Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.
Marissa Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.
Shakespeare in the Kitchen is an original and fascinating read for anyone interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance England, Early Modern literature, history, food studies, and the history of food.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Note on Transcription and Citation; Introduction - Cakes / Twelfth Night; 1 - Posset / Macbeth; 2 - Pear Pie / The Winter’s Tale; 3 - Syrup of Violets / Sonnet 12, Sonnet 99, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 4 - Strawberry Conserve /Othello; 5 - Orange Succade / Much Ado About Nothing; 6 - Salad / Antony and Cleopatra; 7 - Capons / 1 Henry IV; 8 - Venison Pasty / As You Like It; Conclusion - Trout / The Tempest; Bibliography; Index
About the Author :
Marissa Nicosia is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University–Abington College, USA. She is the author of Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590–1660 (2023) and the public history website Cooking in the Archives.
Review :
‘While nearly half a millennium and an entire ocean may separate Philadelphia and William Shakespeare’s England, there is one thread that binds both: we all have simultaneously global and local diets. Marissa Nicosia, 40, associate professor of Renaissance literature at Penn State Abington, marries these two worlds together in her new book Shakespeare in the Kitchen, a hybrid scholarly work and cookbook exploring recipes in the Shakespearean era.’
‘All of the recipes in Shakespeare in the Kitchen, from a posset (or medicinal drink akin to modern day eggnog) to a syrup of violets to venison pasties (an enclosed pie), are rather easily executable in a standard home kitchen.’
- Kiki Arantia, The Philadelphia Inquirer May 2016
