The Shakespeare Cookbook: introduction

8 Introduction Portrait of William Shakespeare. Print by Martin Droeshout from the Third Folio of 1663–4, originally made for the First Folio of 1623. Engraving, 19.4 x 15.6 cm. British Museum, PD P,1.226 Introduction I wonder if anything like this ever happened. Author writing, – ‘To be or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobl–’ ‘William, shall we have pudding to-day, or flapjacks?’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872), p. 10 Shakespeare and food William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, married to Anne Hathaway and with three children by 1585, must, at some date not very long after that, have begun to spend much of his time in London, acting and writing for the theatre. His name became known gradually. A certain ‘shake-scene’, a so-called ‘upstart crow’, was attacked in a pamphlet by rival dramatist Robert Greene in 1592. Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593. Titus Andronicus, first to be published of all the plays now attached to his name, appeared in 1594. In 1598 ‘William Shake-speare’ began to be credited on the title pages of plays, and in that same year the author Francis Meres described Shakespeare as ‘the most excellent’ among English writers of comedy and tragedy. Meres lists among Shakespeare’s successes two plays that we draw on in this book, Romeo and Juliet (see chapter 1) and Henry IV part 1 10 Introduction (chapter 2). Some of his greatest work lay in the future. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night (chapter 3) and Hamlet (chapter 4) appeared in or before 1602, Macbeth (chapter 5) and The Winter’s Tale (chapter 6) in or before 1611. The Taming of the Shrew is difficult to date. King Henry VIII (chapter 7), on which Shakespeare probably collaborated with John Fletcher, was a fairly new play when its most famous performance took place on 29 June 1613. This was when a discharge of firearms, required off-stage during the banquet scene, led to the burning down of the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare died in 1616. His popularity grew slowly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, more rapidly thereafter, and with no significant interruptions. He is the world’s most performed playwright. Food was important to Shakespeare, whether he was conscious of it or not. There are feast and banquet scenes in several plays, including some that we might have used here and have not. In practically every play in which such scenes are used, the feasts and banquets are central to the development of the plot. In Romeo and Juliet, one of Shakespeare’s earliest works, it is at the supper and masked ball at the Capulets’ that the intruder Romeo first meets Juliet. In King Henry VIII, one of his last, it is at supper at Cardinal Wolsey’s that the masked Henry dances with Anne Boleyn. At the wedding feast in The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio and Kate, having got it together just in time, win the competition. In Macbeth the king’s command to Banquo – ‘Fail not our feast!’ – is, to his horror, obeyed: Banquo has meanwhile been murdered but his ghost attends the feast. In The Winter’s Tale it is at the sheep-shearing feast that hidden identities are revealed. In Henry IV part 1 at the Boar’s Head Tavern the ambush is concocted, and in Henry IV part 2 during the outdoor meal in Shallow’s orchard Falstaff learns of the death of Henry IV. The first incident will prove Falstaff’s incompetence or cowardice, while the second leads to his snubbing at the coronation: in both cases the groundwork of his future discomfiture is laid at a meal. There are also suggestive mentions of feasts that don’t take place on stage. We did not use the lavish meals hinted at in Antony and Cleopatra, though we take full advantage of the baked meats from Hamlet’s father’s funeral feast, served up cold (Hamlet sarcastically View of London from the South Bank, as it appeared before the Great Fire of 1666, with London Bridge on the right, Southwark Cathedral in the foreground, and old St Paul’s on the opposite bank. 1610, published in John Speed’s The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611–12). Engraving, 7 x 14.6 cm. British Museum, PD Heal,Topography.71, bequeathed by Sir Ambrose Heal suggests) at his mother’s wedding. Apart from feasts and banquets, all through Shakespeare’s works there are frequent uses of food as metaphor and simile. Characters such as Sir John Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch define themselves in food terms and are so defined by others. Throughout this book incidental mentions of food in the plays will be quoted, and we could have chosen plenty more. Food has been important to everyone, in all historical ages, but it is really true that the sixteenth century (which as far as England is concerned ends in the reign of Elizabeth) marks a significant period in food history. There are several reasons for this. London, a larger and more prosperous city than ever before, attracted trade in food (and other things, luxuries and essentials) from all over England, from the European continent, and from the whole of the known world. New foods from newly discovered lands were being rapidly added to the culinary repertory. And, as explained in the epilogue, the Shakespearean period marked a flowering in the English book trade, notable not least for the number of food books, texts on diet, and recipe books that were in print. 