Eating Elizabethan
O, who can…
Cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast? (Richard II, 1.3)
"A medieval baker and his apprentice" from a Swedish cookbook housed at The Bodleian
There are certain foods that always make me think of my husband: bright yellow lemons, soupy chili, sugar cookies shaped like stars, crispy roasted chicken with plums. In fact, I could probably tell you the history of our relationship through our significant meals together—from the bad subs on our first date to only eating breakfast foods on our wedding day.
I suspect most of us have certain foods that are deeply tied to specific people or memories. We remember these meals with nostalgia, seek them for comfort, or even try to recreate them to evoke another time and place. In other words, food can have a transportive quality that can transcend where or when you are and take you somewhere and sometime else purely through sensation. However, food’s histories and transcendent qualities are never only personal. With every bite, we are digesting histories of migration, plantation, and colonialism that brought these foods to our plates.
With all of this in mind, this week I decided to transport myself back to Elizabethan England by retreating into period recipes. As a historian of early modern drama, I am familiar with the promises and problems of reenactment. In my field, an entire performance model developed called “original practice” performance. This performance mode attempts to recreate early modern casting, costumes, and space as a way to bring us closer to theatrical conditions of the period.
I am deeply invested in what these reimaginings mean for modern conceptions of early modern drama, but even this practical application of scholarship is limited. Performance does not have the same kinds of transcendent qualities as food. When we are watching theater, we cannot be truly transported to another place and time because we are always aware of our own position as spectators. Even in performances that make us feel close to the action or directly involve us in some capacity, we always know we are in a theater. Food, however, can transport us to the past in ways that theatrical performance cannot, so I decided this week to attempt to resurrect the past in a way that is different from the performance methods I usually study.
The book I am using to conduct this experiment is To The Queen’s Taste, which I discovered in a used bookshop. Written by Lorna J. Sass in 1976, its goal is to translate popular recipes from cookbooks published between 1550 and 1620 and adapt them for “modern cooking.” She notes that she pays close attention to these dates in particular because they span the lives of both Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, implying that this book will allow you to eat like two of the most famous figures from the period.
Her brief and energetic introduction contextualizes the Elizabethan recipes she includes. Meals consisted of roasted meat and fowl, though vegetables were also making their way into most diets. Raphael Holinshed notes that vegetables like “melons, pompions, gourdes, cucumbers, radishes, skirts, parsnips and turnips” were no longer only eaten by the poor but also “as deintie dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen and the nobility who make their provision yearlie for new seeds out of strange countries.” With that being said, there are few extant recipes that prepare only vegetables or surviving banquet menus in which vegetables are even mentioned. This was a culture that deeply valued meat, which is apparent since those are the recipes early modern cooks actually recorded.
Elizabethans also loved foods that put on a show. For example, there are banqueting recipes for walnuts stuffed with poems, biscuits, and caraway seeds that are revealed when the walnuts are cracked open; recipes for gigantic decorative pies that have live birds fly out when you cut into them; and recipes for desserts that use egg whites, cream, and sugar to create a “dish of snowe” to garnish the dessert. Though the recipes indicate how to create these effects, as a reader, it is quite difficult for me to visualize what this food actually looked like. Modern trendy foods like rainbow bagels or melted raclette cheese wheels do not possess the same level of theatricality as early modern food trends, and so crafting these recipes often feels like directing a show in the dark.
In terms of flavors, roses were so ubiquitous that they not only flavored most cakes and pies but were also candied and eaten as a snack. Aromatic spices like cinnamon, caraway, cumin, coriander, and anise were also becoming popular in England during this period. Sass notes that on the whole, Elizabethan cuisine was much sweeter than we’re accustomed to now. They believed sugar to have notable medicinal and nutritional value, which Doctor Andrew Boorde writes in his 1592 book Dyetary of Helth: “All meates and drinkes the which is swete, and that suger in, by nutrytyve.” In fact, most of the original recipes included in Sass’s book, whether they be savory or sweet dishes, call for sugar in some quantity.
My recent transition to a vegetarian diet means I didn’t make any of the prized meat dishes Sass includes in her book. Instead, I embraced the Elizabethan love of sweets and decided to make a selection of desserts.
