Upheaval In The Kitchen

While William Shakespeare toiled in his garret, scratching out the tragedies and comedies that remain the most widely read plays in the English language, cooks in
Shakespeare's day were downstairs in the kitchen stirring up a parallel revolution in the culinary arts. Quintessentially English food and drink · tea, roast beef and marmalade, for example · that
arrived on trading ships or were conjured up before British hearths during the 16th and 17th centuries grace dinner tables today in the same way that Shakespeare's characters populate the modern
stage.

But while Shakespeare gets credit for his work, the cooks who also delighted his audiences have not. "Fooles and Fricassees, Food in Shakespeare's England,'' an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare
Library in Washington, D.C., uses rare books, prints and drawings to examine more than 100 years in the evolution of English food preparation and consumption.

The exhibition also recognises a few unsung heroines. There was Martha Stewart to dispense household tips, there was Susanna Packe, who advised in "Susanna Packe her booke'' that the secret to
storing cherries for fresh Christmas tarts was to put them in a barrel of hay placed inside a feather mattress. And long before Miss Manners ever uttered a cry of alarm at a social faux pas there was
Hannah Woolley.

The 17th-century etiquette expert wrote in her "Guide to ladies, gentlewomen and maids'' that food should be eaten with the first two fingers and thumb of the left hand and that those at the table
should "talk not at all . . . for that is unseemly . . . Drink to nobody that you think is better than yourself . . . Put not your Knife to your mouth unless it be to eat an Egge.''

The upheaval in the kitchen during the 16th and 17th centuries was the result of increased trade, which brought exotic new spices and foods to England; printing, which made it possible to publish
recipe books that otherwise might have been circulated only within a family; and a rising mercantile class.

"The merchant class was in many ways trying to copy the upper classes and there was an emphasis on proper behaviour,'' said Rachel Doggett, curator at the Folger: "You have a growing middle
class that is taking on the manners and the ways of serving food that would have been practiced in upper-class households.'' But perhaps the most important change in the kitchen during
Shakespeare's day was the introduction of vegetables, herbs and fruit.

"Greenstuff and fruit had traditionally been thought fit only for the poor and those who chose the monastic life,'' wrote professor Joan Thirsk of the University of Oxford, who penned an essay
for the exhibit's catalogue.

Root crops, such as carrots and turnips, began turning up on fashionable tables and soon were adopted by the middle class. Salade greens, asparagus, cherries, apricots, raspberries and gooseberries
also coloured the previously rather bleak tables. The fruits and vegetables, added to newly acquired taste for roasted meat · most often beef · shifted the flavour of foods from the sweet and spicy
palate popular among Mediaeval diners to the more acidic and salty mix that still dominates Western tables today.

Prior to the 16th century, English meals generally would have consisted of soup and bread. The appearance of the new foods required a new set of rules at the dinner table. Taking a cue from the
Italians, the English carver was advised in a book by Hannah Woolley not to touch his meat or fowl while cutting it "but if he chance unawares to do so, not to lick his Fingers, but wipe them upon
a Cloth, or his Napkin, which he hath for that purpose.''

The hard slabs of bread that had been used as dinner plates increasingly were replaced by a wooden variety called "trenchers'' that even came in painted sets for banquets. And though the spoon
largely had replaced the finger as a more expedient method of getting food to mouth, the fork had yet to be discovered as a device necessary for dining.

"The fork was at the way high end of the social scale,'' said Mary Ann Caton, curator at the Fraunces Tavern Museum in New York City: "While there are references in Ben Jonson to a fork,
he's clearly making fun of the person using it. It's seen as frippery. You don't start seeing the fork on the dinner table until pretty far into the 18th century.''

While adventuresome diners in Shakespeare's day and the years after his death in 1616 welcomed the new foods, in part because they were believed to help maintain health, a trend toward drinking hot
beverages, especially tea and coffee, was viewed with suspicion.

Much like the Temperance movement in the United States 250 years later, women in 17th-century London mobilised against coffee drinking. The first English coffee house was established at Oxford during
this period and the women feared that the lure of the coffee house would be as great as the tavern, and on top of that they feared drinking the inky liquid would make men impotent.

Tea, which had also just arrived in England, was seen as a novelty that required a ritual of preparation · tea time was born. A writer in 1671 called tea a "pick-me-up after the close of
business.'' And so it remains.