In this episode, we learn all about meal times, cutlery, dining etiquette, what people were eating and where it came from, as well as concerns over snacking and sugar! Fascinating insights from Prof. Rebecca Earle, Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick, Esme Wise, Amie Bolissian, and Dr. Sara Read, with gorgeous voice performances from Rich Bunn, Tim Atkinson, Will Harrison-Wallace, and Neil Hancock.
Please do rate and review my pod if you can, and head over to Twitter land where you can contact me @ShakespearesPa2. Thank you so very much for listening, folks!
In this episode, we learn all about meal times, cutlery, dining etiquette, what people were eating and where it came from, as well as concerns over snacking and sugar! Fascinating insights from Prof. Rebecca Earle, Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick, Esme Wise, Amie Bolissian, and Dr. Sara Read, with gorgeous voice performances from Rich Bunn, Tim Atkinson, Will Harrison-Wallace, and Neil Hancock.
Please do rate and review my pod if you can, and head over to Twitter land where you can contact me @ShakespearesPa2. Thank you so very much for listening, folks!
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Anjna: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants, the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna and I'm a Shakespearian, which is a strange thing to do with one's life. In my attempt to be useful for a change, I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners. Without further ado, here is my podcast, Shakespeare's Pants.
Commercial: Shakespeare's Pants.
Anjna: A moderate diet has always been the cornerstone of good health, and never more so than in the 16th and early 17th centuries when food wasn't just a mechanism by which to fuel the body, but also the means by which to distinguish rank and respectability, as well as a way to modify, disrupt, or indeed balance the humors. In this episode, I'm interested in early modern rituals, what were typical meals, and how was food conceptualized? What was considered a good diet? Where did food actually come from?
I'm also curious about attitudes towards snacking, and what precisely constituted a treat. Let's tour it with episode seven, food. What were typical mealtimes? To tell us more about this, here is Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University.
Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick: People who could afford regular meals because not everyone would have eaten regularly, they would have had set meal times, so breakfast, dinner, which will be our lunch, and supper. Dinner time was usually at noon. Dinner would ordinarily be the most substantial and elaborate meal of the day, and supper would have been a light evening meal.
Anjna: I've counted at least 167 separate references to meals across Shakespeare's works, with dinner by far being the most referenced. Either characters invite one another to their homes for dinner, or they gather at named inns like the Tiger, the Phoenix, or the Lover's head in Lumber Street. If you had the means meal times were a given, preferably at a table or board and with company. Before we get to the meat, as it were, I'm fascinated by the material culture of dining and the ways in which the paraphernalia of eating actually modified behavior around food itself.
Joan: This is a brass-topped iron fork, probably a sacred fork that was uncovered during excavations of the Rose Theatre. We think it's dated sometime between 1587 and 1606. It appears to be the earliest fork excavated in London. It's interesting because forks weren't ordinarily used outside Italy until the early 17th century. Even then, they weren't common and it would have been very interesting to see someone using a fork in England. Thomas Coryat, the early modern Englishman, who reported on his travels across Europe, in his book, Coryat's Crudities reports being teased by his English friends for using a fork that he had brought back from Italy.
It was obviously something that was considered really odd. I picture the sacred fork, someone using it perhaps in the theater and being the objective of some attention.
Anjna: Forks being something of an oddity, to find out what implements were used, we turned to the expertise of period interpreter or living historian Esme Wise.
Esme Wise: You would have your own eating set. The eating set would consist of a spoon, it might consist also of a pricket or a pricker, which is basically a metal spike and a knife. You would carry it around on a sheath on your belt, and those are used as your eating implements. What you do is you cut up your food, and then you'd either pick it up with your hand or with your spoon. If you were posh, you would have a whole separate stuff just for eating.
Your knife pricket set could be really fancy, you get some really beautiful, delicate, lovely things with bone handles or filigree and they're quite small and very delicate, and they're for eating only. Then if you're poorer, you've probably got quite a utilitarian knife that you use for everything that you also then might use when eating, hopefully, having cleaned it first.
