives to the guards as she and Macbeth plot to kill King Duncan. Wendy Wall wondered if an elite member of Scotland would even know how to make a drug like that. Turns out, during Shakespeare’s time, women did have chemistry sets in their kitchens so Lady Macbeth could make this dangerous drink. Peter Brears also mentions that the drink itself would be incredibly relaxing. If served as dessert, it could turn a “lively dinner-party into a group of dozing drones”–even without additional soporific drugs.
KS: In Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal at one point tries to quiet Fallstaff by saying “Peace, chewet, peace!” To our modern ear, chewet may sound like a nonsense Shakespearean insult, however the word “chewet” is actually, according to John Tufts, an anglicization of the French pastry dough, pȃte à choux (or for those familiar with Great British Bake-Off “choux pastry” – the dough eclairs are made out of). Chewets, as a dish, were individual-size small pies that had a hand-pinched rim and were filled with either minced meat or fish. So, Hal is calling his friend a doughy meat pie.
ES: And of course, in Titus Andronicus, two characters are baked into a meat pie as a result of an on-going series of revenge plots. This pie would be similar to your standard hand-held meat pie sold in Inns or those Elizabethan takeaway shops Brigitte Webster mentioned.
KS: But we don’t have time to talk more about cannibalism in this mini-episode!
ES: If you’re interested in learning more about food and cooking in Shakespeare’s time, we have some recommendations! First, hop over to John Tuft’s Youtube channel to watch his cooking videos; and then buy his book, Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare's Table, which resurrects over 100 recipes straight from the plays of William Shakespeare.
KS: If you want to see what a cookbook from Shakespeare’s time looked like, look up (or buy) Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, published by Hilary Spurling, which contains recipes in a manuscript inscribed by Elinor Fettiplace from 1604 through her lifetime. It’s a direct view at cooking in an early modern aristocratic house.
ES: Last, but not least, if you’d like an in-depth exploration of food, dining, and hospitality in Tudor and Early Stuart England, get a copy of Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England by food historian Peter Brears.
KS: And that’s food and cooking in early modern England!
ES: Thank you for listening to this episode.
Quote of the Episode:
KS: From King Henry VI pt. 3 act five, scene four, spoken by Queen Margaret, “Our slaughter'd friends the tackles; what of these?”
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was "Korey Leigh Smith".
Episode written and researched by Elyse Sharp and Kourtney Smith.
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
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Works referenced:
Brears, Peter. Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England. Prospect Books, 2015. .
Cash, Cassidy, and Brigitte Webster. “ Shakespeare’s Daily Diet with Brigitte Webster.” That Shakespeare Life, performance by Cassidy Cash, season 1, episode 42, 4 Feb. 2019, https://www.cassidycash.com/shakespeare-daily-diet/. Accessed 10 May 2022.
Hughes, Glyn. “Foods of England Cheat.” Foods of England - Cheat, 1 Mar. 2022, http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/cheat.htm.
Paul, Richard. “You Will Hie You Home to Dinner: The Food of Shakespeare's World.” Shakespeare Unlimited, performance by Wendy Wall, and Barbara Bogaev, season 1, episode 53, 26 July 2016, https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/food-wendy-wall. Accessed 10 May 2022.
Tufts, John. Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare's Table. John Tufts, 2020.
Tufts, John. Performance by John Tufts, Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare's Table, Episode 1: Chewets, Youtube, 7 Apr. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIVBetm29ck. Accessed 10 May 2022.
