The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (44 page)

When you add Lord North’s gifts to her majesty’s officers and his expenses in decorating the rooms, putting up a temporary banqueting house, building several temporary kitchens, and hiring extra pewterware and cooks from London, you will see that a royal feast is prohibitively expensive and disruptive. The whole visit, during which he entertains more than 2,000 people, costs him £642 4s 2d (not including a present of a jewel worth £120 for the queen). For those two days his house becomes a town about the same size as Stratford. This is quite a contrast for Elizabeth, who, when at one of her own palaces, usually dines alone.
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After a feast there comes the ‘banquet’. This is a particularly English form of conspicuous consumption: a sweet course that has its own drama. There will be music as people mingle and pick at sweetmeats, preserved fruit and acres of sugar and marzipan confections that are designed in the shapes of animals, trees, fruit, flowers or household items such as cups, glasses and plates. The marzipan is coloured with saffron and egg yolk, azurite blue and gold leaf. If green is required, spinach is used; if white, milk curds.
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Curiously, a rich man’s banquet is probably the only place you will be offered a potato: William Harrison refers to ‘the potato and such venerous roots as are brought out of Spain, Portugal and the Indies to furnish up our banquets’. All these things are laid out on tables or placed in baskets, arranged to please the eye. Banquets might be held out of doors or in a banqueting house in the grounds of a mansion. Some go on late into the night; others are held over the course of an afternoon. It is hardly surprising that the term ‘banquet’ later becomes synonymous with a long, ostentatious feast.

Food in a Middling Household

As you pass down the social ladder, the character of dining changes. A wealthy Guildford merchant, like the vintner Simon Tally, has a great chamber and enough linen tablecloths and napkins to emulate the rich. He has ‘platters, dishes, chargers, saucers … all of pewter’ and eight silver bowls, three silver salts and eighteen silver spoons. However, the food at his table is produced on a much smaller scale than at Wollaton.
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He does not have a huge household to maintain, only his family and a few servants.
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Nor does he have tenants to feed at Christmas. If entertaining a few gentlemen, he might provide many of the same meats that you will find at Sir Francis Willoughby’s table: lamb, pheasant, quail, larks, chicken, rabbit, leveret, woodcock, snipe, pigeon and heron – although it is unlikely that he will have exotics such as young stork or bittern, and he will only provide venison if he has been given some by a wealthy friend.
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On the other hand, if he and his wife just dine by themselves, they will be served a first course of ham and pea pottage and perhaps powdered (salted) beef with mustard, followed by a second course of one or two roast meats, bread and butter, a custard tart and fruit. Of course, the standard of all this fare depends on the skills of the cook – there is an old English proverb: ‘God sends us meat and the
devil cooks.’ Looking at the contemporary recipes for poached freshwater fish and boiled chicken, you might agree.

With the exceptions of some exotica, there is no great difference between the diets of the middling sort and the rich. In 1562 Alessandro Magno sits down each day to a dinner in his London inn that consists of a choice of two or three types of roast meat or meat pies, savouries, fruit tarts and cheese.
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In June 1560 Henry Machyn attends the feast at which his friend, the herald William Harvey, is elected Warden of the Skinners Company and he notes that the banquet afterwards consists of spiced bread, cherries, strawberries, pippins, marmalade, suckets, comfits and Portuguese oranges.
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Cooking with spices and sugar is another feature that middle-class households share with the rich.
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But on the whole, the less wealthy the household, the more you’ll find that practicality takes precedence over ostentation and taste. Meals are served to the family in the hall. Food is provided by the householder’s wife, not a male cook, and meat is carved by the head of the household, not a servant.

What does the average housewife in town cook for her family? This is a question best answered by looking at the recipe books aimed at the literate townswoman of the day, such as John Partridge’s
The Treasurie of Commodious Conceites and Hidden Secrets
, first published in 1573. This popular little volume is priced at just 4d; the eighth edition appears in 1596 and an enlargement is produced in 1600.
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It contains instructions for some high-status dishes, such as marchpane wrapped in gold leaf for a banquet; but most of the recipes are for meals that every housewife might be expected to make. This is what Partridge says about baking a chicken:

Truss your chickens, cut the feet off, put them in a coffin [a case of pastry], then for every chicken put in a handful of gooseberries and a quantity of butter … then take a good quantity of sugar and cinnamon, with sufficient salt, put them into the pie, let it bake one hour and a half. When it is baked, take the yolk of an egg and half a goblet of verjuice with sufficient sugar sodden together, and serve it.

The success of John Partridge’s book inspires others.
The Good Hous-wives Treasurie
is produced anonymously in 1588. You might like to compare the recipe for mince pies in this book with what you’d expect of its modern equivalent at Christmas:

Take your veal or mutton and parboil it a little, then set it cooling. When it is cold take 3lbs of suet to a leg of mutton or 4lbs to a fillet of veal, and then mince them small by themselves, or together whether you will, then take to season them ½oz nutmeg, ½oz cloves and mace, ½oz of cinnamon, a little pepper, as much salt as you think will season them, either to the mutton or to the veal. Take eight yolks of eggs when they be hard, ½ pint of rosewater full measure and ½lb of sugar; strain the yolks with the rosewater and the sugar and mingle it with your meat. If you have any oranges or lemons you must take two of them and take the peel very thin and mince them very small, and put them in [with] 1lb currants, six dates, ½lb prunes. Lay the currants and dates upon the top of your meat. You must take two or three pomewaters or wardens [apples] and mince them with your meat.

