Women And Cooking

Para1In an age before supermarkets or industrialized food production, housewives from the common folk in the country were responsible for growing, raising, butchering, cooking, and preserving food in their households. They were likely the primary cooks in most households. In larger and wealthier households, even in the country, cooks were still likely female. These cooks in privileged homes ordered specialty goods in from the cities in order to prepare lavish meals, featuring as many as three meat dishes, for the lord’s table. They also prepared plainer foods for the many servants that staffed the manors, mansions, and castles of the early modern period.
Para2In the image shown, a woman on the left a woman prepares a pastry, very likely a meat pie that contained herbs, meat, eggs, spices, and fruit. In the center, poultry or game for roasting or boiling hang. On the right, meat sizzles on the spit, as the woman adds herbs to the pottage, a kind of stew with meat, grain, and vegetables. Pottage was one of the mainstays of the diet for ordinary working people in early modern England. The main meal of the day occurred at mid-day, but pottage was likely available much of the day.
Para3Gervase Markham’s 1615 book The English Housewife lists this recipe for pottage:
If you will make pottage of the best and daintiest kind, you shall take mutton, veal, or kid, and having broke the bones, but not cut the flesh in pieces, and washed it, put it into a pot with fair water; after it is ready to boil, and is thoroughly scummed, you shall put in a good handful or two of small oatmeal, and then take whole lettuce, of the best and most inward leaves, whole spinach, whole endive, whole succory, and whole leaves of cauliflower, or the inward parts of white cabbage, with two or three sliced onions; and put all into the pot and boil them well together till the meat be enough, and the herbs so soft as may be, and stir them oft well together; and then season it with salt and as much verjuice very tart apple vinegar as will only turn the taste of the pottage; and so serve them up, covering the meat with the whole herbs, and adorning the dish with sippets buttered toast triangles.

Markets and Spices

Para4In urban centers, women of all classes could rely on markets that were open six days a week. In such markets, fishmongers, butchers, bakers, cheesemongers, and pepperers (for spices), among other merchants, sold both ingredients and prepared food. Smaller homes in the cities did not have ovens, and so buying bread from a baker was a standard practice, and many housewives sent their homemade pies to the neighborhood baker’s oven to be cooked.
Para5In general, for those who could afford it, early modern food was heavily spiced with warm spices like ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, mace, and a bit of sugar—even meat dishes contained these ingredients. Vegetables such as cabbage, spinach, and sweet potatoes were eaten regularly, as were berries and stone fruits in season and imported citrus fruit when it could be purchased. Salads of raw greens were also popular. Eggs and dairy products made up a significant portion of the English diet, especially in the country where most homes raised poulstry and kept a cow.
Para6Before England became Protestant in 1533, eating flesh (any meat) was forbidden on Fridays, during Lent, and on the many saints’ days. However, eating fish was permitted. During Elizabethan times, fish days were mandated by royal decree on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays for the increase of fishermen and mariners, an economic imperative that carried heavy fines for violators. The wealthy could, however, purchase a license to allow them to serve some meat dishes alongside fish on the 156 days a year that meat was technically forbidden.
Para7During Lent, the season of Christian repentance prior to Easter, meat was only eaten on Sundays, so cooks in wealthier homes became ingenious in their recipes so they could include it in other ways. One cookery book of the period describes how to roast a pound of butter (coat it heavily in breadcrumbs and sugar).

Key Print Sources

Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995.
Picard, Liza. Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Cooks. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/city%20life/trades/cooks.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Best, Michael. Of Women and Kitchens. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/women&kitchen.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Matterer, James L. Gode Cookery, 2013, http://www.godecookery.com/gcooktoc/gcooktoc.htm.
Wolfe, Heather. About that Frontispiece Portrait of Hannah Woolley…. Folger Shakespeare Library, 5 Sep. 2018, https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/frontispiece-hannah-woolley/.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Women And Cooking
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.