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This page provides exclusive articles from key voices within the food studies sphere, written specifically for the Bloomsbury Food Library.
Although Shakespeare is not known for being gastronomically minded, many of his references do shed light on culinary practices of the Renaissance. Among the best known is the passage in Hamlet where the prince mentions that “The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”1 This refers to the pies served at his father’s funeral that have been offered again as cold leftovers at his mother Gertrude’s wedding to his uncle Claudius, one following quickly after the other. Under normal circumstances this would be an act of thrift, exactly as Hamlet says: “Thrift, Thrift Horatio.” But the phrase also refers obliquely, albeit gruesomely, to the pastry shells of the “baked meats” or pies, also known as coffins. The pastry was sometimes a vehicle for storage of the contents and wasn’t eaten, being made of coarse but sturdy free-standing rye flour. The contents would include gelatinous broth or fat to keep the contents hermetically sealed. The coffin is thus meant to protect and preserve the contents from corruption.
Titus Andronicus uses the word coffin in the same double sense when he describes his plan to put children’s heads into a pie to feed to their mother. “I will grind your bones to dust And with your blood and it I'll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin I will rear And make two pasties of your shameful heads.”2 It is the same double metaphor of coffin as pie crust and a vessel bearing the dead. Clearly Shakespeare understood the value of gelatinous meat and bones, even human heads, in keeping the contents of the pie solid, sturdy and long lasting.
Both of these references to coffins are further clarified with a recipe. The 15th century Harleian MS. 279 has a section on baked meats (pies).3 They are specifically for supper, the smaller evening meal, and likewise served at room temperature, and could have been baked several days before and served much like the leftover pies at Gertrude’s wedding.
A bake Mete Ryalle.
Take and make litel cofyns, and take Chykonys y-soþe; o þer Porke y-soþe, and smale y-hackyd; oþer of hem boþe: take Clowys, Maces, Quybibes, and hakke wiþ-alle, and melle yt wiþ cromyd Marow, and lay on Sugre y-now; þan ley it on þe cofynne, and in þe myddel lay a gobet of marow, and Sugre round a-bowte y-now, and lat bake; and þis is for soperys.
A Royal Baked Meat
Take and make little coffins and take boiled chicken, or boiled pork, and chop it fine; or use both of them. Take cloves, mace, cubebs and chop them with the rest, and mix it with crumbs, marrow, and lay on enough sugar, then set it in the coffin, and in the middle put a chunk of marrow, and enough sugar around it, and let it bake, and this is for suppers.
Modern Directions
Bring the water to boil and add the butter. Let the butter melt completely. Put this into the rye flour and knead with your hands into a firm ball, adding more flour if necessary. Let rest. Then gently boil a whole chicken for 20 minutes. Remove from the water, let cool and pull off all the meat, leaving behind the skin and bones. Chop this as finely as you can. Add the spices and bread crumbs. Divide the dough into 8 pieces. With four of them form the bottom crusts with your fingers. Fill with the chicken mixture and add a piece of marrow in the middle. Roll out the other four pieces to form the top crusts and place them on, crimping the edges. Bake for 40 minutes at 375 degrees or until browned. Let cool thoroughly before eating. Serve with a spoon, to break the crust and spoon out the contents. Serves 4.
Shakespeare’s other references to pie reveal that he is usually thinking of fruit inside as well, especially dates. In Troilus and Cressida we are given a seasoning metaphor to describe Troilus’s attributes.4
Pandarus. Do you know what a man is? Is not
birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood,
learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality,
and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?
Cressida. Ay, a minced man: and then to be baked with no date
in the pie, for then the man's date's out.
Cressida’s quip refers to a variety of finely chopped mincemeat pie, made up of so many jumbled ingredients, each individual item, just as each personal attribute of a person, is lost in the mix. She also implies that without dates in the pie, it would be out of date, or out of fashion, or without substance.
The Good Huswife’s Handmaide for the Kitchen, first published in 1588, offers a good idea of the type of pie Shakespeare is referring to here. First it is a pie with an edible crust. The author warns explicitly in a recipe to make Paste to raise Coffins, not to put too many eggs in the pastry or “it will make it drie and not pleasant in eating.”5 On the next page he offers exactly the sort of recipe Cressida has in mind.