12 universally accepted, the seeds of change were being sown. Medieval traditions were beginning to fall from favour. Scientific methods were encouraged by Galen and other ancient scientists whose original works were now being rediscovered and translated. Experimentation on new foods and drugs discovered in Asia and the Americas had begun to throw up difficulties with humoral theory, difficulties that would eventually lead to its abandonment. These were exciting times. Meals and mealtimes Breakfast, the first meal of the day, was taken soon after dawn. Country people in winter breakfasted before dawn to take full advantage of the hours of daylight. A typical breakfast was a meal so light that it hardly seemed to be a meal at all; hence, unlike other meals, there would be no need to say grace beforehand. In Henry IV part 1 Falstaff jokes about what Prince Hal will do when he succeeds to the throne, and whether he should be called ‘your Grace’, but no, it will have to be ‘your Majesty’ – ‘for grace thou wilt have none –’ ‘What, none?’ ‘No, not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter.’ This is good material for the food historian. First, it tells us that the average member of the audience did not say grace as a prologue to breakfast (‘What, none?’); second, it gives us two of the typical constituents of a late sixteenth-century breakfast in London, because if this was not typical, Shakespeare’s audience would fail to recognize its own breakfast in five syllables of a fast-paced dialogue. The same breakfast menu is repeated when carriers spending the night at an inn at Rochester on the Canterbury road are said to be ‘up already, and call for eggs and butter, and will be away presently’. Admittedly the egg and butter won’t make a healthy breakfast on their own, but with the help of our imaginations we can easily add to the menu the staple food – bread – and the staple drink, ale for Londoners and Kentishmen, sack for Sir John. A fuller breakfast menu (‘butter and cheese and umbles of a deer’) is found in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon 13 Introduction Introduction In spite of these developments, the way people thought about the contribution made by individual foods to human diet and health had not changed very much since Roman times. That was when the physician Galen and his Latin and Greek successors set out schematically how each food measured up on the scales of heat and moisture, how easily and quickly it was ‘concocted’ or assimilated into the body, and how it affected the four bodily humours. Everyone believed in those scales. Whenever we talk about pepper being ‘hot’ (although we know that the thermometer would disprove it) and wine being ‘dry’ (though wine is notoriously wet) we are betraying the fact that somewhere at the back of our minds we still believe in them. Everyone – at least, everyone who wrote about the subject – still believed in the four humours. They, too, formed part of everyone’s vocabulary, used in discussing one’s own temperament and that of others. The humours are blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and people are by nature sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic, these temperaments being determined by a predominance of any one humour over the other three. Disease results from a temporary predominance of any humour. How are these humours to be adjusted? The answer lies in the foods we choose to eat, in the spices and sauces with which we temper them, and in the medicines that doctors prescribe for us. Foods are less powerful in their effects (but we eat more of them); spices and herbs can be very powerful (but we don’t take them in large quantities); medicinal concoctions are potentially the most powerful (and therefore the most dangerous if the doctor happens to get it wrong). Looking at sixteenth-century health practices from a twentyfirst-century point of view, we can say immediately that the humoral theory is mistaken: no such four humours determine our temperament. But we can also see why the theory continued to be believed. It’s true that food choice affects one’s health and constitution; it’s true that spices and herbs can have powerful effects, often positive, occasionally negative; and it’s true, too, that medicinal concoctions are