Eating like S hakespeare
In 1600s England, food could be seasonally fresh from the garden, salted to death or just plain scarce
Food in the 1600s could be good — or not
Meals served fresh from the garden, the baking oven and the butchering block might sound like some nouveau farmto-table trend, but it was a way of life in Elizabethan England.
So was meat so saturated with salt to preserve it that it had to be boiled within an inch of its life to be edible again.
And beer and ale were the main source of liquid refreshment because, while people figured out that drinking the water polluted by tanneries or human and animal waste could kill you, they hadn’t figured out that the boiling involved in the brewing process was what made the water safe to drink.
For many people, though, especially those in the city with little income, hunger and starvation was not all that uncommon, according to Suzanne Cross, a Santa Fe resident who has made a study of what kinds of food William Shakespeare and his contemporaries might have had on their tables or bought from street vendors.
“When I was very little, I wanted to time travel,” said Cross, who grew up on a small farm outside Springfield, Mo. When she realized she probably wouldn’t have access to a time machine anytime soon, she plunged into the study of the past instead. It’s a passion but not a vocation — her paying job has been as a paralegal.
Since moving to Santa Fe in 2004, she revived her old interest in the Bard and became involved with the International Shakespeare Center, for whom she has
hosted Elizabethan dinners for fundraisers, consulting books that discuss food availability and give recipes from that era. She gave a talk earlier this month on Shakespeare’s cookery as part of the ISC’s “Shakespeare Talks” program, which brings in guests for lectures on anything Shakespeare, usually on the first Tuesday of the month at the Santa Fe Woman’s Club.
Some tasting samples Cross planned included a hotchpotch (the origin of the term hodgepodge), a sort of beef stew but with grains, herbs, maybe some veggies and whatever else might be handy; orangeado pie tarts, which include a lightly spiced mixture of Spanish oranges and apples; and a Queen Elizabeth fine cake.
Oh, and don’t forget mincemeat, a sampling of which Cross offered the Journal and which she contends is far superior to the stuff you get out of a can.
It very well might be what Shakespeare would have had on his holiday table after he reached playwriting success, since the recipe is filled with expensive spices and treats that common people then would have been hardpressed to afford, Cross said.
Her recipe used beef, a cut of chuck roast, which normally has fresh suet added for richness and fat. “You can no longer get suet in Santa Fe,” Cross exclaimed, saying she has to drive to Albuquerque to find that ingredient. So, at least this time, she said, she substituted butter.
All together, the recipe included a dozen ingredients, such as honey (or maybe sugar, but that expensive ingredient was still relatively sparse to any but the royal households), apples, dried fruits, currants, candied orange and lemon peels, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and more.
“It was one of the best holiday dishes they could make,” she said, adding that, while everyday mincemeat might include fewer ingredients, “for Christmas they would knock it out.”
That mincemeat pie would be encased in a whole wheat pastry, since finely ground white flour was not used at the time, she said.
Shakespeare might have eaten another version when he rented a room or rooms in London and likely ate a lot of fast food available on the street, Cross said, in the form of what we know as Cornish pasties. It’s sort of an English version of a taco — a pastry shell with meat and maybe veggies and more cooked within, able to be eaten by hand.
Something most people don’t realize, Cross said, is that in England around 1600, most people didn’t have access to a kitchen unless they owned their own home. Renters often only had one room, and almost never a kitchen, and rarely were offered meals in their lodgings. Most often they bought their meals from street vendors or in taverns. So “eating out” is nothing new.
Seasonally scarce but plenty of beer
Recent excavations of Shakespeare’s middleclass home in Stratford, where he lived with his wife and children, according to Cross, revealed that he had an open-hearth kitchen where food was boiled or roasted over a fire, and also a “cold pit” some 6 or 7 feet down in the ground where foods such as cheeses were stored. And, of course, he had a brewery, since people who owned houses also brewed their own beer and ale.
And while we think nothing of stopping in the store and purchasing a sixpack, that home labor of brewing beer could include harvesting and threshing wheat and laying out the grains and keeping just the proper moisture to bring the seed to nearly sprouting. And that’s just to create the malt you need to make the beer or ale, she said.
“They drank six to eight big mugs of beer in a day,” Cross said.
Lamb was to be had in the spring, when they reached the right age for slaughter — thus the association of lamb with the Easter dinner, Cross said. And hogs generally were slaughtered in the fall, when everyone gorged on fresh pork for a couple weeks and then stored the rest up the chimney where it could be smoked. Greens were available in the spring, but nuts and fruits that could be dried offered the most year-round nourishment, along with whatever root vegetables could be stored. (Potatoes were not found in England at the time, she said.)
With limited storage options, though, choices could get very limited by the late winter and early spring months.
Bread indeed was the staff of life, one that could include barley or oats as much as wheat. As a matter of fact, during the times of year when very little fresh food was available, that might be all people were eating. When a string of bad grain harvests hit in the 1590s and the price of bread went up, “Everyone got very jittery,” she said.