Francine Segan, a food historian with a taste for the Renaissance, adapts a 1610 handwritten recipe for rose cakes from a recipe book that’s part of the Folger collection.
Posts Categorized: Early-modern-life
Food historian Francine Segan has a taste for the Renaissance and a love of Shakespeare. Here she adapts a recipe for “Citron pye” from a 1587 cookbook. You’ll find an intense combination of vinegar and pepper in these citrus tarts.
Twelfth Night is a Christian holiday typically celebrated on January 5 or 6, concluding the 12 days of Christmas and celebrating the visit of the Magi (the three kings). Twelfth Night is also, of course, the name of a Shakespeare play, although whether he wrote it to be performed during holiday festivities is up for debate…. Continue Reading »
Francine Segan is a food historian with a taste for the Renaissance. She’s the author of six cookbooks, including Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2003) and the Opera Lover’s Cookbook, which was nominated for a James Beard award. This year she’s been spending a lot of time in Italy researching 16th- and 17th-century Italian recipes. We caught up… Continue Reading »
By Esther Ferington The roles of early modern women in Shakespeare’s time—both the fictional characters in his plays and the real-life women of his era—have been central to many projects created by Georgianna Ziegler, Louis B. Thalheimer Associate Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita. Ziegler, who is also a co-founder of the Society for the… Continue Reading »
“Let the sky rain potatoes… I will shelter me here.” Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor is referring here to a food that had but recently arrived to England, but was already on its way to popularity. A team of Folger researchers recently uncovered a very early European potato recipe in our archives. The Folger is proud… Continue Reading »
The Folger is home to the largest collection of early modern western European recipe books in the United States, and a team of Folger researchers recently uncovered a very early European potato recipe in our archives. This recipe, “to make a potato puding,” comes from a recipe collection kept by the Grenville family from c. 1640-1750…. Continue Reading »
Few Elizabethans were wealthy enough to afford a licensed physician. Instead, they would rely on the knowledge of a local “wise woman,” with her home collection of remedy recipes and medicines. Or, they would send a description of their symptoms (along with a urine sample) to an “empiric,” who might cast an astrological horoscope. Broken bone? Call the barber-surgeon!… Continue Reading »
The Ancient Greeks may hold the franchise on Olympic wrestling—but how would they have fared against a 17th-century British shin-kicker? In 1612 in the tiny village of Chipping Campden, Robert Dover opened the first Cotswold Olympicks, ushering in a new sporting tradition that revived the Olympic spirit and laid the foundation for the modern… Continue Reading »
Early modern kitchens, food, and recipes offer an intriguing window on the world in which Shakespeare lived. Our new Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episode is a fascinating interview with Wendy Wall, who explores the role of food, kitchens, and other related subjects in her 2015 book Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen…. Continue Reading »
