Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare

Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories

Joan Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317066545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Providing a unique perspective on a fascinating aspect of early modern culture, this volume focuses on the role of food and diet as represented in the works of a range of European authors, including Shakespeare, from the late medieval period to the mid seventeenth century. The volume is divided into several sections, the first of which is "Eating in Early Modern Europe"; contributors consider cultural formations and cultural contexts for early modern attitudes to food and diet, moving from the more general consideration of European and English manners to the particular consideration of historical attitudes toward specific foodstuffs. The second section is "Early Modern Cookbooks and Recipes, " which takes readers into the kitchen and considers the development of the cultural artifact we now recognize as the cookbook, how early modern recipes might "work" today, and whether cookery books specifically aimed at women might have shaped domestic creativity. Part Three, "Food and Feeding in Early Modern Literature" offers analysis of the engagement with food and feeding in key literary European and English texts from the early sixteenth to the early seventeenth century: François Rabelais's Quart livre, Shakespeare's plays, and seventeenth-century dramatic prologues. The essays included in this collection are international and interdisciplinary in their approach; they incorporate the perspectives of historians, cultural commentators, and literary critics who are leaders in the field of food and diet in early modern culture.

PART 1
Eating in Early Modern Europe

Chapter 1
Crammed with Distressful Bread? Bakers and the Poor in Early Modern England

Diane Purkiss

As part of his rumination on the difference between monarchs and other men, Shakespeare puts something about bread into the mouth of Henry V:

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell;
But like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium. (Shakespeare 1997, 4. 1. 259–66)

Why is the bread here so distressful, and why does Shakespeare nonetheless say its peasant eater ‘sleeps in Elysium’? Most critics have read the lines in relation to Genesis 3:19. But the Shakespeare passage is toying with the Genesis reference. Bread, positioned at the end of Shakespeare’s line, and sweat, placed at the beginning of the next line but one, might appear to be yoked by an assonance as well as by the biblical quotation commonly adduced to gloss the reference. Shakespeare could have emphasised the sweat by placing it first, since this is how Genesis usually runs; in the Geneva Bible, recently said by David Kastan (2009) to be Shakespeare’s source-text in matters biblical, the verse is: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth, for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return’ (Anon 1560). Coverdale is similar: ‘In the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate thy bred, tyll thou be turned agayne vnto earth, whence thou art take: for earth thou art, and vnto earth shalt thou be turned agayne’ (Anon 1535). The Bishop’s Bible also is very similar: ‘In the sweatte of thy face shalt thou eate thy breade, tyll thou be turned agayne into the ground, for out of it wast thou taken’ (Anon 1578), and the Vulgate is identical to the Geneva version. Here too the sweat comes before the bread, causally. All the above yoke sweat and bread together in that order, and then make a segue to death and to going back to earth. This is not Shakespeare’s strategy; instead, he wants to uncouple the usual biblical causal chain and create another one, while also detaching the sweat from a universal curse, death. The sweat and the bread it earns are well separated by a strong evocation of duration and duress, perhaps too well for the Genesis reference to be adequate as a gloss on the lines. The causal relation between the bread and the sweat is also inverted. Gill’s Geneva commentary focuses on the universality of the curse:

it may have regard to all manufactories by which men get their bread, and not without sweat; and even such exercises as depend upon the brain, are not excused from such an expense: so that every man, let him be in what station of life he will, is not exempt, more or less, from this sentence, and so continues till he dies, as is next expressed … (Gill 1763, 26; Genesis 3:19)

But this is precisely the opposite of what Henry is saying. For Henry, sweat is a differend that defines the peasant by class. Why? This is the puzzle this essay sets out to resolve.