Anjna: The put upon corporal name in Henry the fifth talks about using his knife for both martial and culinary purposes.
Actor: I dare not fight, but I will wink and hold out mine iron. It is a simple one but what though, it will toast cheese and it will endure cold as another man sword will and there's an end.
Anjna: Implements in hand, the dining experience obviously varied according to rank. The more wealth and leisure you had, the more expensive the board itself, the cutlery, and the general dining paraphernalia. The actual ritual of dining was itself a codifying of both rank and morality based on physical behavior, or what we might call table manners. We'll come back to this shortly. First, I want to consider the idea of access to food as remuneration for labor. If you were a labouring sought, your employer would be responsible for feeding and watering you as part of your wage.
Esme: A day laborer's pay was partly in their dinner, so they have to be fed. They're not always at the board because they might be being fed out in the fields, but you're going to feed them so you have to provide good food, and you have to provide good ale. You get eight pints of ale a day as a man as part of your wage and you get five pints of ale a day as a woman as part of your wage as a day laborer. It's a supplement to the wage, the money wage. We are used to a minimum wage.
In the 16th century, there was a maximum wage, a day laborer, a man could be paid no more than six pennies a day. A day laborer woman could only be paid the maximum of four pennies a day. Then, they would have their ale ration for the day and their dinner. The only variable in that is dinner. Once you've given them the maximum amount of money the only way you can make their pay better is by giving them more food. That maximum was often not paid. That's the most you could get.
That would be the height of summer when you're working all day. In the winter you'd be lucky if you get two pints. For day laborers that was very important that you had that extra food and drink.
Anjna: In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock complains that his servant Lancelot Gobbo was want to Gorman dies, the implication being that when he goes off to work for the spendthrift Bassanio, Lancelot might find his dining options much more limited. Curious, because Gobbo declares to his father, upon being asked how he fares in Shylock employee.
Actor: I am famished in his service. You may tell every finger I have with me ribs.
Anjna: The connection between employment and food is therefore significant. An employer's reputation could depend in no small degree on the quality and quantity of food provided to laborers. Let's circle back to table manners. Esme explains some of the rules to Elizabethan dining.
Esme: First of all, you have a napkin, we're talking a cloth-yard of fabric, it goes over your left shoulder, and it's very long, so actually extends down to your lap. Importantly, it comes to your front because you want to protect your clothing as much as possible. You are allowed to eat with your right hand. This is much easier to show than tell. Imagine, everybody, that you take your right hand and you wipe it on your left shoulder. Now, that is an easy movement, it also means you're not sticking your elbow out, which means you're not invading anybody else's space.
If you have it on your right shoulder, you are inevitably going to stick your elbow out when you're cleaning your hand. This is much safer and more sensible. You're meant to use your thumb and your first two fingers only, because you're indicating that you are delicately picking up your food and you're not grabbing it with your whole hand. You don't eat with your knife, and you don't eat with your prickett. You don't pick up food and put them in the mouth with these very sharp implements.
Certainly, the idea of not putting your elbows on the table is at least 400 to 500 years old, except in the Tudor period, it wasn't to put your elbows on the table. It was, don't put your elbows on a board. It was a health and safety feature because if you put your elbows on the board, you were liable to tip it up. Leaning could happen because you don't usually have a chair back. Only the most important people would have a proper chair with a back, so you do have to sit upright and not slouch.
Anjna: Assuming one had access to a board some basic cutlery, and all slouching and elbowing was under control, one finally arrives at the best bit, the food. This is an extract from Erondell and Hollyband’s book of dialogues designed to teach language learners lots of English customs and vocabulary.
Actor: Come here though, John. We will do this message well. Tell the good man of the Rose at Temple Bar that he will send me of such wine we drank the other day at his lodging, and tell him that if he do not send me of the like, which I did taste in his cellar, we will send it back again. Run quickly. Now, eat and make good cheer. You shall talk after dinner and at leisure. Is the children's table covered? Bring their round table and make them dine there at the boards, and read a chapter or two of the New Testament whilst they make ready your table.
