Alonso Sanchez Coello, The Royal Feast, 1596
Happy New Year, everyone!
Like most of you, we did a lot of cooking and entertaining over the holidays, with family and friends. Sometimes the seating plan at these holiday tables can be a little tricky, especially when you’re mixing your relatives with your friends.
I have this amazing cookbook written by Francine Segan called Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook, that includes authentic recipes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It wasn’t all boiled mutton–the recipes are an amazing window into the way people lived at the time. According to Segan, cookbook authors assumed that a cook knew the proper amounts of ingredients. Recipes don’t include details more specific than “as your eye shall advise you,” and “as your cook’s mouth shall serve him.” She also includes some fascinating information about feasting and customs from Shakespeare’s day.
In Renaissance times, big-banquet seating in grander houses was very hierarchical; you instructed your page to seat people according to their rank, from duke to marquese to earl to bishop to viscount to baron to knight to squire.
It was considered quite improper to serve water at a feast. Water was stored in lead tanks so that the worst of the “mud” and whatever else it was polluted with could settle before it was drunk, but it tasted awful anyway. People used it for boiling meats and to make fermented drinks, which killed a lot of the germs.
So instead of water, the host served fermented alcoholic drinks like hard cider, ale, wine or beer—to men, women and children. From the time of the Middle Ages, toast was added to drinks to improve their flavor, and it was from that practice that the expression “drinking a toast” comes from.
Usually the kitchen was quite a hike from the feasting area—fire was a real hazard, of course, so in many manor houses and castles the kitchen was in a separate building. As a result, most food served at Renaissance feasts was room temperature.