To make sweete pies of Veale
Take Veale and perboyle it verie tender, then chop it small, then take twise as much beef suet, and chop it small, then minse both them together, the put Corrans and minced Dates to them, then season your flesh after this manner. Take Pepper, salt, and Saffron, Cloves, Mace, Synamon, Ginger, and Sugar, and season your flesh with each of these a quantitie, and mingle them altogether.6
Modern Instructions
You will also need: 2 muffin tins (1 dozen each tin), mixing bowls, large pot with lid, small saucepan, 4 inch biscuit ring, 3 inch biscuit ring, sheet tray, rolling pin, flat surface for rolling, fork, knife.
In a large pot, cover the veal with cold water. Cover pot with a lid and simmer until tender, about 1 ½ hours. Drain and allow the veal to cool. Chop it finely with the chopped suet or beef fat. Add in currants, chopped dates, sugar and spices. Set aside. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. To make crust, first melt 1 stick of butter in 1 cup of water. Heat just until the butter is melted, do not boil. In a large mixing bowl, make a well in the center of the 4 cups of flour. Pour the water/melted butter mixture into the well and mix until well combined. Let sit until it reaches room temperature. Mix in egg yolks. The dough should come together as a ball. Allow dough to rest for 10 minutes, then divide into 4 equal portions. On a floured surface roll the dough to 1/16 inch thickness, then cut out 24 4-inch circles. Roll out remaining dough and cut into 24 3-inch circles. Place the larger dough circles into the bottoms of 2 greased muffin tins (one dozen each tin), then spoon in 2 tbsp of filling. Top with the smaller dough circles, pressing down to make sure that there are no air pockets between the dough and the filling. Use a fork to crimp the top and bottom edges together. Make a vent by cutting a small “x” in the top of each pie.
Place muffin tins on top of baking sheets. Bake pies for 1 hour, rotating the pans halfway through, until pies are nicely browned. Makes 24 individual pies.
Presumably without the dates the pie is not only paltry, but not something likely to please – an insulting comparison directly to Troilus. The double meaning of date points directly to the reigning aesthetic of the late 16th century, when dates were still an exotic luxury, absolutely requisite in elegant and table-worthy pies.
A similar pun about date and fashion is given by Parolles in the opening scene of All’s Well that Ends Well. He is describing how virginity is of no use if kept too long.7
Virginity, like an old courtier, wears her cap out
of fashion: richly suited, but unsuitable: just
like the brooch and the tooth-pick, which wear not
now. Your date is better in your pie and your
porridge than in your cheek;
The pun is that dates, the fruit, belong in pies, but date meaning age, does not wear well on a woman’s face. The lines only make sense knowing that dates in pies are indeed still fashionable and that without them pies are not considered very interesting. We also learn, incidentally, that picking one’s teeth in public was now considered declassé.
1. Hamlet I:ii.180.
2. Titus Andronicus V:3.
3. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, ed. Thomas Austin. London: Oxford University Press, reprint, 2000, p. 55.
4. Troilus and Cressida I:2.258.
5. Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen, ed. Stuart Peachy. Bristol: Stuart Press, 1992, p. 22. It should be noted that these are free-standing pies baked on a sheaf of paper rather than in a pie pan. They use hot water in the crust and not too much butter which makes the dough so short that it can’t support itself. In other words it is not a modern pie crust, but is nonetheless intended to be eaten.
6. Ibid, p. 23.
7. All’s Well That Ends Well I:1.
Ken Albala is professor of history at the University of the Pacific and director of the Food Studies MA program in San Francisco. He is a prolific figure in food academia and has authored or edited over 23 books on food. These include A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance; Beans (winner of the 2008 IACP Jane Grigson Award); Pancake: A Global History; At the Table: Food and Family around the World; and Nuts: A Global History. He was co-editor of the journal Food, Culture and Society and has also coedited The Business of Food, Human Cuisine and Food and Faith. Albala was editor of the Food Cultures around the World series and the four-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia and is now series editor of Rowman and Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy, for which he wrote Three World Cuisines (winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards best foreign cuisine book in the world for 2012). He has also co-authored cookbooks, including The Lost Art of Real Cooking and The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home.
