The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (43 page)

Obviously special occasions alter these routines. It is customary for all the wedding guests to be invited to breakfast before the ceremony, so many have had a good tipple before they go to church; they then rush to the inn afterwards to partake of the beef and mustard, frumenty (wheat and spices boiled in milk) and mince pies traditionally served at the wedding feast. Similarly after a funeral it is customary to hold a ‘drinking’. Be prepared to imbibe large quantities of wine or beer – and to write off the rest of the day – if someone invites you to such a sorrow-drowning occasion.

Food in a Wealthy Household

Food is like clothing in that it is an opportunity for the wealthy to show off, reminding everyone of their social status. Long before you even taste a morsel in a large house you will observe the clean diamond-patterned linen tablecloths and the similar high-quality napkins folded into elaborate shapes. In some houses you will see silverware to the value of £1,000 or more – plates, saucers, dishes, bowls, flagons, knives, spoons, salts, even eggcups. You will find that great attention is paid to the order of precedence: seating plans are not designed for people to enjoy their neighbour’s company but in accordance with social hierarchy. If you are a gentleman (or your husband is), the pair of you may well be seated in the great chamber with the head of the household. If you are lower in the pecking order, you will eat in the hall.

Cooks in wealthy households are for the most part ‘musical-headed Frenchmen’, or so William Harrison declares. As for the food they prepare, you will be astonished by the variety and quantity of meat. On every meat day the kitchens prepare dishes of beef, veal, mutton, lamb, pork, chicken, geese, rabbits and pigeons. And those are just the basic meats. All sorts of rare birds that you have probably never considered eating may appear before you – stewed, poached, boiled, baked and roasted. If a rich man is trying to impress you he may serve teal, snipe and curlew. He will give you venison because of its prestige value: it cannot normally be bought or sold, only hunted by the wealthy. If it
is a fish day you may be served sturgeon, porpoise or seal. One recipe begins: ‘take your porpoise or seal and parboil it, seasoning it with pepper and salt, and bake it’.
²⁶
Another form of ostentation lies in the number of servants bringing food to the table: fifteen servants wait on the Willoughby family at Wollaton. In an earl’s house you can expect to see even more servants process in, all carrying silver plates.

Before we look at the full range of food on the menu, it is important to give a caveat: you should not assume that
every
meal is a gut-busting indulgence. Some rich men eat frugally: Mr Percival Willoughby (Sir Francis’s son-in-law) has been known to sit down with a couple of servants and consume just a quarter of mutton (a quarter of the sheep, that is, at 16d), a piece of beef (8d) and bread and butter (12d) in a light supper.
²⁷
However, most meals are much more extravagant. A formal dinner at Wollaton will start in the late morning and go on for at least two hours.

If Sir Francis invites you to dinner, remember to wash your hands before the meal. The old style is for a ewerer to pour water for you, but these days it is more common for a basin to be provided for all to dip their hands in. Having washed your hands, dry them on the towel provided and take your place. If there is a clergyman present he will say grace; if not, another man will be appointed. It need not be an extensive thanksgiving; most men have a short rhyme prepared for such a duty, such as:

O Lord which givest thy creatures for our food

Herbs, beasts, birds, fish and other gifts of thine,

Bless these thy gifts, that they may do us good,

And we may live to praise thy name divine.

And when the time has come this life to end

Vouchsafe our souls to Heaven may ascend.
²⁸

You will have a silver or pewter plate laid out on the table in front of you, together with a cup, spoon and loaf of bread. In front of the master of the household will be the salt – an elaborate silver or gold vessel – and a pepper box. Use your own knife unless one has been provided from a household set. Do not expect to see a fork: eating with a knife and fork is an Italian custom generally regarded in England as foppish. Young men who want to advertise the fact that they have been on the Grand Tour occasionally insist on using a fork, much to
the annoyance of their hosts. Court ladies also sometimes eat with one. Lady Ri-Melaine, at a dinner in her own house, orders that a knife, spoon and fork are set at every place; but normally forks are only used for fruit and sweetmeats.
²⁹

In a rich household, the carver will cut the meats and place them on pewter or silver dishes, which the servants will then carry to your table and place in front of you, together with the appropriate sauces. Sir Francis Willoughby strictly observes Fridays and Saturdays as non-meat days; therefore, if you happen to visit on one of these, expect four or five of the following dishes to appear, one after another in the following order, along with a dish of butter. Remember not to eat too much: this is just the first course.

