Lecture 21: Elizabethan England, Puritans, Country Food
sacred festivals that dotted the Christian calendar and took a harsh
attitude toward food and pleasures of the body. When young Edward died, the nation without hesitation proclaimed
Mary Queen of England—even though she was Catholic. England
reverted to full obedience to the Pope and the Catholic Church
for several years, and then they switched just as quickly back to
Protestantism under Elizabeth. The importance of this is that England maintained both Catholic
and Puritan minorities—the former attracted to the continent
aesthetically, and the latter tending toward simple, native tastes.
There are many other factors involved, but this makes England
sort of schizophrenic gastronomically. England was nonetheless
dazzling in the reign of Elizabeth. In the 1580s and 1590s, a spate of cookbooks was published. The
fi rst of these was The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen,
which appeared in 1588. It is addressed to a woman cooking for
or managing a household, presumably a wealthy one located in the
country because many of the recipes call for wild game. The next important cookbook produced in England fi rst appeared
in 1596: Thomas Dawson’s The Good Huswifes Jewell. Like The
Good Huswifes Handmaide, it refl ects new ideas in cookery. It
contains, for example, the fi rst recipe for sweet potatoes. It also
includes directions for making various marzipan fi gures. Although
many of the recipes call for boiling ingredients, they also show a
fairly simple and direct way of dealing with them.England in the Early 17th Century
Cookery in the early 17th century did not differ that much from that
of the previous century. There was a new king on the throne—the
Scotsman James I, who was not quite as popular as Elizabeth. Gervase Markham was one of the most prolifi c author/compilers of
this generation, writing about a variety of topics that would appeal