Eating with the Tudors, by Brigitte Webster - Colin
Eating with the Tudors: Food and Recipes by Brigitte Webster really grew on me. The book has a good lengthy introduction, followed by four chapters – Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter – and a final chapter on banqueting food. Each chapter follows a similar structure: discussions about the food in season; what Tudor authors had to say about it; and then lots of recipes. The author gives a transcription of the original recipe; her modernised version of it; and then additional information about the dish, its ingredients, or just something related which is of interest.
I don’t cook and I had little interest in the recipes, to be honest, but I found the general information about the dishes; the lifestyle; and the ingredients absolutely fascinating. As Webster writes in the introduction, food changed a lot during the Tudor period, from when Henry VII came to the throne in 1485 until Elizabeth I died in 1603. Food from the New World such as potatoes, new potatoes, and turkey were introduced. The Catholic Church started to lose its rigid control of what people could do, including dietary restrictions based upon the Church calendar. The growth of printing enabled the mass production of recipe books, and some entrepreneurs with an eye to the nascent middle-class housewife demographic, gleefully plagiarised recipes as fast as they could and pushed books out into the market.
Webster really knows her stuff: both the historiography and the cooking. She warns us that tansy should be avoided, despite it appearing in a recipe for Tansy Cake in the 1594 book, The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin. “The effects of the body are harmful and abortive” – so not the best dish for a romantic dinner for two, then!
Any quibbles? Yes, but both nerdy! Firstly, Webster tells us what contemporary writers decided were the food’s humours (that is hot, cold, dry, moist) but tells us this was “in the first degree”, “in the second degree” or “in the third degree”. While she explains the characteristics of those four humours, she doesn’t explain what the different degrees signified. That would have enhanced our understanding of the contemporary views.
Secondly, the Tudor age saw the transition from the medieval world to the early modern: printing and the introduction of New World foods, as I mentioned above, are examples. I’d expect some transition in the technology associated with cooking, but nothing is mentioned in the book. Now, maybe there were no developments but, given the diminishment of the church, I’d expect the money that went to the Church to be diverted into secular building instead – and with that much money being suddenly spent on domestic dwellings, I would also anticipate some of that money going into new technology such as chimneys and enclosed fireplaces (according to English Heritage!) OK – maybe chimneys didn’t really revolutionise cooking, but I believe the first stove was invented in France in 1490 – surely we saw them introduced into the UK during Tudor times? That would have meant a major change to cooking techniques – did Webster see any evidence?
Overall, I whole-heartedly recommend this book, both if you enjoy trying unusual recipes (although perhaps not if you’re a vegetarian like me!) and if you want to get a sense of how the modern world was born.
Colin
