Read Shakespeare's Kitchen Online
Authors: Francine Segan
Shakespeare's Kitchen (9 page)
4.
Arrange the onion mixture in the shape of an oak leaf in the center of a platter. Top with tuna slices. Serve lemon wedges on a side plate. If using, scatter the grains over the salad.
ORIGINAL RECIPE:
Another [sallet for fish days]
Onyons in flakes layd round about the dish, with minced carrets layd in the middle of the dish, with boyled hoppes in five parts, like an oken leafe; made and garnished with tawney, long cut, with oyle and vineger.
THE GOOD HUSWIFES JEWELL,
1587
Watercress Salad with Sherry Pears
SERVES 4
S
HERRY WAS A FREQUENT
ingredient in Elizabethan cookbooks, and Shakespeare mentions both sherry and sack more than sixty times in his works. This English love of sack inspired me to poach the pears in sherry and purée them into a sherry vinaigrette.
1 cup sweet sherry
2 firm Comice or Bosc pears, peeled and sliced ½ inch thick
¼ cup sherry vinegar
¾ cup walnut oil
1 tablespoon sugar
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
2 bunches of watercress, stemmed
1.
Bring the sherry to a simmer in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the pears and cook for 20 minutes, or until just tender.
2.
Purée half of the pear slices, the vinegar, walnut oil, and sugar until smooth and season to taste with salt and pepper.
3.
Toss the watercress with the vinaigrette and arrange the reserved pears on and around the salad.
Vegetives
CHAPTER FOUR
PURÉED CARROTS WITH CURRANTS AND SPICES
SAUTÉED MUSHROOMS “IN THE ITALIAN FASHION”
SIX ONIONS SIMMERED WITH RAISINS
LEMONY SWEET POTATOES WITH DATES
BABY CAULIFLOWER IN ORANGE–LEMON SAUCE
AUTUMN SQUASHES WITH APPLES AND FRIED PARSLEY
’Tis known, I ever Have studied physic, through which secret art, By turning o’er authorities, I have, Together with my practice, made familiar To me and to my aid the blest infusions That dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones; And I can speak of the disturbances That nature works, and of her cures …
PERICLES,
3.2
Vegetables,
or “vegetives” as the Elizabethans called them, were served both raw and cooked with every meal. Herbs and various wild edible plants seasoned every dish. The “sweet herbs” so often called for in Elizabethan recipes were understood to mean an assortment of herbs and greens including lettuces and root tops. The Elizabethans used many more herbs than we do today, including those rarely seen in modern kitchens, such as hyssop, pennyroyal, tansy, and rue. According to a sixteenth-century nutrition guide,
A Dyetary of Healthe,
“There is no Herbe, nor weede, but God hae given vertue to them, to helpe man.”
Puréed Carrots with Currants and Spices
SERVES 6
Let me see; what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast?
Three pound of sugar, five pound of currants …
THE WINTER’S TALE,
4.3
C
URRANT” IS AN
anglicization of the Old French
raisin de Corinthe,
referring to the Greek city from which the dried fruit was imported to Britain. With their naturally high sugar content, currants appealed to the Elizabethan sweet tooth. In 1610 the Venetian ambassador to London wrote, “England … consumes a greater amount of this fruit than all the rest of the world.”
Carrots, here delicious paired with currants, were believed to be aphrodisiacs, “a great furtherer of Venus her pleasure, and of loves delights.”
8 medium carrots, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 tablespoon verjuice
1 tablespoon butter
⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons ginger marmalade
1 tablespoon currants
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
Bring 2 cups of salted water to a boil. Add the carrots, cover, and cook for 25 minutes, or until tender. Drain the carrots and purée with the verjuice, butter, and cinnamon until very smooth. (A tablespoon of the cooking liquid may be added if the mixture is too dry.) Stir in the marmalade and currants and season to taste with salt and pepper.
Poetry was very popular in Elizabethan England not only in plays and sonnets but also in cookbooks. Thomas Tusser, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, wrote “Five Hundred Good Points of Husbandry” entirely in rhyme. About fruit Tusser wrote,
Fruit gathered too timely will taste of the wood
Will shrink and be bitter, and seldom prove good:
So fruit that is shaken, and beat off a tree,
With bruising and falling, soon faulty will be.
