Today's post is by Richard, who researched Shakespearean food for a 'show and tell' type session we had a couple of months ago. I get hungry just reading about it!
In the
late sixteenth/early seventeenth century, culinary customs were quite
remarkably divided between rich and poor, as are those of today. In the houses
of the well-to-do, servants prepared the food in separate areas (sometimes at
great distance from the dining halls). The kitchens had great brick ovens and
fireplaces where meat, fish and poultry were cooked over coals by
spit-roasting, boiling, smoking, frying or baking.
Fresh
food was purchased from dedicated livestock, poultry, fish and vegetable
markets on a more-or-less daily basis. Fire shovels, barrels and tubs were kept
in a pantry, there was a buttery (storage area for wines and provisions), wet
and dry larders, a spicery, a mealhouse for grain, a sieving or boiling house,
and coals were stored in a squillerie with brass pots and pans, pewter vessels,
herbs, covered dishes and a court cupboard.)
Meat was usually beef, coney
(rabbit), kid, lamb, mutton, pork, veal, and venison. Common dishes were meat
pie, sausage, and sheep’s feet.
Methods
of preserving fresh meat were by salting, vinegar soaking (with verjuice),
saucing, spicing, or by burying for one or two days after wrapping in cloth.
Spices, known as “good powders” included aniseed, bay leaf, cinnamon, clove,
cubeb (a Java berry tasting like allspice), fennel, ground ginger, mace, nutmeg
and pepper. Some of these were introduced as a result of the voyages of Sir
Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.
Fish was consumed widely by poorer
folk living near waterways and coastal areas, especially during the long
winters when meat was scarce. It included conger eel, gurner, haddock, herring,
lamprey (a type of eel), pilchard, mackerel, pike, salmon, sturgeon, tench and
whiting; crustaceans such as cockle,
crab, lobster, mussel and shrimp were
also widely enjoyed.
Poultry included bittern, blackbird,
brant (wild goose), crane, dove, duck, dunbird (wild duck), fowl (chicken),
goose, knot(sandpiper), lark, mallard, olicet, partridge, peewit, pelican,
plover, quail, sheldrake, sparrow, swan , teal, turkey and widgeon (duck.)
Vegetables
were most
widely consumed by the less well-off in country areas. Much of what was used
either grew wild or was home-produced. Artichoke, asparagus, bean, beetroot,
cabbage, carrot, cucumber, gourd, horseradish, lettuce, melon, olive, pea,
pumpkin, rape (canola) and skirret (water parsnip) were commonplace. There was much use of herbs such as borage,
chervil, clary(sage), cowslip, and sowthistle, plus greens, which included the
leaves of avens, borage, dandelion, dittany and hyssop (both mints), laver
(purple seaweed) orach (red and green), pellitory (climbing nettle), purslane
(pinkish fleshy stems), rocket, rose hip (fruit of the rose) and St John’s wort
(brown stalks, narrow leaves). Root plants like ginger and galingale (a kind of
sedge with aromatic rhizomes) were also popular.
Fruit was mainly consumed fresh by the
common people, again in country areas - apricot, blaunderelle (apple), bullace
(wild damson plum), cherry, cornel, currant, gooseberry, grape, lemon, medlar
apple, mulberry, peach, pear, raspberry and strawberry.
It must
be stressed that the common folk in towns and cities, more so than those in the
country, had a constant battle in getting enough of any sort of food to
survive, hence the high mortality rate at an early age.
Mainly
used by the well-to-do were garlic, leek, onion and tomato (the last-named
introduced with corn, potato and yam following New World voyages by Sir Francis
Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, along with corn and the addiction of smoking. It
took some time for these to gain popularity.)
There was
also extensive use of eggs and of bread – made from wheat for the
gentry; made from acorns, barley, lentils, oats and rye for the common folk.
Sugar and honey were less used by the poor, who generally had a healthier diet
if they got enough to eat, because they ate more vegetables and herbs and the
less starchy breads.
Dietary
deficiency, combined with almost all desserts and fruit being cooked in pies,
led to the upper classes lacking in vitamin C and consequently, they suffered
from myriad skin diseases, scurvy, rickets and bad teeth. It even became
acceptable to have black teeth in society, with the very fashionable even
exaggerating (don’t laugh!) their blackened appearance cosmetically!
Desserts were mainly the indulgences of
the upper classes –cakes (banbury, lemon, shrewsbury and violet),
comfit (sugar coated seeds), custard, eringo (thistle), flan, fruit
mince pie, gingerbread, marchpane
(marzipan), puddings (almond, green, quaking and rice ), sillibub, sucket
(candied peel), and sugar bread. (Fruit pudding usually accompanied roast beef,
long before Yorkshire pudding was devised.) All these sweetenings contributed
to rapidly deteriorating teeth.
Food
colouring was effected with alkanet (bright red dye from roots), pulverised
sandalwood (it coloured the food dark red) soaked spinach (green), and
turnsale, which produced a purple dye. A thickening agent was almond milk,
obtained by steeping almonds in milk, broth or wine. Another was ambergris, the
grey substance produced by whales and centuries later, used in the production
of perfumes.
Beverages
– mainly
ale, beer, buttermilk, milk and water for the hoi polloi; spirits, stepony
(raisin wine), whey and wine made from dandelion and berry such as blackberry
and elderberry for the gentry.
Tea and
coffee became known in England only in the seventeenth century.
Culinary offerings included:
Beef, collared
Black pudding
Blackbird, baked
Broth
Bullock’s Neck
Calf’s head with
oysters
Capon boiled with
oysters
Carp Pie
Chicken Pie
Duck, boiled
Eggs, fricassee of
Flounder, boiled
Gammon Pie
Goose blood pudding
Goose, baked
Haggis
Hen with oysters
Lamprey Pie
Larks, baked
Liver Pudding
Lobsters
Mutton, boiled
Partridge, boiled
Pig Pie
Pig, roasted
Pigeon Pie
Pike with oysters
Potato Pie
Rabbit, boiled
Red Deer Pie
Shellfish
Shrimp Pie
Swan, baked
Trout, stewed
Turkey, baked
Veal Fillet
Veal, roasted
Venison, roasted
When
entertaining, the tables of the well-to-do groaned under the many dishes, often
decorated with crane, peacock and swan feathers, (the cooked birds arranged on
platters with their heads still attached) candles and flowers. There were
drinking vessels of pewter, gold, silver, horn, leather, glass and earthenware.
The only table utensil was a personal knife – diners then used their fingers to
convey food to their mouths. It would be many years before the table manners of
today became de rigueur. Such
doyennes of early twentieth-century etiquette as Emily Post would have been
absolutely horrified at the goings-on at table in Shakespearean times. The
proliferation of cutlery and crockery to the point of confusion at modern
banquets is probably the result!
