Kitchens and Cooking Kitchens and Cooking Author Mackenzie Krahn Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this entry 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.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Mackenzie Krahn, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Cooking and Kitchens Food Housewifery Recipes Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. added figure and image citation. Created File. Michael Best 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.

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Mackenzie Krahn Mackenzie Krahn

Mackenzie Krahn was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

 Kate McPherson 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.

 Melissa Walter Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
Kitchen Activities

In smaller homes in early modern England, the kitchen was typically one of two main rooms on the ground floor. Sharing a central chimney with the parlor in larger homes, the kitchen was often secluded from the rest of the household and had external entrances to facilitate access to wood/coal sheds, cisterns, gardens and yards (Pennell 204) to make cooking easier. Like today, the kitchen was a key room in any home, used for cooking and eating, but it was also a place for conversation, discussion, and family disputes. The kitchen usually included: A chimney, with hooks for hanging meats to be smoked An oven, for baking bread, pies, and pastries A cooking hearth, including a spit for roasting meat Cooking implements such as hooks, tongs, and spoons of iron and wood Cookware of metals such iron, copper, brass, and tin Dishes, bowls, sppons, ladels, and platters of pottery, wood, and pewter for serving and eating Vessels like mugs, cups, and tankards of pottery, wood, pewter, horn, and leather for drinking A table for food preparation and eating A chair or stool for sitting by the hearth

The Complexities of the Early Modern Kitchen

In small households, the wife was often the cook of the house, whereas in bigger households, a male cook or cooking staff might be employed as servants. Housewives had the responsibility to provide food for the family, especially over winter when carefully allocating resources was necessary. Therefore, the family would need to trust the cook with managing quantities of ingredients for daily and longer-term use. Before refrigerators, food preservation was naturally very important. A cook in a household needed to know a variety of techniques to preserve food. Some of the foods preserved commonly included Fruit Nuts Meat Vegetables And even candied flowers

Women in the Kitchen

The housewife or cook would need to understand how to effectively preserve food and adapt for differences in recipes. In terms of gender roles, being the cook of the house provided many women with a purpose considering the kitchen was, at its core, a domestic and feminine space. Historian Sara Pennell notes that, for married women, the kitchen was perceived as the public locus in which that virtuous persona was made visible and accountable (212).

The 1594 book The Good Huswifes Handmaid for the Kitchen has the following very lengthy subtitle that indicates how crucial the role of women was in making food and preserving the household’s health, noted here in modern spelling and punctuation: Containing many principal points of cookery, as well how to dress meats, after sundry after many of the best fashions used in England and other Countries, with their apt and proper sauces, both for flesh and fish, as also the orderly serving of the same to the table. Hereunto are annexed, sundry necessary conceits for the preservation of health. Very meet suitable to be adjoined to the good housewife’s closet private chamber for of provision for her household.

Recipes and Recipe Books in Early Modern England

Both handwritten and printed recipe books offer evidence of the kinds of domestic knowledge that the people of early modern England had or needed. Within the books, household tips as well as helpful recipes appeared. Recipes were integral to early modern households, and many women made recipe books for themselves and their families. Recipe books were used for record keeping and as a way to move the verbal culture of recipe creation and knowledge to written form. The Folger Shakespeare Library holds the world’s largest collection of manuscript recipe books from the early modern period, with 125 catalogued manuscripts.

Recipe books contained many useful facts. For example, one shared how to salt and dry meat; animals were often slaughtered at the start of winter, so the meat had to be preserved through drying, salting, or smoking. Recipes like this one were often edited over a lifetime and reflected the social context of the time in which they were created.

Printed books of recipes, as opposed to handwritten ones, began appearing in the mid-16th century, with dozens of printed texts of recipes for food and medicines, as well as household management appearing before 1700.

An example of how to Bake Red Deere is demonstrated in the 1656 The Compleat Cook, Expertly Prescribing The Most Ready Wayes, Whether Italian, Spanish Or French, For Dressing Of Flesh And Fish, Ordering Of Sauces Or Making Of Pastry. This recipe for a venison pie shows the different techniques and seasonings used in early modern kitchens. Parboyl it, and then sauce it in Vinegar then Lard it very thick, and season it with Pepper, Ginger and Nutmegs, put it into a deep Pye with good store of sweet butter, and let it bake, when it is baked, take a pint of Hippocras spiced wine, halfe a pound of sweet butter, two or three Nutmeg, little Vinegar, poure it into the Pye in the Oven and let it lye and soake an hour, then take it out, and when it is cold stop the vent hole.

English Cookery and Medicine Book, c. 1677–1711. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library.
Key Print Sources Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995. Pennell, Sara. Pots and Pans History: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England. Journal of Design History, vol. 11, no. 3, 1998, pp. 201–216. Tigner, A. L., and D. B. Goldstein. Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England. Duquesne University Press, 2016.
Key Online Soures A Good Huswife’s Handmaide for the Kitchin. 1594. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475–1640_the-good-huswifes-handma_book_1594. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023. Best, Michael. Of women and kitchens. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/women&kitchen.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023. Best, Michael. Cooks. Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/city%20life/trades/cooks.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023. Caton, Mary Ellen. Fooles and Fricasses: Food in Shakespeare’s England. Folger Shakespre Library Exhibition, 10 Sep.–30 Dec., 1999. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Fooles_and_Fricassees:_Food_in_Shakespeare%27s_England. Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, Hypotheses. 4 Oct 2023. https://emroc.hypotheses.org/about. Havard, Lucy J. <q>Preserve or Perish</q>: Food Preservation Practices in the Early Modern Kitchen. The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, vol. 74, no. 1, 20 Mar. 2020, pp. 5–33. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0004. Martha Carlin. (n.d.). Medieval and Early Modern Cookery. https://sites.uwm.edu/carlin/medieval-and-early-modern-cookery/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2023. Recipe books at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Folgerpedia. The Folger Shakespeare Library. 21 Jul. 2020. hhttps://folgerpedia.folger.edu/_mw/index.php?title=Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library.
Image Source English Cookery and Medicine Book. c. 1677–1711. MS. Pg. 4. Folger Shakespeare Library. LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. Call number V.b.380. https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/img142914.