Bread is not a dangerously indigestible food; medievals and early moderns recommended it with every meal to help rather than to hinder digestion, though some did express doubt about rye bread, as Joan Fitzpatrick has shown (Fitzpatrick 2007, 53). This may have been no more than a Londoner’s distaste for products seen as foreign or wrong, however, which is also Ann Fanshawe’s reaction to rye loaves in the West Country during the Civil War (Albala 2002, 59, 67, 193; and see Bullein 1595, LR5, and Cogan 1636, D3R). Is the distress of which the bread is full the result of being eaten by a peasant? Does it label the bread as peasant food? This is certainly how Shakespeare uses bread to define the mechanicals in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,/That work for bread upon Athenian stalls’ (3.2. 9–10). They are not given bread; they have to work for it. They are close to masterlessness. Bread is also the food of the desperate: ‘those palates who, not yet two summers younger,/Must have inventions to delight the taste,/Would now be glad of bread, and beg for it’ (Pericles 1.4.) The elder Hamlet is also overstuffed with it, murdered ‘grossly, full of bread’ (3. 3. 80), a line which has puzzled critics but which makes sense if bread becomes an index of a horrible class lapse, as if the elder Hamlet is now trapped forever in the very sleepy and entirely unmonarchic peasant mode which Henry V envies.

When analyzing this jagged pattern of images, critics have tended to focus on the religious significance of bread, but in this essay I hope to remind them that bread is not just a religious symbol; it is also a material object which can be smelt and tasted (Harrison 1953; Rabin 2004). It is inscribed on the body not only as scripture but also as food. If each act of eating is social, it follows that everything which can be eaten can also become a way of experiencing identity and enmeshment. Only by understanding what Marxists were once comfortable calling the material means of production can we hope to understand that registration of social identity in full. In a preliminary fashion, then, I want to offer an extended gloss on Shakespeare’s line by exploring the making and naming of bread in early modern England, ultimately venturing that the distress comes not from the sweat of its eater’s brow but from the sweat baked into it, which becomes a metonymic trope for all the effort that goes into bread. This essay is a work-in-progress, in part because what I have discovered is that food history connects to everything, every historical process and event. My goal is not just to explicate Shakespeare but to point to a forgotten foodway, a lost culture of masculine bread that Shakespeare’s allusion partially lays bare.

The first thing to say is that most material histories of bread are handicapped by the fact that most of their authors know very little about baking, which leads to some mistaken assumptions. What most food historians think they know about medieval bread was that there were two basic kinds: paindemayn, which is later called manchet, and cheat bread, which is brown (Sim 2005, 6, 7; Wilson 1991a, 241–2). But medieval sources, including the Bread Assize (a thirteenth-century statute that set standards of quality, measurement, and pricing for bakers and brewers) actually record many different kinds of bread (Carpenter 1861, 227ff; Thrupp 1933, 72ff; Thirsk 2007, 232–3; Burnett 1989, 9–10, 236–7; Pennell 1997, 65–8). The whole notion of just two kinds comes from Gervase Markham’s 1615 work The English Housewife (Markham 1986, 209–11). Even if we just look at flour, its colour is inaccurate as a representation of what it is. Flour is not defined by colour – white or brown – but by what a modern baker would call the extraction rate, the amount of the exosperm removed in milling and processing (Hamelman 2004, 31–5; Calvel 1990, 13). French bakers to this day assign numbers – basic baguette flour is 55, while what they call farine de meule is 85 flour. This last corresponds much more closely to the clear flour of earlier periods than modern ‘white’ flour. The sense involved is not just the colour sense, but – much more important – touch and what modern food technicians call mouthfeel. We can find hints of the importance of texture in the earliest surviving receipts (later known as recipes). Fifteenth-century cookbooks request ‘tendre bread’, a designation clearly about texture, not colour (Anon 2004, 109). As well, there are, as said, many kinds of medieval bread, some of which we know little about, such as wastel bread (from the Norman French Gastel or cake), which some historians equate with pandemain, but although the OED cites many references to it, these are unspecific in the extreme. There is also cocket, said by Wilson to be a ‘fine white bread’ and by other historians to be coarse and brown on the basis of the 1266 statute, which in a sixteenth-century translation reads as follows:

Bread Cocket of a farthing of the same Corne and bultell, shall weigh more than wastell by iis. and Cocket bread made of Corne of lower price, shall weigh more than wastell by vs.. Bread (of a farthing) made of the whole wheat shall weigh a cocket and an halfe, that is to say, the Cocket, that shall weigh more than a wastell by v.s.. And bread of common Corne shall weigh two [great] cockets. (Luders 1810–28, I 199–200)

