As well as using food and meals to create character and add dramatic impact, Shakespeare litters his plays with food references used metaphorically. Continue reading “Food as Metaphor in Shakespeare”
Category: Shakespeare
Falstaff: The first literary foodie?
A few posts back when I was still on the Middle Ages I wrote about Geoffrey Chaucer’s innovative literary creation of a cook as a storyteller – see here Now that I’ve moved onto Shakespeare, I wonder if there’s another literary first here: the first foodie in English literature, Sir John Falstaff. Continue reading “Falstaff: The first literary foodie?”
Breakfast in Shakespeare
Rereading Henry IV Part One to find about the eating habits of Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s rotund food-loving comic character, I noticed a number of references to breakfast. Continue reading “Breakfast in Shakespeare”
Spicing it up
The history of ginger in English cookery and literature is similar to that of sugar – see here. Like sugar, ginger is not native to England; its origins lie in South Asia, and over time its cultivation spread to East Africa and the Caribbean. As with sugar, it is thanks to the Crusades that ginger was brought to the west. And like sugar, ginger was expensive – a pound of ginger was the same price as a sheep – though nowhere near as expensive as black pepper, which cost more by weight than gold. Used for medicinal and culinary purposes, including in wine, ginger was also commonly imported in a preserved form and made into sweets. Continue reading “Spicing it up”