Sirs I pray you make good cheer. Ye be welcome. Drink all out. Will you have a bit of this beef? What's up? You love mustard as I perceive. It will make you a red nose and a crimson face. William, give her some bread. Take a ladder and see what wanteth upon the board. Oh, you will never learn to serve. Why do you not lead it with a trencher plate and not with the hand? I have told you above 100 times. Hold. Give this platter of porridge to the children and give them some spoons. Peter, take up my knife which has fallen under the table. I have not tasted of these cabbages.
[vomiting sound] Maybe too much peppered and salted. Give me rather of that capon boiled with leeks, for I should smell of garlic three days after. Oh, take away this boiled meat and bring us the roast. Pull hither that shoulder of veal, which is very well larded. It provoketh me to eat, truly. Make room to set the dishes. Set that aside a little. Cut that turkey cock in pieces but let it be cold for it is better cold than hot. Mistress, shall I give you some crust of this pie? Me thinketh that it is too much baked.
Anjna: Here we have a sense of the communal, joyous occasion and the variety of foods on offer at dinner, along with the opportunity to curate one's own meal. A bit like a buffet. The children have a board of their own and porridge on which to sup, and a goodly supply of dishes are on offer for the grownups. Beef, bread, cabbage, capon, leeks, turkey and a pie. There's also condiments, mustard, salt, pepper and garlic.
On certain days mandated by the law as Fridays and Saturdays, and in some places, even Wednesdays, fish had to be served, in Italy for religious reasons and subsequently for economic ones. Recipes are abound for boiling, seasoning, poaching, sourcing and generally fancifying one's fish dishes. In the Erondel and Hollyband passage, there's plenty of wine on offer. I asked Joan what people usually had to drink.
Joan: Basically, water wouldn't have been very safe to drink. I think, in the countryside and with a running stream nearby, it might have been fine, but certainly standing water or in the cities, the public were advised to avoid drinking it. They would have drunk what was referred to as small beer, and small beer was simply weak beer. They would drink it at all times of the day.
They may have a glass of beer at breakfast, for instance, but there were also some very, very strong beers that caused a certain amount of social discussion and a lot of authorities were complaining about the antisocial behavior at markets and ferries and whatever. They had really strange names like Stride By The Wall and Dragon's Breath, and all these really odd names, which beers tend to. Today as well, a lot of beers can have very odd names, but these were very, very strong. Twice brewed.
Queen Elizabeth is reputed to have said, "We need to brew more weak beer because everyone's getting inebriated, there's a lot of social disorder, it's terrible. They could drink very, very strong beer but there was a sense in which it wasn't terribly good for the adhesion
of society. The poor would have drank way by-product of milk, which they would have retained for cheese making. Well, of course, some Falstaff likes his snack doesn't taste-- It was an English practice to add sugar to wine to sweeten it.
The English seemed to like their drinks quite sweet so there would have been wine. Wine would have been expensive relatively, so the poor wouldn't really have been drinking wine very much.
Anjna: Over 50s may be delighted to hear what Amy Bolissian has to say about medical recommendations on wine consumption.
Amy Bolissian: The Latin phrase [Vinum] lac sennum they use, which was meaning that wine was like milk for old people. Part of this was because of the way that they conceptualized wine itself as a foodstuff, is, water was seen as empty liquid to take into your body. It had no nutritious value. Whereas wine, by most people, was seen to contribute to nutrition. It was thought to warm the body and old people were thought essentially very cold.
Anjna: I'll return to food and drink being healthy in a moment, because I'm interested in the business of fashion. Falstaff loves sack, which we know fell out of favor somewhat in the 17th century. What other food fads might we encounter if we were to step back into 16th century England? This is Joan.