Fish days in a middling household depend hugely on geographical location as well as wealth. In winter you will need to stay by the coast to get the most popular seawater fish, such as conger, turbot, mullet and gurnard; or in a city to be able to buy freshwater fish like pike, roach and tench. Most people eat these fish only occasionally; the most common varieties consumed are smoked and pickled herrings, and dried and salted cod. The latter are caught in the waters off Iceland or Newfoundland and can be transported long distances in their preserved state; they are therefore available all year round. Oysters can be transported live and are eaten in huge quantities by the rich and middling sort alike, both whole and chopped up in oyster pies. Eels are popular among all classes.
The Good Hous-wives Treasurie
gives the following recipe for a very affordable eel pie:

Take two pennyworth of very fat eels when they be flayed and very fair washed, seeth them in a little fair water and salt till they be half sodden, that they may slip from the bones, cut away the fins on every side, then slip them from the bones, and shred them somewhat fine with a knife and take two or three wardens and shred them very fine to put among them, or pippins or other apples. If you do want wardens then take a little salt, a little pepper, cinnamon, cloves, mace and sugar and season it with all. Put in a ¼lb of sweet butter, so make it into a paste and bake it not too rashly. You may put in the yolk of an egg and a little verjuice when it is half baked if you will but I think it is better without.
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When it comes to dairy products, you will find a mixture of attitudes. Butter is eaten at almost every opportunity; milk is largely avoided. Cheese is available in several forms: green (new) cheese, hard cheese (such as cheddar), soft cheese, cheese with herbs, and particular regional cheeses. All of these are becoming more popular, as cheese is increasingly seen as fit for the dinner tables of the wealthy. Cheshire cheeses are brought south for the privy council’s dinners in 1590. Dutch cheeses to the value of £2,482 are imported in 1559–60. Parmesan too is imported from Italy and commonly grated with sage and sugar. Curiously, the English never adopt the custom of making ‘cheese with worms’, in the German fashion. Andrew Boorde is not the only Englishman who baulks at the practice of deliberately breeding maggots in a cheese – and then eating them together.
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The moderately well-off have always tended to eat more vegetables than their social superiors, so as the very wealthy start to eat a little more fruit and vegetables, yeomen and merchants have no qualms about following suit. Cookery books include recipes for puddings baked in a turnip, stuffed carrots and cucumbers stuffed with pigs’ livers. In case you don’t believe me, here is the recipe:

Take your cucumber and cut out all the meat that is within it. Then take the liver of a lamb or a pig, and grapes or gooseberries, and grated bread, pepper, salt, cloves and mace and a little suet, and the yolks of three eggs, and mingle them all together and put in the cucumber, and let your broth boil … the broth must be made of mutton broth, vinegar and butter, strained bread and salt.
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Artichokes, which were unheard of in England at the start of Henry VIII’s reign, are now common. Pumpkins too have recently been introduced from France, as have melons.
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Cauliflowers are another novelty, introduced from Italy in a dinner given to the privy council in November 1590.
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In East Anglia and the south-east, immigrants from Holland and Flanders introduce their market gardens from the 1570s, thereby bringing in new vegetables such as the edible carrot, chervil and lamb’s lettuce. They also import great quantities of vegetables from Flanders to London, where they are sold near the gates of St Paul’s Cathedral: 12,600 cabbages, sixty-five barrels of onions and 10,400 ropes of onions in the month of November 1596 alone.
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Cabbages, parsnips, carrots and turnips are cultivated around London
– the largest cabbages weighing up to 28lbs – and all of these are boiled and eaten with butter.
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The old fears of fruit-eating are similarly weakening. The pioneering gardening writer, Thomas Tusser, lists twenty-seven varieties of fruit trees to be cultivated. William Harrison declares that the gardens of old were just a dunghill compared to those of his own time. Somewhat surprisingly, however, you will hardly ever find mushrooms on the table. Even though many different edible types grow in the woods and fields up and down the country – and John Gerard notes in his
Herbal
that there are common mushrooms ‘to be eaten’ – people are simply too cautious of the poisonous varieties. ‘Mushrumps’ are well known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but they never regard them as food: they consider them more suitable for elves to sit under.
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Food in a Poor Household

For the poor, the question of ‘what to eat’ is somewhat disingenuous: they eat whatever they possibly can. ‘A few herbs well chopped together will make a mess of good pottage to a hungry man,’ writes William Horman patronisingly, ignoring the low nutritional value of herbs by themselves. The hard fact is that a labourer’s daily wage will barely pay for the food he requires. The diet fed to sailors in the navy in 1565, mentioned in
chapter 7
, amounts to a substantial 5,800 calories per day – almost double the requirement of 3,000 calories for a moderately active man; but that diet costs 4½d per day.
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A labourer in Elizabeth’s reign earning 4d per day cannot afford more than 5,100 calories – not enough to feed his family as well as himself, let alone pay for clothes and other requirements. His children will suffer from malnutrition unless the family manages to produce more calories from their garden than they require to work the soil. Small wonder so many labourers’ sons are ready to join the navy.