Daily Life in Elizabethan England (36 page)

179

ach, or mint. The salad oil could be made with ¼ teaspoon pepper instead of the sugar.

Pies

Pie Crust

Your rye paste would be kneaded only with hot water and a little butter, or sweet seam

[animal fat]
and rye flour very finely sifted, and it would be made tough and stiff that
it may stand well in the rising, for the coffin thereof must ever be very deep: your coarse
wheat crust would be kneaded with hot water, or mutton broth and good store of butter, and
the paste made stiff and tough because that coffin must be deep also; your fine wheat crust
must be kneaded with as much butter as water, and the paste made reasonable lithe and
gentle, into which you must put three or four eggs or more according to the quantity you
blend together, for they will give it a sufficient stiffening.
[Markham, chap. 2, no. 109]

Sift together 2 cups unbleached white flour with 1 cup whole wheat flour. Make a well in the flour, and shave ½ cup butter into it. Mix into a finely crumbling consistency. Work 2 eggs into it, then work ½ cup water into it bit by bit (you may need slightly less or more water—the dough should be just elastic enough to be worked). Divide the dough in half, and roll it out into two circles for a pie shell and a lid. Pour the 1 recipe fruit or spinach filling (see below) into the pie shell, and cover with the lid.

Fruit Filling

To make all manner of fruit tarts: You must boil your fruit, whether it be apple, cherry,
peach, damson
[plum],
pear, mulberry, or codling
[a kind of apple],
in fair water, and
when they be boiled enough, put them into a bowl and bruise them with a ladle, and when
they be cold, strain them, and put in red wine or claret wine, and so season it with sugar,
cinnamon, and ginger.
[Dawson,
The Good Huswifes Jewell,
p. 18].

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Cut 6 peaches into eighths, removing the pits, stems, and skins. Bring 4 cups water to a boil, add the peaches, and boil for 5–10 minutes or until tender. Remove the mixture from the heat and crush the peaches with a ladle. Let the mixture cool, and strain it to remove excess water. Add ½ cup red wine, ½ cup sugar, 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and 1 teaspoon ground ginger. Place in pie shell and cover. Bake at 450 degrees F for 10 minutes, then reduce to 350 degrees F

and take it out when the crust is golden brown, which should be approximately 45 minutes later.

Spinach Filling

To make a tart of spinach: Boil your eggs and your cream together, and then put them into a
bowl, and then boil your spinach, and when they are boiled, take them out of the water and
strain them into your stuff before you strain your cream, boil your stuff and then strain
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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

them all again, and season them with sugar and salt.
[Dawson,
The Good Huswifes Jewell,
pp. 20–21]

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Stir 4 eggs into 1½ cups cream, bring to a boil, and remove from the heat. Boil 6 cups spinach in 4 cups water for 1 minute. Strain the spinach, add it to the egg and cream mixture, boil, and season with ½ tablespoon sugar and salt to taste. (Other recipes replace the salt with cinnamon and ginger—you can use a teaspoon of each.) Place in pie shell and cover. Bake at 375 degrees F for 35–40 minutes, and take it out when the crust is golden brown.

This dish is essentially an Elizabethan quiche.

Spiced Cake with Currants

To make a very good Banbury cake, take four pounds of currants, & wash and pick them
very clean, and dry them in a cloth: then take three eggs and put away one yolk, and beat
them, and strain them with barm
[froth from ale making],
putting thereto cloves, mace,
cinnamon, and nutmegs; then take a pint of cream, and as much morning’s milk and set it
on the fire till the cold be taken away; then take flour and put in good store of cold butter
and sugar, then put in your eggs, barm, and meal and work them all together an hour or
more; then save a part of the paste, & the rest break in pieces and work in your currants;
which done, mould your cake of what quantity you please; and then with that paste which
hath not any currants cover it very thin both underneath and aloft. And so bake it according to the bigness.
[Markham, chap. 2, no. 172]

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Dissolve 1 teaspoon dry active yeast in ¼ cup lukewarm water or beer, and allow to sit for 10 minutes. Add 1 beaten egg, ¼ teaspoon cloves, ¼ teaspoon mace, ½ teaspoon cinnamon, and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg. Warm ¾ cup half and half, and stir it into the yeast mixture. Mix 2 cups sifted unbleached flour with ¾ cup sugar, and work in ½ cup butter. Work the yeast mixture into the flour mixture. Work in 1 cup dried currants. Bake in a greased bread pan for about 1 hour; when the cake is done, the surface will be golden brown and a knife stuck into it will come out dry.

An Elizabethan cake, like bread, was leavened with yeast, since baking soda had not yet been introduced.

Spiced Beer

Take three pints of beer, put five yolks of eggs to it, strain them together, and set it in a
pewter pot to the fire, and put to it half a pound of sugar, one pennyworth of nutmegs
beaten, one pennyworth of cloves beaten, and a halfpennyworth of ginger beaten, and when
it is all in, take another pewter pot and draw them together, and set it to the fire again,
and when it is ready to boil, take it from the fire, and put a dish of sweet butter into it, and
brew them together out of one pot into another.
[
The Good Husewifes Handmaide for the
Kitchin,
p. 62]

Food and Drink

181

Add 1 egg yolk to 1 pint of beer, and warm. Stir in ¼ cup sugar and a pinch each of ground nutmeg, ground cloves, and ground ginger. When it is on the verge of boiling, remove it from the stove, add a spoonful of butter, and stir.

This sort of drink was often consumed as part of the festivities of the Christmas season.

Hippocras

Take a gallon of wine, an ounce of cinnamon, two ounces of ginger, one pound of sugar,
twenty cloves bruised, and twenty corns of pepper big beaten, let all these soak together one
night, and then let it run through a bag, and it will be good hippocras.
[
The Good Husewifes Handmaide for the Kitchin,
p. 54]

Take 1 bottle red wine; add ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon, ½ teaspoon ground ginger, and 5 crushed whole cloves, 5 peppercorns, and 1 cup sugar. Stop up and let it sit overnight, then the next day strain it through a coffee filter.

Mulled wine was also consumed during the Christmas season, but hippocras was drunk cold at any time of the year. It was considered medicinal; its name derived from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates.

NOTES

1. Thomas Dawson,
The Good Huswifes Jewell
[1596], ed. Susan J. Evans (Albany, NY: Falconwood Press, 1988), 1.

2. Joel Hurstfield and Alan G. R. Smith,
Elizabethan People: State and Society
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 101.

3. P. Razzell, ed.,
The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart
England
(London: Caliban Books, 1995), 32.

8

Entertainments

Leisure, no less than work, played an important part in the lives of Elizabethans. The landowning classes were not obliged to work at all. Many of them did work quite hard, whether in government, estate management, or some other aristocratic calling; but all of them had plentiful opportunity to pursue leisure activities. Ordinary people had much harder schedules, laboring from dawn to dusk most days of the week, yet they eagerly pursued entertainments in such free time as was allowed them. For such people, the principal leisure time was after church on Sundays and holidays, although religious reformers increasingly objected to Sunday games as a violation of the Sabbath.

The Elizabethan traveler Fynes Moryson commented on his countrymen’s devotion to their pastimes:

It is a singularity in the nature of the English, that they are strangely addicted to all kinds of pleasure above all other nations. . . . The English, from the lords to the very husbandmen, have generally more fair and more large Gardens and Orchards, than any other nation. All Cities, Towns, and villages swarm with companies of musicians and fiddlers, which are rare in other kingdoms. The City of London alone hath four or five companies of players with their particular theaters capable of many thousands, wherein they all play every day in the week but Sunday. . . . Not to speak of frequent spectacles in London exhibited to the people by fencers, by walkers on ropes, and like men of activity, nor of frequent companies of archers shooting in all the fields, nor of Saints’ days, which the people not keeping (at least most of them, or with any devotion) for church service, yet keep for recreation of walking and gaming. What shall I say of dancing with curious and rural

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Daily Life in Elizabethan England

“A Fete at Bermondsey,” ca.1570, by Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600). [Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library]

music, frequently used by the better sort, and upon all holidays by country people dancing about the Maypoles with bagpipes or other fiddlers, besides the jollities of certain seasons of the year, of setting up maypoles, dancing the morris with hobby horses, bringing home the lady of the harvest, and like plebeian sports, in all which vanities no nation cometh anything near the English. What shall I say of playing at cards and dice, frequently used by all sorts, rather as a trade than as recreation. . . . As the English are by nature amorous, so do they above other nations assert and follow the pleasant study of poetry. . . . To conclude with hawking and hunting, no nation so frequently useth these sports as the English.1

THEATER

The Elizabethan period witnessed the true emergence of an entertainment industry, particularly in the theaters of London. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, theatrical performances took place in the courtyards of large inns. In 1576 London’s first successful public theater was built—outside the city limits, to escape the stringent regulations imposed by hostile city authorities. Called simply the Theatre, this structure was the model that gave rise to a series of similar facilities constructed over the following decades: the Curtain in 1577, the Rose in 1587, the Swan in 1595, the
Entertainments 185

THE CITY FATHERS OF LONDON COMPLAIN TO THE PRIVY

COUNCIL ABOUT THE EVILS OF STAGE-PLAYS, 1597

Stage-plays . . . are a special cause of corrupting their youth, containing nothing but unchaste matters, lascivious devices, shifts of cozenage, and other lewd and ungodly practices, being so as that they impress the very quality and corruption of manners which they represent. . . . They are the ordinary places for vagrant persons, masterless men, thieves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, cozeners, coney-catchers, contrivers of treason and other idle and dangerous persons to meet together . . . which cannot be prevented nor discovered by the governors of the city for that they are out of the city’s jurisdiction. They maintain idleness in such persons as have no vocation, and draw apprentices and other servants from their ordinary works and all sort of people from the resort unto sermons and other Christian exercises, to the great hindrance of trades and profanation of religion . . . In the time of sickness it is found by experience that many having sores and yet not heart-sick take occasion hereby to walk abroad and to recreate themselves by hearing a play, whereby others are infected.