Shakespeare in the Kitchen

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.

Marissa Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.

Shakespeare in the Kitchen is an original and fascinating read for anyone interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance England, Early Modern literature, history, food studies, and the history of food.