to the owner or steward and housekeeper of a typical country house.
With titles covering agriculture, husbandry, medicine for people
and animals, and cooking, he provided readers, probably landed
gentry, with practically everything they would need to know. The English Housewife of 1615 (which then appeared in expanded
editions for the next two decades) is his foray into cookery, but it
also contains sections on distillation, brewing beer, baking bread,
making cloth, curing ailments, and even the virtues requisite for
the ideal housewife. It is clear from some of his recipes that the
household was wealthy enough to afford fashionable and exotic
Mediterranean ingredients worthy of royal tables.
When James I died, his son Charles I inherited the throne.
Immediately, people began to notice changes at court. There
was a new style of clothes and architecture, modeled closely on
continental fashions, which seemed foreign to Englishmen. After a
series of political blunders, a civil war erupted that succeeded not
only in removing Charles’s head and abolishing the monarchy, but
also in instituting a godly republic led by Oliver Cromwell and a
host of puritanically minded parliamentarians.
The signifi cance of this episode for the history of food is that the
pleasures of the palate became suspect. All sensory indulgence
was deemed sinful. The theaters were closed, and the village
festivals were banned. Anything redolent of paganism was purifi ed,
following strict biblical authority.
Without a royal court, one might think the arts of the table
languished; in fact, they didn’t, and Cromwell kept a very nice wine
cellar. However, most of the great chefs seem to have just gone into
hiding because a magnifi cent court reemerged as if overnight with
the restoration of Charles II in 1660 as king.
For the rest of the 17th century, the full splendor of the royal court
returned, but the power of parliament also remained strong, leaving
England with a constitutional monarchy. England, in contrast to