1. A sallat (salad) with boiled eggs
   
2. A pottage of sand eels and lampreys
   
3. Red [smoked] herring covered with sugar
   
4. White [pickled] herring, ling or whiting with mustard sauce
   
5. Minced salt salmon in a sauce of mustard, vinegar and sugar
   
6. Pickled conger eel, shad or mackerel
   
7. Plaice or thornback ray with vinegar, or wine and salt, or mustard
   
8. Cod, bass, mullet or perch
   
9. Eels, trout or roach upon sops [bread soaked in the liquor in which the fish was cooked]
   
10. Pike in pike sauce
    
11. Tench in jelly
    
12. A custard tart.
    ³⁰
    

You might note that you start with a vegetarian dish: a salad. The wealthy have long disdained to look at anything green as a food in itself: as we have seen, vegetables are thought to be ‘noyful to man’. But attitudes are slowly changing. The still-life paintings of the sixteenth century demonstrate a new inquisitiveness about the natural world – and that includes food. Fruit and vegetables are now frequently depicted in artwork and sculpture. New vegetables such as the edible carrot and tubers from the New World are reverently treated, almost as if they have come straight from the Garden of Eden. Many householders now have a salad on a fast-day, following the lead of the trend-setting Italians. If your host is among them, expect to be presented with a concoction of leafy greens and herbs – coleworts, lettuce, sage, garlic, rampions, chervil, onions,
leeks, borage, mint, fennel, watercress, rosemary, cucumber and parsley – washed and drenched in olive oil with vinegar, salt and sugar.
³¹

There will be an interlude before the second course. When the carvers reappear, bearing their silver platters, expect another four or five dishes selected from the following list, served in this order:

1. Flounders in pike sauce
   
2. Salmon, conger eel, brill, turbot or halibut in a vinegar sauce
   
3. Bream or carp upon sops
   
4. Fried sole
   
5. Roast lampreys or porpoise in galantine sauce
   
6. Sturgeon, crayfish, crab or shrimps in a vinegar sauce
   
7. Baked lamprey
   
8. Cheese tart
   
9. Figs, apples, raisins and pears
   
10. Blanched almonds
    

You might be wondering about the pike sauce: this is actually a form of poaching used for most freshwater fish. The same cookery book that contains the lists of dishes provides the recipe for seething a pike:

Scour your pike with bay salt and then open him on the back. Fair wash him and then cast a little white salt upon him. Set on [to heat] fair water well seasoned with salt. When this liquor seetheth then put in your pike and fair scum it, then take the best of the broth when it is sodden and put it in a little chafer [a dish to keep it warm] and put thereto parsley and a little thyme, rosemary, whole mace, good yeast, and half as much verjuice [a bitter vinegar-like liquid made from fruit] as you have liquor, and boil them together, and put in the liver of the pike and the kell [the membrane around the intestines], being clean sealed and washed and let them boil well, then season your broth with pepper gross beaten, with salt – not too much because your liquor is salt that your pike is boiled in – put therein a good piece of sweet butter and season it with a little sugar that it be neither too sharp nor too sweet. So take up your pike and lay it upon sops the skinny side upwards, and so lay your broth upon it.
³²

I suspect you will consider pike a disappointment when cooked in this manner – especially as a single pike normally costs 10s, or thirty times a labourer’s daily wage.
³³
Salmon in vinegar is probably a safer
option, although it is even more expensive: a large fresh salmon costs 13s 4d – forty times a labourer’s daily wage.