Joan: There tended to be certain food fashions brought to London by immigrants. For example, beer, which is distinct from ale, beer made with hops, was more fashionable than ale during Shakespeare's life time. Another Flemish fashion was the spreading of butter on bread. Cheese as well, traditionally a food of the poor that became more fashionable after 1600. This was especially the hard, expensive cheese as it-- They were expensive because they took a long time to mature. The well-off would have wanted to eat this cheese that traditionally had been a food primarily for the poor.
If you were very well-off, you may have eaten chicken but chicken, which is ubiquitous today, in Shakespeare's period, it wouldn't ordinarily have been consumed. That's because poor people would have used the chicken if they needed the eggs. That's a fashion, I suppose for, as a chicken would have been considered very fashionable and very exotic because it was expensive but again, there's an economic imperative there. The role of fashion and the role of the more expensive foods being desirable is something that's always apparent.
Anjna: Not only do people have access to the vegetables, fruits and meats in England itself, but the expansion of geographical territories and trade links meant that what was on people's plates began to change. This is Professor Rebecca R, from the Department of History at the University of Warwick.
Rebecca: Europeans encountered foodstuffs that they had never have seen before, and the ones that could be cultivated without enormous effort in Europe were the ones that really naturalized most quickly, not surprisingly. Among those are things like maize, sweet corn. Relatively quickly, the maize for example, became a staple in the area around Venice. I've seen a really nice drawing from, I think, 1547. A half a century after Columbus first bumbled into the Caribbean, showing a drawing of fields. Showing of maizefield next to a field of wheat.
Things like chili peppers spread very quickly across the Mediterranean and they replaced black pepper, which was of course, an expensive spice being imported from abroad. You can't grow black pepper really easily in Europe, but you can grow a chili pepper on your windowsill, and people did.
Actor: Let the sky reign potatoes. Let it thunder to the tune of 'Greensleeves'. Hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes. Let there come a tempest of provocation. I will shelter me here. [chuckles]
Rebecca: Sweet potatoes were being eaten in Britain or in England in the late 1500s. Cookery books from the 1600s have lots of recipes for sweet potato. They were being grown at Hampton Court. Potato-potatoes are from the Andes. Europeans didn't reach there until three decades or so after Europeans had arrived in the Caribbean, so potatoes were encountered later and they came to Europe later. I think they spread and became common much earlier than scholars have recognized.
It's very, very likely that the mentions in Shakespeare of potatoes are indeed sweet potatoes. When Falstaff says, "Let the sky reign potatoes", he was probably thinking of the sweet potato, but it's not impossible that it could have been a potato-potato because they were spreading around through the British Isles as well. They'd already reached Ireland, where they really flourished in the climate and the soil, and so, already again by this time, potato-potatoes have become really associated with Ireland the same way that leeks were getting associated with the Welsh.
Anjna: We get a sense of the imported flavors and the Winter's Tale when the clown draws up a list of ingredients for his sister's feast.
Actor: Let me see. What am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice-- What will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made a mistress of the feast and she lays it on. Oh, I must have saffron to color the warden pies; mace, dates, none-- that's out of my notes; nut-megs seven; a race of two of ginger but that I may beg; four pounds of prunes, and as many of the raises o' th' sun.
Anjna: I'm interested in concerns or dietary advice in relation to these exotic imported foods. I asked Rebecca what physicians had to say on the subject.
Rebecca: Heath manuals and physicians were absolutely interested in evaluating the effects on your body of these new foodstuffs, just as now, doctors don't always agree. They didn't always agree then, and so people had slightly different views about whether tomatoes were cold in the third degree, or only the second degree, or what the impact of these things would be. There was a general consensus that most of these foods were fine if you weren't consuming them in large quantities. The worry was more if you were knocking out basic staples in your diet and replacing them by total novelties.
That any change, it wasn't necessarily because these were foods from across the ocean. If they weren't foods that were familiar to your body, if you lurched into a totally new diet, I think the general sense was that that was a risky undertaking and you'd be advised against it.
Anjna: There's plenty of savory bites. Now what about the sweets? Here are some more of the Hollyband passage.