Sautéed Mushrooms “in the Italian Fashion”
SERVES 4
M
USHROOMS, ALSO CALLED
toadstools in England, were exceptionally popular in Renaissance Italy. You’ll notice that this and many Elizabethan recipes call for cooking in either oil or clarified butter, butter precooked and strained. In keeping with the recipe’s Italian origins, olive oil is used in this modern version. These mushrooms are delicious warm or cold, but if you are eating them cold add a bit more vinegar and oil just before serving.
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
8 cups sliced assorted mushrooms (such as cremini, white button, or portobello)
¼ cup finely chopped mint
½ cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped thyme
½ cup finely chopped endive
⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon verjuice
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
Heat the olive oil in a large sauté pan. Add the mushrooms and cook for 1 minute. Add the mint, parsley, thyme, endive, and cinnamon, cover, and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in the verjuice and season to taste with salt and pepper.
ORIGINAL RECIPE:
To dress Mushrooms in the Italian Fashion
Take mushrooms, peel & wash them, and boil them in a skillet with water and salt, but first let the liquor boil with sweet herbs, parsley, and a crust of bread, being boil’d, drain them from the water, and fry them in sweet sallet oyl; being fried serve them in a dish with oyl, vinegar, pepper, and fryed parsley. Or fry them in clarified butter.
THE ACCOMPLISHT COOK,
1660
Crisp Fried Baby Artichokes
SERVES 4
Green indeed is the colour of lovers …
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST,
1.2
I
N SHAKESPEARE’S TIME
artichokes were thought to be an aphrodisiac. Only the bottoms were eaten and the leaves, if used at all, were only for garnish. The original sauce remains in this modern version, but whole baby artichokes substitute for the bottoms recommended in the original recipe.
8 baby artichokes
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
1 tablespoon verjuice
Zest of 1 orange
8 to 10 fresh mint leaves, finely chopped
1.
Remove any tough outer leaves from the artichokes and cut off the thorny tops. Cut each artichoke in half and sprinkle with a little of the lemon juice to prevent darkening. Wrap each artichoke in a clean cloth. Using a meat mallet, or the flat part of a small frying pan, lightly pound the artichokes to flatten them slightly.
2.
Heat the olive oil in a sauté pan over high heat for 1 to 2 minutes, or until it gets slightly smoky. Place the artichokes in the pan and cook for 3 to 4 minutes on each side, or until golden brown and the edges are crispy.
3.
Arrange the artichokes in the center of a serving platter and season to taste with salt and pepper. Drizzle the verjuice on the artichokes and sprinkle with the orange zest and mint.
Beet and Apple Tarts
SERVES 6
I
WAS INTRIGUED BY
the title of this 1631 recipe, “A Fridayes Pye,” not only because of the odd spellings of Friday and pie, but because it highlighted the fact that in Shakespeare’s time neither fish nor meat was eaten on Fridays.
Served with assorted cheeses and a salad, these tarts make a wonderful nonmeat dinner.
½ recipe of
Renaissance Dough
2 tablespoons butter, melted
¼ teaspoon freshly milled black pepper
Dash of ground ginger
¼ cup raisins
¼ cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1 teaspoon sugar
2 medium beets, peeled and grated
1 Granny Smith apple, cored and finely diced
1.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Roll the Renaissance Dough to ⅛ inch thick on a floured work surface. Cut the dough into twelve 4-inch circles and press into muffins cups. (The dough will go about halfway up the sides of the muffin cup.) Bake for 4 minutes.
2.
Lower the oven temperature to 350°F. Combine the butter, pepper, ginger, raisins, orange juice, and sugar in a bowl. Add the beets and apple and stir well. Spoon the mixture into the tart shells and bake for 20 minutes, or until the beets are tender. Allow to cool slightly in the pan before carefully removing.
ORIGINAL RECIPE:
A Fridayes Pye, without either Flesh or Fish
Wash greene Beets cleane, picke out the middle string, and chop them small with two or three well relisht ripe Apples. Season it with Pepper, Salt, and Ginger: then take a good handfull of Raisins of the Sunne, and put them all in a Coffin of fine Paste, with a peece of sweete Butter, and so bake it: but before you serve it in, cut it up, and wring in the juice of an Orange and Sugar.
MURRELLS TWO BOOKES OF COOKERIE AND CARVING,
BOOK 1, 1615
“Coffin,” as used in this recipe, meant a pie covered with a top crust.
Coffin
comes from the Middle French
cofin
for basket or holder. Pies and coffins were rectangular, square, or round and often had crusts thick enough to support the filling without an outer pan.
