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Wednesday, April 19, 2006 

Shakespearean Cuisine

The Boston Herald today offers a glimpse inside an intriguing cookbook entitled Shakespeare’s Kitchen.

They tell us :

Psychologist and food history expert Francine Segan has reawakened Elizabethan tastes with the beautifully illustrated “Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook” (Random House, 2003), which teems with savory re-creations and adaptations of meals created for Queen Elizabeth I, King James I and their contemporaries. By researching several cookbooks from the late 1500s to the early 1600s, Segan opens a fascinating window onto what people of that era ate and their thoughts on cooking and entertaining.

In recipes that range from Renaissance rice balls to salmon in pastry, we discover that Elizabethans used fresh or dried fruits as flavoring and a wide array of herbs and edible flowers for texture and flavor.


The article also offers a couple of sample recipes from the book. Seems like a pretty interesting idea for a cookbook, and with his birthday lined up for this Sunday, the timing for checking it out is pretty good too.

While hunting down a photo to use with this post, I came across this very interesting website, which also examines the food and cooking of that time period.