Actor: Elizabeth take all away, give us the fruit-- Oh, lay those roasted peppers and the scraped cheese, and set those apples lower. They'd be pippins, it seemeth to me. It is grown in England, this tarts be cold and the eggs and pies also. Mistress will you have some cake? Truly it is, but dough. I would the baker had been baked when he did heat the oven.
Anjna: Back to Joan.
Joan: Post-meal and to freshen the breath, they would have eaten comfits. They would have been either seeds or spices or roots or little pieces of fruit encased in sugar. They were thought to ease the digestion and freshen the breathe. If they were very well-off and perhaps were attending a banquet, they would have eaten desserts. The lower ranks wouldn't have been able to afford sugar. Access to honey would have been more usual, certainly with sugar, it would have been a nice indulgence.
Anjna: Many fruits were consumed alongside cheese. As in, The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans wishes to be left alone, to enjoy his pudding.
Actor: Pray you to be gone. I will make an end of dinner. There's pippins and cheese to come.
Anjna: It's unclear whether or not Hugh's pippins are cooked. If they're not, that says rather a lot about him. This is Dr. Sara Read from Lufbery university here to explain a bit more.
Dr. Sara Read: A cooked apple might be thought very good for a number of conditions, but a raw apple might be thought to make you quite poorly because of the cold wet nature of fruit. There is lots of accounts of people dying of melons. They have melon and well, wouldn't-- you've made yourself humorously out of sync and that's one of the reasons you die.
Anjna: Let's get down to the snacking. Was this a thing? If so on what were people munching. Food on the go would have been consumed in public theaters. Evidence from the Rose theater's excavation offers some insight into the kinds of snacks that were available.
Joan: Recent, relatively recent excavations of the Rose Theater, tell us that apples and other fruits would have been eaten by the audience. This is because they find the benefits of those fruits. They also would have eaten cockles and oysters because we've discovered the shells of the cockles and the oysters, and also nuts. Fragments of hazelnut nutshells and walnut shells have been found in the Borough bidding pits and theaters and excavations [unintelligible 00:24:08].
Anjna: Snacking, notably on the move. Wasn't necessarily an indication of respectability or indeed moral fiber, essentially because moderation in one's food and indeed drink intake both in quantity and content was the true cornerstone of a good early modern English diet. Have a listen to physician William Bullein.
Actor: When the table is garnished with diverse meats, some roasted, some fried and bacon, some warm, some cold, some fish, some flesh with sundry, fruits and salads of diverse hubs to please thyne. I remember with thyself that the sight of them all is better than the feeding of them all. Consider with thyself, thou art, a man, and no beast, therefore be temperate in thy feeding for access of meats, bring sickness and gluttony cometh at the last in to an unmeasurable heat.
Anjna: Just as dangerous as overeating was under-eating. It's the basis of the plot in Love's Labour's Lost in which four young men decided to abstain from both food and women for three years. Not only is this ambition characterized as unachievable, but also pointless and importantly unnatural.
Actor: 'Oh, these are barren tasks too hard to keep not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.
Anjna: We know when and where to eat, but if one assuming had access to the resources you were expected to self-manage your diet, how did people know what was actually good or indeed healthy to eat?
Rebecca: Medieval in early modern banquets. They were often kind of buffet-style. You might have multiple courses, but on the table, you'd have tons of different things. If you look at the lists of what was served at banquets, it seems overwhelming and that there was huge amounts of food and sweet things and savory things mixed together. You might have a roast sturgeon and a gooseberry pie, and all of those things would be on the table. Then there'll be another course where you'd have all of, again, the same things, all different, different combinations of sweet and savory things.
The idea was that you could then select the things that would best suit your own constitution. You were just being served the first course, you picked what suited you. The choice was there as a health concept, certainly, in the early modern period. There wasn't this sense of a universal dietary recommendation that you should eat certain things and that's good for everybody. Early modern medicine acknowledged the ways in which people are interested in their own bodies behavior, I think.