Most people would rather call on Sir Francis on a meat day, especially on a Sunday, which, in most great houses, is a day for luxuriating in the food available. This is the likely palette of first courses served on a Sunday, from which four or five will be prepared for you (turn up after 1 November if you want to eat the swan):

1. Brawn in mustard
   
2. Capons stewed in white broth
   
3. A leg of venison in beef broth
   
4. A chine of beef and a breast of mutton boiled
   
5. Mutton pies
   
6. Three green [young] geese in a dish of sorrel sauce
   
7. A stubble goose [a goose left to feed itself on stubble in the fields] with mustard and vinegar
   
8. A swan in
   sauce chaudron
   
9. A pig roast
   
10. A double rib of roast beef, with pepper and vinegar sauce
    
11. A loin or breast of veal with orange sauce
    
12. Half a lamb or a kid
    
13. Two capons roasted, either in wine and salt sauce or a sauce of ale and salt (but not the latter if it be served with the sops)
    
14. Two pasties of fallow deer in a dish
    
15. A custard tart
    

And for the second course, expect four to five dishes from the following list:

1. Jelly
   
2. Peacock in wine and salt
   
3. Two coneys or half a dozen rabbits in a mustard and sugar sauce
   
4. Six chickens upon sorrel sops
   
5. Six pigeons
   
6. Mallard, teal, gulls, stork or heronsew [young heron] in a mustard and vinegar sauce
   
7. Crane, curlew, bittern or bustard in a galantine sauce
   
8. Pheasant, or six rails [corncrakes], cooked in salt water with sliced onions
   
9. Six woodcocks cooked in mustard and sugar
   
10. Six partridges
    
11. A dozen quail
    
12. A dish of larks
    
13. A pasty of red deer
    
14. Tart, gingerbread, fritters
    

The jelly is not served in a bowl, but coloured and moulded into the shapes of flowers, herbs, trees, animals, birds and fruit. You will find ‘galantine’ sauce served almost everywhere – it is one of the most popular ways of presenting meat and has been for centuries. It consists of vinegar in which toasted bread has been soaked and removed, and to which claret, cinnamon, sugar and ginger are added and then boiled. As for the
sauce chaudron
in which the swan is served, it is made like this:

Take white bread and lay it into soak in some of the broth that the giblets be sodden in, and strain it with some of the blood of the swan, a little piece of the liver and red wine, and make it somewhat thin, and add cinnamon, ginger, pepper, salt and sugar, and boil it until it be somewhat thick and put in two spoonfuls of the gravy from the swan and serve it in warm saucers.
³⁴

The usual practice is to pick a little at each dish. Lift the meat on to your plate with your knife, cut away the bones, gristle and any other parts you don’t want, and dip the morsel into the sauces provided in the saucers. The bones and unwanted parts you may put into a ‘voider’ – you will find one on the table. Then move on to the next dish. Do not worry about waste; you are not expected to eat everything. Any leftovers will be reused the next day, or eaten by the servants or handed out to paupers at the kitchen door.

The principal difference between the daily fare described above and a feast is the level of ostentation. At a feast,
all
the above dishes in each course will be served, not just a selection. The best silverware will be on show. There will be dancing and playing of musical instruments – shawms, trumpets and sackbuts – as the host and his principal guests make their way to the great chamber to dine. The meal itself may be accompanied by viols and softer instruments. The hall will be decorated and all the servants will crowd in to enjoy the wide array of food. A man like Sir Francis Willoughby will sometimes slaughter an ox to celebrate a feast at his house, so that everyone may have as much meat as he desires, including the servants.
³⁵
At Christmas the wealthy are expected to entertain the less-fortunate members of society. Rich men with extensive estates treat their tenants to a feast on at least one of the twelve days set aside for the celebrations. This might entail the serving of beef, mutton, goose, pork, capon, coneys, chicken and such exotics as woodcock, turkey and swan, as well as
the ever-popular venison pasties. Extra bread and beer will be laid on for all those who come to the house unbidden; it is not done to turn away the poor at this time of year.

At a truly great feast, dozens of dishes are laid out at each course. When Robert Dudley entertains the queen at Kenilworth in 1575 she is served by 200 gentlemen carrying more than a thousand dishes of silver and glass.
³⁶
Two years later Elizabeth decides to call on Lord North at Kirtling; she stays from suppertime on Sunday 1 September to after dinner on Tuesday 3rd, and this is the food that Lord North has to provide for the two-day visit: