Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia
By Kate McPherson, inspired by
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This document uses Canadian English spelling
In 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.
In 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.
Gervase Markham’s 1615 book
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 verjuicevery 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 sippetsbuttered toast triangles .
In 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.
In general, for those who could afford it, early modern food was heavily spiced with
Before England became Protestant in 1533, eating 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.
During 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).