Going back to the early modern period, you saw these discussions in health texts from the 15 hundreds, they would say, this is a very nourishing food, very suitable for laborers or something like that. I got interested in how did people evaluate whether something was a nourishing food? What did that actually mean? This is way before calories or anything like that. There was no way to quantify whether the food was nourishing by saying-- We, didn't have an agreed upon language or a measuring system for evaluating that.
The explanation of what it meant was, a food that somebody can sustain a great deal of labor on. The person who got to decide whether the food was nourishing was really the person who was eating it, because they had to report, this food will keep me going, is sustaining food. I can work all day on this food. It was a very embodied sense of nourishment. That then led me into this looking at how people in early modern England fought about what foods were nourishing, what were foods they thought were sustaining in this way.
That's where excretion comes into it, because it seemed that there was a kind of popular sense that foods that produced copious bowel movements were not nourishing because all this stuff that your body is pooing out is obviously nourishment that your body isn't able to take out of the food. The less you excreted it from a foodstuff, the more of that-- the nourishment that, that food contains must be staying in your body. That's why I think white bread was so desired by ordinary people.
Ordinary people wanted white bread because it didn't produce the loose bowels that whole-grain bread products, which is what we've value whole-grain breads partly for that, but they saw that it's just waste.
Anjna: The responsibility was on the individual to select appropriately and to curate, if you like, one's own diet, but the individual body's needs were invariably trumped by the concept of desire and most, especially when sugar was involved.
Rebecca: Sugar was something that was you'd consumed by the spoonful. It was like cinnamon, it was a spice. You'd sprinkle it on the top of something, the same way that you'd sprinkle any other spice effectively. One thing that was happening over this period, which has to do with desirability and desire is that sugar was becoming linked to women. The idea that we now call somebody sugar and honey and sweetie.
That's part of the story of associating sweetness with sex and so sugar and sweetness and sweet things, in general, were coming particularly strongly linked to women and to female sexuality during this period.
Actor: You have witchcraft in your lips Cate, there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council.
Anjna: Indulging in too much sugar, whether by spicing or eating too many dainties, was curiously linked to revulsion Shakespeare, often juxtaposes sweetness with surfeit
and even disgust.
Actor: For as a surfeit of the sweetest things, the deepest loathing to the stomach brings.
The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness.
Sweetest not hath soury strind.
Anjna: Dr. Sara Read explains how her research into women's writing also affirms this notion of excess sweetness as somehow negative, something for which to feel guilt.
Sara: You see a lot in diaries and personal accounts of women having dainties as a generic term for treats, I think. I only see it in the context of women beating themselves up about it. Oh, I'm not being very well. That's because I had too many dainties and I knew it was bad for me and God has been cross with me. Oh, that-- and you see it literally in that context.
Anjna: The opening lines of Twelfth Night make a direct connection between the appetite, indulgence and sickness, really playing into this early modern obsession with moderation.
Actor: If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it. That's surfeiting the appetite may sicken and so die.
Anjna: Have a listen to physician William Vaughan from 1600.
Actor: Ignorant men do the light and corporal and outward things which move their bodily senses. As in, the holding of fair women, pleasant, gardens, richer tiles, or else in eating and drinking
Anjna: Last and fashion are parallel in this logic to eating and drinking, which suggests that pleasure is cheap or common corporeal. Naturally, the ability to self-moderate was seen as the most powerful and significant indication of moral socials, and indeed intellectual wholesomeness. Keep away from those foreign foods. Remember that wine is pretty much like milk, and if you must addict yourself to melons, perhaps just stick to one.
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That's the end of this episode of Shakespeare's Pants do join me next time for the final episode in this series, when I shall be exploring the world of fitness in early modern England. In this episode you heard from Dr. Joan Fitzpatrick, Esme Wise, Amy Bolissian, Professor Rebecca Earle, Dr. Sara Read, and me Dr. Anjna Chouhan You also heard the voices of Tim Atkinson, Will Harrison-Wallace, Neil Hancock and Rich Bunn. A thousand thanks, as ever, for listening. Adeiu!
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Shakespeare's Pants.
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