potentially the most effective of the three but also the most dangerous. Although, in Shakespeare’s time, the old theories were still Introduction and Friar Bungay, printed a few years before the Henry IV plays; this nourishing breakfast is offered to a party of noblemen who have ridden through the night, and they have the cheek to demand ‘a bottle of wine’ to go with it. There are no invitations to breakfast in Shakespeare, but there are invitations to dinner, which for many people marked the end of a long morning’s work. Dinner was the main everyday meal, and it was a midday meal. Shakespeare happens to make the timing clear both in Measure for Measure when Escalus, told that it is eleven o’clock, invites the Justice ‘home to dinner with me’; and in As You Like It Breakfast, by Diego Velázquez. c. 1617. Oil on canvas, 183 x 118 cm. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg when Rosalind says to Orlando: 15 I must attend the Duke at dinner. By two o’clock I will be with thee again. Introduction 14 If we read this too closely with Andrew Boorde’s A Compendyous Regyment we will suppose that the duke dined shortly before one o’clock, because Boorde instructs that ‘an hour is sufficient to sit at dinner’; but that is to take texts more literally than is wise. Perhaps the duke had more leisure than Boorde’s average reader, and sat longer at his dinner. Other texts confirm that most people began to dine at twelve or a little before. Some, including Boorde, took the view that dinner should be the longer meal: one should sit ‘not so long at supper’, he says severely. William Bullein in The Government of Health directs a special warning to those who are ‘phlegmatic’ (in whose temperament phlegm predominates): late suppers, ‘specially if they be long’, are followed by painful nights. The general view among dietary authors is that supper should be eaten five or six hours after dinner. The view among speakers in Shakespeare’s plays is slightly different: they are almost unanimous that supper comes at night, which should usually mean after six o’clock. We get more detail on just one occasion, in Richard III, when Catesby tells the king: ‘It’s supper-time, my lord. It’s nine o’clock.’ This, again, we should not read too literally. The king’s life may not be as regular as most people’s – he is about to be killed, after all – and he is sufficiently preoccupied to reply ‘I will not sup tonight’, possibly the only explicit reference in Shakespeare to a missed meal. As a Shakespearean character you don’t invite people to breakfast. You may invite people to dinner informally, on the spur of the moment; if you do, your dinner will still not be wholly unlike your dinner on the day before. Supper is quite a different matter. You will invite people to an evening entertainment, on a more formal and planned basis than your dinner invitations. You may name it a feast, a supper or a banquet, and all these names will be true, and your family supper on this particular day will be transformed. There will be a supper (i.e. an evening meal not unlike dinner, but bigger and more elaborate than the dinner you had a few hours earlier). There may be 16 Notes on some ingredients Pepper, in this book, is black pepper, which was imported to Europe from southern India. It was exotic and fairly expensive, although the ‘India route’ around Africa, opened up by the Portuguese, had reduced prices by breaking the old monopoly of Arab and Italian traders. Attempts were being made to identify cheaper substitutes, not only in West Africa (Benin pepper) but also in Central America (the ‘hot’, red or chilli pepper that Columbus and his successors were so pleased to find). Chilli peppers, though agreed by dieticians to be equally hot, were easily distinguished from the real thing; in any case they had not yet reached England. Shakespeare never mentions any of the alternatives to pepper, but if you can get them it would not be inappropriate to try long pepper or cubebs (already available in ancient and medieval times) or Benin pepper (a novelty on the English market in the 1590s) as an alternative seasoning to black pepper. Ginger, imported from India and Eritrea, had been well known in Europe for about 1,500 years. ‘Razes of ginger’ – roots, that is – are mentioned in Henry IV part 1. Among the health benefits of ginger Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Castel of Helth, mentions one that is not generally familiar: ‘Being green, or well confectioned in syrup, it . . . quickeneth remembrance if it be taken in the morrow fasting.’ Cinnamon, extremely expensive and therefore much prized in traditional medicine, had become gradually cheaper and is called for in many recipes. In The Haven of Health, a lifestyle manual aimed at university students and their tutors, Thomas Cogan writes imprecisely that cinnamon is ‘the bark or rind of a certain tree growing in the Indies’, specifically Ceylon (Sri Lanka), southern India and south-east Asia. Cogan adds a recipe for distilling a ‘cinnamon water’ or liqueur, adding: ‘I reckon it a great treasure for a student to have by him in his closet, to take now and then a spoonful.’ For students who wish to test this, liqueurs flavoured with cinnamon can still be found. Nutmeg, still quoting Cogan’s vague geography, is the ‘fruit of a tree in India like unto a peach tree’. ‘India’ here means the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia. During the years of Shakespeare’s success English merchants in the East Indies were engaged in an ultimately fruitless struggle with the Dutch for direct access to the producing islands. The great importance of nutmeg, as of the other spices, was in its health-giving and medicinal effects. For students ‘that have weak heads’, Cogan advised that nutmegs ‘being taken last at night in a caudle of almonds or hempseed, they procure sleep’. Both the weak heads and the sleep may possibly have been an effect of the hempseed; we offer no modern recipe. Students are also advised ‘if they can get nutmegs condite, which must be had of the apothecaries, that they would have always by them half a pound or more to take at their pleasure’. ‘Condite’ means conserved in syrup, like ginger root: we have not yet encountered nutmeg in this form. Sir Thomas Elyot adds that nutmeg ‘comforteth the power of the sight, and also the brain, in cold dyscrasies’. Mace, the husk of the nutmeg fruit, is more commonly called for in Elizabethan recipes than in modern ones. If you can’t get it, a smaller quantity of nutmeg can be used as a substitute: the flavour is not wholly different. Cogan regards mace, often sold in whole pieces, as ‘to the stomach very commodious and restorative, being used in meats; and for this purpose they are boiled whole in broths or cullises [coulis] or milk’. Sugar – the sugar cane, that is – originated many millennia ago from a hybridization of two grass species in New Guinea. Its usefulness ensured its spread across the world in cultivation; by the medieval period it was grown in parts of the Middle East. In Shakespeare’s 17 Introduction Introduction music and dancing. Towards the end of the evening, before or after or among the dances, there will be a banquet. A banquet is not so much a whole and distinct meal; it may sometimes appear to be a dessert course attached to supper. It is probably a buffet, probably consisting partly of finger food; complicated to make, elaborate to display, easy to eat, somewhat playful – though not usually as insubstantial as the magic banquet in The Tempest which was tantalizingly laid out by spirits under Prospero’s command and removed again before anyone had a chance to taste it. 18 Introduction time it had already been planted in the West Indies, but the supply of white granulated sugar came to England from Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes, Sicily and Madeira. Loaves of ‘sugar candy’, both white and brown, were also familiar. Sugar was much sought after as a medicine, regarded as more wholesome than honey. Sugar was very popular in food among those who could afford it, but it was not yet by any means the cheap product we know today. The seeds of caraway, anise and fennel, closely related and with similar health effects, were well known to Elizabethan cooks and dieticians. ‘Caraway breaketh wind’, as William Langham writes in The Garden of Health, and Thomas Cogan confirms it: ‘I advise all students that be troubled with wind in the stomach or belly to cause fennel seeds, anise or caraway to be wrought up in their bread’ (mixed with the dough). Caraway comfits, that is, caraway seeds coated in sugar, were often eaten alongside apples, which were regarded as difficult to digest. A plate of caraway seeds was handed out in Judge Shallow’s orchard in Henry IV part 2 for exactly this reason. The seeds make an excellent digestive to nibble after a meal, like fennel seeds in an Indian restaurant – and fennel seeds of course have the same effect on the digestion, as Cogan again confirms: ‘Students may use [fennel seeds] made up in comfits, wherein I myself have found great commodities, as being often grieved with windiness of the stomach.’ Mustard, like the three seeds just mentioned, legitimately counts among spices although its origin is not exotic. It was familiar across Europe and was a food of which England was proud. ‘His wit’s as thick as Tewkesbury mustard’, Falstaff says of Poins, and the reference to this Gloucestershire town is confirmed in Cogan’s The Haven of Health, which adds that good mustard came also from Wakefield in Yorkshire. Cogan has much to say about mustard. It is especially useful to ‘such students as be heavy headed and drowsy, as if they would fall asleep with meat in their mouths’; it not only ‘procureth appetite, and is a good sauce with sundry meats both flesh and fish’, but is also ‘medicinable to purge the brain’. Cogan’s logical demonstration of this claim is amusing: ‘If a man lick too deep, it straightway pierceth to the brain and provoketh neezing, which extremity may be soon helped by holding bread at your nose The Sense of Taste, by Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens. 1618. Oil on panel, 64 x 109 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid so that the smell thereof may ascend up to the head.’ Finally he recommends mustard in pill form to music scholars: [Mustard and honey pills]. If any be given to music and would fain have a clear voice to sing, let them make mustard seeds in powder and work the same with honey into little balls, of the which they must swallow one or two down every morning fasting, and in short time they shall have very clear breasts. Padua was one of the European cities renowned for its mustard. The Italian cookbook Epulario, republished in Venice in 1596 just about the time when Romeo and Juliet was first seen on the London stage, gives a recipe for Padua-style mustard followed by another for mustard pills: here the idea is for the traveller, who requires mustard for gastronomic or health reasons, to take it with him dry to be mixed when needed: 20 Vinegar, ‘the corruption of wines whether made from grapes, fruit or grains . . . is developed rather for use in flavouring or to excite the palate and the appetite’, writes Charles Estienne in 1550, incidentally confirming that wine vinegar, cider vinegar and ale vinegar were all familiar to him; ‘it is useful in that by its acidity it corrects the blandness or excessive sweetness of foods’. Estienne adds practical advice: ‘To be useful and effective vinegar should not be new but clear, and should retain the flavour of the wine from which it is made. Add it to sauces, salads and salty foods, sparingly, so that it lends nothing to them except its flavour.’ A method for making vinegar is offered in an unpublished recipe collection of Shakespeare’s time, part of the Commonplace Book of Lady Catherine Grey: lemon juice is probably what drove verjuice off the market, and if you can’t get verjuice then lemon juice will serve as a substitute, though the flavour is not the same. The following instructions, for a lightly fermented verjuice and for a flavoured type, are from the Italian cookbook Epulario: To make verjuice. Pick grapes of the wild variety called usiglie, or unripe grapes, and crush them very well dry, adding a little salt; have at hand a small quantity of old verjuice to pour on them; pass through a sieve. To make verjuice with fennel. Take some garlic if you like it, and the sweetest and best fennel flowers you can get, and cook and crush them very well together. Add dill to new verjuice and pour it on the crushed herbs; pass through a sieve; add a little salt when necessary. In England grapes did not grow wild, and cultivated grapes were far too valuable to be picked before they were ripe. Hence, as Thomas Cogan tells us, in England at that period verjuice was made of ‘crabbes’ – crab-apples, that is – ‘pressed and strained’. A young man faced with marrying for money discusses his future wife’s finer points with his servant in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women: ‘Methinks, Sordido, she has but a crabbed face to begin with.’ ‘A crabbed face? That will save money.’ ‘How? Save money, Sordido?’ ‘Ay, sir, for having a crabbed face of her own, she’ll eat the less verjuice with her mutton: it will save verjuice at year’s end, sir.’ ‘Nay, an your jests begin to be saucy once, I’ll make you eat your meat without mustard.’ To make vyneger. Take old wine drawen from the lees; put it into a vessel and set it in the sun. Then take oatmeal and water and temper them together and make it in cakes and bake them in an oven till they be dry; then break them hot in small pieces and put them into the wine with a bag of elderflowers dried. Then let it stand in the sun 14 days and it will make pure vinegar. If your vessel be great you must put in the greater quantity of these things. Two varieties of rose water were familiar in Tudor England, as Cogan explains: ‘The red rose water pure, without any other thing mingled, is most commended for wholesomeness, but the damask rose water is sweetest of smell.’ Verjuice is the acid juice of unripe grapes. It was often used in France and Britain as an ingredient to add sourness to a sauce; less often now, though it can still be found. The ease of making and using Two kinds of oranges were already known in England at this period. Bitter or Seville oranges had been imported for some centuries, while sweet oranges were a new thing and highly popular among those 21 Introduction Introduction To make good Paduan mustard. Take the mustard, grind it very well, take raisins and grind them as well as you can, have some breadcrumbs and a little red sanders and cinnamon, and a little verjuice (or vinegar and grape juice) to add liquid to the mixture, and press it through a sieve. To make mustard that you can carry in pieces. Take the mustard, grind it as above, take raisins very well ground, and add to these ingredients cinnamon and a little cloves; make round pills or little square pieces of whatever size you like, and put them to dry on a table. When dried you can take them from place to place as you want. Note that when you wish to take or use them you can mix them in a little verjuice or vinegar or vino cotto or grape juice. 22 [Orange sauce.] The juice of oranges having a toast of bread put unto it, with a little powder of mints, sugar, and a little cinnamon, maketh a very good sauce to provoke appetite. Lemons, which were also imported by sea, were candied and their juice was made into a syrup. Like oranges, they were strongly favoured by the dietary writers. Thomas Cogan suggests a morning medicine: [Morning draught.] A cup of Rhenish or white wine, with a lemon sliced and sugar, is a pleasant medicine next a man’s heart in a morning. Sweet potatoes were known in England by the date of The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin but they were a ‘fortifying’ medicine, not an everyday food item. They are required in that 1594 cookbook in an aphrodisiac concoction. We quote the original recipe but offer no modern version of this courage-provoking tart: A tarte to provoke courage either in man or woman. Take a quart of good wine, and boil therein two burr [burdock] roots scraped clean, two good quinces, and a potaton root well pared and an ounce of dates, and when all these are boiled very tender, let them be drawn through a strainer, wine and all; and then put in the yolks of eight eggs and the brains of three or four cock sparrows, and strain them into the other, and a little rosewater, and seethe them all with sugar, cininamon and ginger, and cloves and mace, and put in a litle sweet butter, and set it upon a chafing-dish of coals between two platters, and so let it boil till it be something big. Thomas Elyot confirms that sparrows as a foodstuff ‘stir up Venus (and particularly the brains of them)’. The usual household drink, for all who had the resources to produce it at home, was ale. Bottled ale also existed, for city dwellers who had no time to make it themselves and enough money to buy it. Beer, distinguished from ale by being flavoured with hops, was not yet commonly made in England and is mentioned by Shakespeare only as ‘small beer’, a weakly alcoholic drink suitable for children. Cider (see page 000) was familiar only in the West Country. Mead and metheglin (see page 000) were known as Welsh specialities, though appreciated by some in England for their health benefits. Wine in Shakespeare’s England was imported, hence expensive. According to Gervase Markham, writing in 1613, no wine at all was made in England in his time: the growing of grapes ‘is but only for a fruit-dish at our tables, for neither our store, nor our soil, affords us any for the wine-press’. The best known table wines were Rhenish and Gascon. Both of these travelled by river barges and then seagoing ships to reach London and other English cities. Rhenish wines, so called because they came by way of the Rhine and the North Sea, corresponded to the German and Alsatian wines of today. Gascon (or Bordeaux) and Rochell wines reached England by sea from the ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay; these wines were produced for the most part in former English possessions in Poitou and Gascony in south-western France. Rhenish wine was mostly white; French wines were white, red and claret, but claret did not yet mean ‘red Bordeaux wine’ as it does now. In Shakespeare’s time claret was any light-coloured red wine; in French it was usually called vin vermeil, although the French term clairet is also sometimes used in this sense. William Bullein, in his 1579 book on health, describes it carefully as ‘pure claret, of a clear jacent [hyacinth] or yellow colour; this wine doth greatly nourish and warm the body, and it is an wholesome wine with meat’. Bullein’s expression ‘pure claret’ is intended to distinguish this from clary, which was a medicinal wine with added spices and sugar, called claré (occasionally ipocras claré) in sixteenth-century French. 