Elizabethan Food Dining Essay
Elizabethan Food Dining
For the well to do, eating during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods was a fancy affair. A king or
queen when going abroad could expect banquet tables filled with hundreds of dishes for just one meal!
There was much pageantry and entertainment. At Leicester, Queen Elizabeth I (predecessor of King
James VI I) was greeted with a pageant of welcome displayed on a temporary bridge. There were
cages of live birds bitterns, curlews, hernshaws and godwits. One pillar held great silver bowls piled
with apples, pears, cherries, walnuts and filberts. Other pillars held ears of wheat, oats and barley,
gigantic bunches of red and white grapes, great livery pots of claret and white wine, sea fish in
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Let Huswife be carver, let pottage be eat, a dishful each one with a morsel of meat.
Rich Elizabethans loved hospitality and had chronic guests. In following the old custome, they
gathered in the Great Hall where the host sat at the head of the table and guests were arranged in order
of importance. Food was prepared in vast quantities and what was left over went to servants. After the
servants ate, the remaining food was given to the poor who waited outside the rich men s gates
reminds one of Lazarus and the rich man.
Kitchen Equipment: brick ovens, working table, spits, pots, posnetts, chafing dishes, graters, mortars
and pestles, boilers, knives, cleavers axes, dripping pans, pot racks, pot hooks, gridirons, frying pans,
sieves, kneading troughs, fire shovels, barrels, tubs, pantry, buttery (wine and other provisions stored
here), wet and dry larders, spicery, mealhouse sieving or bolting house, coals kep in squillerie along
with brass pots and pans, pewter vessels and herbs, covered dishes, court cupboard, sideboards.
Drinking vessels: gold, silver, pewter, horn, leather, glass, earthenware.
Meat: beef, mutton, lamb, veal, kid, port, coney, pig, venison, fish (sometimes salted pike, salmon,
haddock, gurnard, tench, sturgeon, conger eels, carp, lampreys, chines of salmon, perch, white herring,
shrimp, pilchards, mackerel, oysters), sausage, eggs, sheep s feet, meat pies. Due to lack of
refrigeration, techniques for preparing spoiled meat vinegar,
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