Orange Marmalade
Take your Oranges and Lymonds large and well coloured, and take a raspe of steele, and raspe the outward rind from them, then lay them in water three dayes and three nightes, then boyle them tender and shift them in the boyling to take away their bitternesse, and when they bee boyled tenderly, take two pound of sugar clarified with a pint of water, and when your syrope is made, and betwixt hot and cold, put in your Lymonds and Oranges, and there let them bee infused all night, the next morning let them boyle two or three walmes in your Syrope, let them not boyle too long in the sugar, because the rinds will be tough, take your Lymonds out and boyle your Syrope thicker, and so when it is colde, put them vp and keepe them all the yeare. (A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen)
Marmalade is an excellent way to preserve fruit, which is why I imagine many early modern cooks were so fond of it. It was one of the most involved confectionery recipes in the book, and one I would not normally be inclined to make, since marmalade is readily available at supermarkets. However, watching the mixture reduce, darken, and become sweeter and sweeter over the three-day period was delightful.
From what I can tell, modern marmalade recipes largely use the same ingredients and techniques as this early modern recipe, yet the time it takes to make is nearly cut in half. Sass’s recipe translation followed the original precisely (her version had more exact measurements), though in retrospect I imagine I could have done exactly the same steps in half the time with the same results.
Jumbals
To make Jumbals more fine and curious than the former, and nearer to the taste of the Macaroon, take a pound of Sugar, beat it fine, then take as much fine wheat flower, and mix them together, then take two whites and one yelk of an Egg, half a quarter of a pound of blanched Almonds: then beat them very fine altogether, with half a dish of sweet Butter, and a good spoonful of Rose water, and so work it with a little Cream till it come to a very stiff paste, then roul them forth as you please: and hereto you shall also if you please, add a few dryed Anniseeds finely rubbed, and strewed into the paste, and also Coriander seeds. (The English Hous-wife)
Jumbals were biscuit-like cookies that were traditionally shaped into intricate knots. Sass’s recipe does not follow the original very closely, and she chose to change the original to give her audience the flavor of a jumbal without needing the baking techniques to shape the jumbal. She uses the same ingredients as the original but the dough produces a much more cake-like batter, as opposed to a cookie-like dough. I tried to create some sort of pattern with the batter by putting it through a piping bag with a decorative tip, but the shape wouldn’t hold.
Banbury Cakes
To make a very good Banbury Cake, take four pounds of Currants and wash and pick them very clean, and dry them in a cloth: then take three Eggs, and put away one yelk, and beat them and strain them with the Barm, putting thereto Cloves, Mace, Cinamon, and Nutmegs, then take a pint of Cream, and as much mornings Milk, and set it on the fire till the cold be taken awy; then take flowre, and put in good store of cold butter and sugar, then put in your eggs, barm and meal, and work them all together an hour or more; then save a part of the past, & the rest break in pieces, and work in your Currants, which done, mould your Cakes of what quantity you please, and then with that paste which hath not any Currants, cover it very thin, both underneath and aloft. And so bake it according to the bigness. (The English Hous-wife)
Personally, I thought Banbury Cakes were the most delicious creation of them all. These cakes originated in Oxfordshire and resemble a modern-day scone or biscuit. When I was making this, I about tripled the amount of currants and spices that Sass’s translation called for, because I wanted to make sure the dough would be gorgeously brown and generously dotted with purple fruit throughout.
Modern Banbury Cakes are much more delicate and made with puff pastry and stuffed with a paste of spices and dried fruit. This original recipe also calls for a paste, but Sass did not include it in her translation.
These were scrumptious topped with warm butter and my homemade marmalade.
It’s clear that in these recipes, something of the original is lost in translation. As I worked between these old recipes and Sass’s translations of these recipes, I constantly confronted the fact that our contemporary food production, availability, and quality means my culinary experience of these dishes will inevitably be different from an early modern cook’s experience. Does the factory-produced rose water I am using to make jumbals taste like the rose water made 450 years ago? Does my cinnamon taste like Shakespeare’s cinnamon? Is my flour as finely milled? Are the oranges I used to make marmalade too tart for an early modern palette? And perhaps most importantly, I had to ask myself: What do these foods mean to me in 2020? What did these same foods mean to early modern eaters?
However, I realized there are clear resonances of Elizabethan taste in contemporary British desserts. What is a Banbury Cake but a first-stop at a modern Spotted Dick pudding? What is Snow on an Apple Tree if not a version of a modern Eton Mess? A 1520 Almond Tart can easily be transformed into a 2020 Bakewell Tart. I see that many modern British desserts are simply iterations of their Elizabethan equivalents. Even with the best translations, I know I won’t quite be able to eat the same sweet spinach tart Shakespeare did. But I can eat a jam roly-poly, and that feels close enough.