23 Introduction Introduction who could afford them. Oranges were not grown in England – heated orangeries were still in the future – but were imported by sea from Spain. Although oranges travel better than many other fruits, buyers were often disappointed when an orange that looked perfect turned out to be past its best, dry and tasteless. Sir Thomas Elyot strongly recommends as medicine the candied peel of oranges, which ‘comforts the stomach’, and the juice ‘eaten with sugar, in a hot fever’. He also gives a recipe for an orange relish: 24 successor James I, aiming to economize, ruled that the ‘sergeant of our cellar’ should issue no more than twelve gallons of sack a day for consumption at court. The best sack was known as ‘sherris sack’, meaning that it came from Jerez (‘Sherris’) de la Frontera. Although the exact style of sack may be impossible to recreate now, it’s hard to deny a probable resemblance between sherris sack and dry reserve sherry (see also page 000). As regards bread: manchet, cheat and maslin bread are explained on page 000. Sippets were slices, often triangles, of bread. Richard Surflet in The Countrie Farme wrote of ‘sippets or small slices of bread dried upon the coals’ – toast, in other words. For sops see the recipe and explanation on page 000. A coffin is a pie shell: see the recipe and explanation on page 000. A trencher was no longer a thick slice of bread used instead of a plate, as it often was in the previous century when Caxton published his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. ‘Etiam mensas consumimus’, we are even eating our tables, said the boy Ascanius when the Trojans first set food on Italian soil: they had no plates and so little food that, after setting out all that was left on flatbreads, they finished the meal by eating up the bread. So, as Caxton tells the story, ‘they set themselves at dinner, and made trenchers of bread for to put their meat upon’. By the late sixteenth century a trencher was usually a wooden platter, square or circular, on which food was served – an everyday item in most houses. ‘I found you as a morsel cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher,’ says Antony to Cleopatra in the Shakespeare play. A trencher was the simile that came first to the mind of Captain John Smith, explorer and settler of Virginia, when he was discussing the world view of the native Americans he encountered: ‘They imagined the world to be flat and round, like a trencher, and they in the midst.’ Wooden trenchers from the British Museum’s collection are illustrated in this book. So is a posset cup, whose purpose was to allow the liquid at the bottom to be drunk before the curd at the top had all been eaten. Kitchen equipment mentioned in the recipes includes a pipkin, a small earthenware pot or pan. 25 Introduction Introduction This was less well known than its relative, ipocras (see recipe and explanation on page 000), a spiced white wine sweetened with sugar. Wines that reached England from further south were all fortified, but not by adding spirits to them at the end of the fermentation process as is done now. The normal method of fortification was by adding sweet grape juice or grape syrup; the result would still, as now, be a wine that was stronger than the average, sweeter than the average, and less likely to spoil. Such wines were suited to slow, long-distance transport: table wines could scarcely survive the rough and wearisome sea journey from the Mediterranean. About a dozen regional styles of fortified wine were imported to sixteenth-century England. Names occurring in just a few sources include bastard, which came from southern Portugal and is appropriately called for in the recipe for fists of Portingale (page 000). It was a sweet wine, possibly a distant relative of port; the variety name bastardo is still in use in Portugal. Malaga, still familiar as a sweet, heavy white wine, is named in a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Middleton (page 000). But the best known of all these fortified wines were certainly malmsey, canary and sack. Malmsey was a grape variety from Crete and the Aegean islands (monemvasiós) and a style of fortified wine, strong in residual sugar but with pleasing acidity, whose export trade once centred on the Greek port of Monemvasia. It had been familiar in England since the fourteenth century. The variety had by Shakespeare’s time spread westwards along the Mediterranean coasts. Under a variant name (malvasía) it already flourished on Lanzarote and La Palma in the Canary islands; the wine from there, however, was familiarly known as Canary or Canaries. It is mentioned in Twelfth Night and in Henry IV part 2: ‘You have drunk too much Canaries, and that’s a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the blood ere one can say, what’s this?’ The Malmsey grape was also one of those that had begun to flourish on Madeira. Shakespeare mentions Madeira wine once – in Henry IV part 1 Falstaff is accused of selling his soul to the devil for ‘a cup of Madeira and a cold capon’s leg’ – but in English texts of this period no link is visible between Madeira and Malmsey. Sack was a strong and relatively dry white wine from the southern coasts of Spain. It was as popular among Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers as it was at the Boar’s Head Tavern. In 1604 Elizabeth’s Scottish