SC - Fw: Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare's England

[Christine A Seelye-King]

Forwarded by request.
Christianna

- --------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Terri Spencer" <tspencer at revest.com>
To: 'Christy' <mermayde at juno.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1999 17:26:13 -0400
Subject: Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare's England
Message-ID: <01BEFBB1.95220350.tspencer at revest.com>

So just how far a drive/train ride is DC?  How about a field trip?

PS - please post to the Cooks List if someone hasn't already brought it
up. 
 If they have - what did they say? I'm still modem-challenged so I'm not 
subscribed.

Terri


WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Shakespeare Theater and the Folger Shakespeare 
Library have come up with a new way of looking at the Bard, via the 
stomach.
           ``Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare's England,'' is
the 
exhibit opening Friday at the library. Cooks of Shakespeare's time made a

``foole'' of fruit, mace and cream. It resembled what today's Britons
call 
trifle, and Italians call ``English soup.''
           Meanwhile, the theater's modern-dress production of ``King
 Lear,'' which opened last week, begins with a chorus of ``Happy
Birthday'' 
as two maids in caps and short skirts bring in a huge white cake with 
candles _ director Michael Kahn's new version of the play's beginning.
Two 
characters _ brothers Edgar and Edmund _ are seen eating a piece of the 
cake.
           It's fun, but purists may complain that the play Shakespeare 
wrote includes none of this. The text gives no indication that the king, 
who is 80 or more, is celebrating a birthday.
           ``People in those days didn't celebrate birthdays much,'' said

Rachel Doggett, the library's curator of books. ``It was more
 name-days.''  They did bake big cakes, though.
           The library exhibit includes a manuscript from about 1610 _
two 
years after the first printing of ``King Lear'' _ is entitled, ``Mrs.
Sarah 
Longe Her Receipt Book.'' In it, she instructs her staff on how ``To make
a 
Cake.''
           ``Take halfe a bushell of flower, 8 pound of Currence 
(currants), and 5 pound of butter, and boyle it by it selfe, and skim it,
3 
pints of Creame, and boyle it, 3 quarters of a pound of sugar....''
           Little is known of Mrs. Longe, but she must have been a cook
of 
some reputation.  `King James and his Queene have eaten with much
liking,'' 
she boasts of her biscuit recipe.
           The exhibit also includes examples of kitchenware and cutlery
of 
the period _ round spoons and big knives but no forks. Forks came into
use 
from Italy only some years after Shakespeare. A reconstructed place
setting 
for a family table includes a trencher, the round or square wooden plate 
used by people no longer so poor as to eat their food off a slice of dry 
bread, but not wealthy enough for porcelain plates.
           There's part of a rare set of watercolors depicting life in
King 
James' court. One shows five elaborately dressed gentlemen wearing hats
and 
seated at a table loaded with food. They are devoting more attention, 
though, to large glasses of wine being poured by a young man in a bright 
red jacket.
           On the wall, a printed proclamation by the king forbids anyone

to import pepper except from the recently formed East India Company.


Website: http://www.folger.edu
Here's what the website had (under upcoming exhibits - looks like they 
haven't updated it yet.) :

Fooles and Fricassees: Food in Shakespeare's England

September 10, through December 30, 1999

In her "Receipt Booke," compiled about 1610, Mrs. Sarah Longe recorded 
recipes for a variety of foods and medicines: everything from "A
Goosebery 
Foole" and a "Bisket of Almons" to "Plague Water," a "Limon Sallett," and
a 
"White Frigasy." The recipes that she and numerous other women recorded
for 
their household use provide a fascinating glimpse into the everyday diet
of 
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Household accounts, probate 
inventories, diaries, and commonplace books, not to mention printed
cookery 
books, discourses on trade, ordinances, and pamphlets such as The Women's

Petition Against Coffee (1674) document shifting fashions in food and its

preparation. Drawings, woodcuts, and engravings of the period illustrate 
not only the planting, harvesting, and marketing of food but also such 
niceties as the proper way to cut pie vents or carve an artichoke.

Fooles and Fricassees will explore the changes in diet that occurred in 
England between 1550 and 1700. Transformations in agriculture and food 
production and consumption were central to the constitution of British 
culture in the early modern period. Dietary changes were prompted by 
population growth, new farming techniques, and increased access to
overseas 
goods and ideas. Elaborate rituals and manners evolved with the 
introduction of new foods and drinks such as coffee and chocolate, and 
information about continental cooking techniques contributed to changes
in 
traditional cooking methods.


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