But there is nothing here to suggest darker colour. There might well be many reasons why wheat or flour is cheaper and heavier; damp comes to mind. Moreover, the statute explicitly contrasts cocket with whole wheat bread (Wilson 1991a, 241). Efforts to define have been made through colour, but actually manchets (like cottage loaves in England) seem to be defined less by their dough contents than by their shape. The first printed bread recipe is not, in fact, Markham but comes from The Good Huswife’s Haindmaide for the Kitchen, of 1594, and it stresses size and scaling above all:

THE MAKING OF FINE MANCHET

Take half a bushell of fine flower twise boulted, and a gallon of faire luke warm water, almost a handful of white salt, and almost a pinte of yest, then temper all these together, without any more liquor, as hard as ye can handle it: then let it lie halfe an hower, then take it up, and make your Manchetts, and let them stand almost an hower in the oven. Memorandum, that of every bushell of meale may be made five and twentie caste of bread, and every loaf to way a pounde besyde the chesill. (Anon 1594, 51)

A bushel of flour weighed 56–60 pounds. Again, when thinking about making or using bread, the whiteness of the flour was not uppermost. This emphasis on size and quantity was the other way in which cooks defined bread. In receipt books, loaves were very often identified by assize criteria of size rather than by white or brown, a penny bread or penny loaf.

Some bread receipts specify a shape, such as the cottage loaflike manchet shape, and this too is implicit in the receipt above. The receipt which demands a penny loaf suggests size and shape are also important. In large towns there were variants of the Assize to cover local variations in bread, and I want to look into these, because I suspect some of these bread types are actually regional variations. But what seems clear is that the kind of apartheid between white and brown is an oversimplification of a complex picture which takes little account of change.

Another thing everyone knows was that there were two bakers’ guilds in medieval London, the white bakers and the tourte bakers (Carpenter 231, 295; Wilson 1991a, 211; Drummond and Wilbraham 1957, 39–41; Hartley 1985, 505). The latter are usually equated with brown bread bakers. But in fact ‘the white shall bake all manner of brede that they can make of wheat’, says the 1440 ordinance. It then gives a list, which includes ‘cribill brede’ and ‘basket bread such as sold in chepe for poor men’. Which means it is no simple matter of ‘white bakers’ equaling ‘upper class bread’ – both kinds could be baked for the poor. The tourte bakers were indeed not allowed to own a sieve, but may have been defined less by this than by the ability to bake with grains other than wheat. Rye and barley are exacting, and to this day German rye bakers are specialists and often bake nothing else. It may be that tourte bakers were catering to a different kind of market or taste – or even an ethnicity or identity. What kind of dark bread you ate depended on where you lived as well as your social status, and it was not just a matter of bolting wheat flour or not. In 1304, there were 32 tourte and 21 white bakers. In 1574, there were 36 tourte and 62 white bakers. Colin Spencer sees the rising number of white bakers to mean that the public was acquiring an uppity taste for white bread (Spencer 2002, 70). But given that tourte bakers were also expanding, the whole thing may actually point to a radical decline in home baking. As well, tourte bakers may have fallen into a minority because they made some of their income from home bakers, so their demise could equally point to a decline in these enterprising housewives. The quarrels that broke out between the white and tourte bakers under Queen Elizabeth I complicate the picture even more – tentatively, it seems that ideas about kinds of bread which defined the guilds were themselves contested, so earlier portrayals have been vastly over-simplified.

A more careful look at Gervase Markham’s description of bread types, seen through the lens of this increased understanding of the complexity of bread types, reveals that even his categories cannot be divided along the axis of brown versus white. The first type is often equated with paindemain, but Markham does not say this. His specifications are much more exact. He speaks of meal ‘ground upon th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Eating in Early Modern Europe
• Part 2 Early Modern Cookbooks and Recipes
• Part 3 Food and Feeding in Early Modern Literature
• Index