RENAISSANCE FOOD FROM RABELAIS TO SHAKESPEARE Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories Edited by JOAN FITZPATRICK Loughborough University, UK ASHGATE © The editor and contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Joan Fitzpatrick has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Renaissance food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: culinary readings and culinary histories. 1. Food habits - Europe - History - 16th century. 2. Food habits - Europe - History- 17th century. 3. Food habits in literature. 4. Diet in literature. 5. Cookery in literature. 6. Food writing - Europe - History 16th century. 7. Food writing - Europe - History 17th century. 8. European literature Renaissance, 1450-1600 - History and criticism. 9. European literature - 17th century - History and criticism. 1. Fitzpatrick, Joan. 809.9'33564'09031-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Renaissance food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: culinary readings and culinary histories I edited by Joan Fitzpatrick. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6427-7 (alk. paper) 1. European literature-Renaissance, l450-1600-History and criticism. 2. Food in literature. 3. Food habits in literature. 4. Cookery in literature. 5. Food-Europe-History. 6. Food habits-Europe-History. 7. Cookery-Europe-History. 1. Fitzpatrick, Joan. PN721.R4472010 809' .933564---dc22 2009037548 ISBN 9780754664277 (hbk) ISBN 9781409401155 (ebk) Mixed Sources D© Product group from well-managed forests and other controlled sources Printed and bound in Great Britain by www.fsc.orgCertno.SA-COC-1S65 FSC © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council MPG Books Group, UK Contents List o/Contributors vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction Part 1 Eating in Early Modern Europe Crammed with Distressful Bread? Bakers and the Poor in Early Modem England 11 Diane Purkiss 2 Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine: Gaster and Gastronomy in Rabelais's Quart livre 25 Timothy 1. Tomasik Part 2 Early Modern Cookbooks and Recipes 3 Recipes for Knowledge: Maker's Knowledge Traditions, Paracelsian Recipes, and the Invention of the Cookbook, 1600-1660 55 Elizabeth Spiller 4 Cooking as Research Methodology: Experiments in Renaissance Cuisine 73 Ken Albala 5 Distillation: Transformations in and out of the Kitchen 89 Wendy Wall Part 3 Food and Feeding in Early Modern Literature 6 Performances of the Banquet Course in Early Modem Drama 107 Tracy Thong 7 '1 Must Eat my Dinner': Shakespeare's Foods from Apples to Walrus 127 Joan Fitzpatrick 8 Narrative and Dramatic Sauces: Reflections upon Creativity, Cookery, and Culinary Metaphor in Some Early Seventeenth-Century Dramatic Prologues 145 Chris Meads Index 167 List of Contributors Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. He is the author of nine books, including Eating Right in the Renaissance (University of California Press, 2002) and Beans: A History (Berg, 2007), winner of the 2008 Jane Grigson Award. He edits the Food Culture Around the World series for Greenwood Press and is co-editor of the journal Food Culture and Society. He has a cookbook forthcoming (The Lost Art ofReal Cooking) and is currently working on a study of food controversies in the Reformation era. Joan Fitzpatrick is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, UK. Her third monograph, Food in Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2007) was nominated for The Renaissance Society of America Phyllis Goodhart Gordon Book Prize. She is currently writing an Athlone dictionary on Shakespeare and the language of food and preparing an edition of three early modern dietaries for the Revels Companion Library Series (Manchester University Press). She also writes the Sidney and Spenser section of The Year s Work in English Studies (Oxford University Press). Chris Meads was, until recently, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Worcester, UK. Now an independent scholar, his research concentrates upon the coincidence of food, sex, and casual violence in banquet scenes from English plays staged between 1585 and 1642. He has published an anthology of sixteenth­ and early seventeenth-century humorous prose, Elizabethan Humour (Robert Hale, 1995) and Banquets Set Forth (Manchester University Press, 2001) a comprehensive account of banqueting on the early modern English stage. Diane Purkiss is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Keble College Oxford. She has published widely on witchcraft and on Milton and the Civil War, with pUblications including The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations (Routledge, 1996) and Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Her most recent book is The English Civil War: A People s History (HarperCollins, 2006), and she is currently working on a history of ordinary people thinking about food. Elizabeth Spiller, Professor of English at Florida State University, is the author of Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2004) and the editor of the two-volume collection, Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books (Ashgate, 2008). She has published on early modern literature and culture in a number of peer-reviewed journals and is currently co-editor of the Journalfor Early Modern Cultural Studies. Her most recent project, Reading and the History of Race, is a study of the impact that reading practices had on the development of early modern conceptions of racial identity. Vlll Renaissance Foodfrom Rabelais to Shakespeare Tracy Thong recently completed her PhD on the early modem banquet course at Loughborough University, UK. Her publications include an essay on traders and tricksters in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair in Food and Morality Proceedings from the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2007, edited by Susan Friedland (Prospect Books, 2008), and an essay on The Taming of the Shrew in Desperate Housewives: Politics, Propriety and Pornography, Three Centuries of Women in England, edited by Jennifer Jordan (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Timothy 1. Tomasik is Assistant Professor of French at Valparaiso University, Indiana. His scholarship focuses on the intersections between early modem literary works and culinary texts (cookbooks, dietetic treatises, and natural histories). Previous publications include a translation of the second volume of Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and Cooking (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures ofFood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, which he co-edited with Juliann Vitullo (Brepols, 2007) . He is currently working on a translation of the early Renaissance French morality play La Condamnation de Banquet. Wendy Wall is Professor of English Literature at Northwestern University. A specialist in Renaissance literature and culture, she is author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1993) and Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a finalist for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the MLA and a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner. She is currently working on a book entitled Strange Kitchens: Knowledge and Taste in Early English Recipe Books. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the contributors for agreeing to be part of this collection and for providing it with such marvellous essays. I would also like to thank Ashgate, especially Erika Gaffney, whose enthusiasm and support as the volume was taking shape proved most encouraging, and my copy editor, Juleen Eichinger, who was attentive, efficient and patient. A debt of thanks is also due to The Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, an invaluable resource for Renaissance scholars and without which many excellent studies would fail to see the light of day; the same is true for the electronic resource, Early English Books Online (EEBO) as enhanced by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) at the University of Michigan led by Shawn Martin. The ideas that emerge in this volume have been debated and discussed at international conferences including meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Renaissance Society of America and I would like to thank the organizers of these events for the opportunity to present and discuss the ideas and fellow scholars for engaging with them. I would also like to thank the British Academy for their financial support throughout the years I have been studying food and its impact upon Renaissance culture. Introduction Joan Fitzpatrick The role of food and diet in early modem culture is a burgeoning area of interest, and this collection of essays brings together many of the best scholars currently working on this topic. The essays are international and interdisciplinary in their approach and incorporate the perspectives of historians, cultural commentators,