Class serves up a taste of Shakespeare’s England
May 18, 2026 Kate Sweeney
People plan elaborate feasts, withhold meals from starving wives, trade drunken jibes and poison one another’s booze — and these are just a few ways that food and drink play key supporting roles in the plays of William Shakespeare.
“You know, Shakespeare is wonderful, and Shakespeare can be intimidating,” says Sheila Cavanagh, Emory professor of English. “But looking at the food prepared in Shakespeare’s time can be a great entry point.”
Shakespeare lived from 1564-1616, including during the transformative Tudor period that marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period.
Students study the work of the Bard and medieval author Geoffrey Chaucer through the lens of food in Cavanagh’s Maymester class “Literature and Cultural Studies: Cooking with Chaucer and Shakespeare.”
The online class is crosslisted in the departments of English and history.
That’s the starting point for Cavanagh, who delights in the variety of cultural and academic perspectives her students bring.
In addition to literary and historical readings and guest lectures from experts like renowned food historian Ivan Day, students prepare dishes at home from recipes of the medieval and Tudor eras to develop a final project, presented online. Their dishes vary in complexity, from mixed pickles, to mushroom pasties, to spit-roasted venison or steak, to cherry pottage — a type of dessert pudding.
One student, with a strong art background, “carved a boar’s head out of marzipan, which is an almond paste, to have as the centerpiece of a feast for her final project,” Cavanagh recalls, adding that it was “staggeringly impressive” to behold.
Effort, however, is more important than the quality of execution, says Cavanagh, who considers the attempt of preparing a meal from another era key to the learning process.
The idea for the course arose from Cavanagh’s desire to bring a hands-on approach to teaching early English literature.
“I’m not a woodworker,” she says, ticking off points on her fingers. “I’m not a musician. I can sew, but I’m not any good at it. So, I decided that I would investigate early historical cooking.”
That was in 2015, when she served as the Fulbright-Global Shakespeare Centre Distinguished Chair at Queen Mary University of London.
Since then, Cavanagh has weaved historical foodways into several English literature courses at Emory, in addition to publishing articles and giving talks that combine the topics.
Arden Shakespeare is set to publish her book, “Cooking with Shakespeare: Teaching the Plays through Culinary History and Practice,” in 2027. Cavanagh says she plans to include some recipes in the book that seem familiar to readers, “and throw in at least a couple where they say, ‘Really?’ They may actually cook them or not!”
What was it like to live and eat in England in 1600? From Queen Elizabeth’s sweet tooth to delicacies lost to time, Cavanagh gives the lowdown.
Cooking was complicated
With open-hearth fires, no grocery stores and few options for food preservation, English cooking during the late-16th-to-early-17th centuries was a complicated business.
“That’s one of the things my students often say,” says Cavanagh. “‘I couldn’t survive! It’s all too much work.’”
Rather than just measuring ingredients and cooking them, most people who made meals in Shakespeare’s time also had to grow or raise the food and process it so that it was edible — all without the use of modern tools. People also relied on many foods that they preserved or pickled — another time-consuming process.
Otherwise, it was all farm-to-table.
“Back then, it had to be seasonal,” says Cavanagh. “And when crops failed, there were a lot of problems.” The era was rife with crop failures and hunger, prompting many to flock to urban centers like London in search of better lives.
One complicated-but-common dish in Shakespeare’s day was an early type of meat pie.
Cooks would enclose a meat stew in what they called a “coffin” of “very rough dough,” says Cavanagh. While not intended for human consumption, the dough would prevent the meat from burning on the woodfire or in a brick oven.
It was the original blind bake. “You couldn’t peek to find out when things were done; that would ruin it,” she says. “You just had to know.”
When the dish was ready, people would break into the “coffin,” eat the contents, then toss the shattered dough to their animals. Shakespeare famously had the Roman general in his bloody revenge play “Titus Andronicus” use dough coffins to cook the heads of his enemies.
Even outside of ghastly dramas, food preparation could be deadly, says Cavanagh.
“Kids would be sent to fetch water, and they’d fall into a creek and drown,” she says. And, hundreds of years before antibiotics, cooks could die of infections after slicing their hands while chopping herbs and vegetables for a “salat” of mixed greens.
Almond milk, hold the coffee
A challenge in recreating Tudor dishes, aside from the labor involved, is the availability of authentic ingredients.
“The plants and animals are all completely different now,” says Cavanagh, noting that today’s food is bred and cultivated for ease of shipping. From apples to chickens, little of what we eat bears much resemblance to its ancestors. Other foods have largely disappeared due to their lack of convenience.
Take the medlar, which gets a frequent nod from the Bard. The fruit, which resembles a cross between a russet apple and a persimmon, requires a controlled rotting process before it’s ready to eat. Alas, the persnickety medlar has not been favored by the world’s food industry.
English importation of the long pepper, a species from India that was popular in medieval and Tudor meals, has also declined, says Cavanagh. It was supplanted by black pepper and chilis from the Americas.
Many other foods common to today’s diets didn’t exist in England at that time.
“My students come to class aware that Shakespeare wouldn’t drink Coca-Cola,” says Cavanagh. “But they might assume he drank coffee and tea, which, of course, he didn’t.” World trade routes hadn’t brought coffee or tea to England yet, she explains.
Nor had Shakespeare likely ever seen a turkey leg. Despite what the actors at Renaissance fairs might portray, that particular fowl arrived in England later, from the Americas.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries did drink almond milk.
“And that surprises people,” says Cavanagh. “Because it’s something you might include in an order to your barista.” People from wealthy classes in medieval and Tudor eras had servants create the labor-intensive beverage to consume on religious fast days as a substitute for dairy milk.
Different classes ate different dishes
“Even today, there are laws [in Great Britain] that commoners can’t eat swan,” says Cavanagh. With the exception of the fellows at St. Johns College at the University of Cambridge, she notes, “the swans all belong to the monarchy.”
Most people today wouldn’t think to eat swan. But at the turn of the 17th century, Cavanagh says, “if you had the right access, you would eat swan, you would eat pheasant; you would eat basically any bird that you could capture.”
Sugar was another prized ingredient whose cost made it inaccessible to anyone except nobility — and their servants poured it on, in pies, cakes and alcoholic beverages. Even savory meat courses were sweetened with sugary sauces. People believed sugar was healthy and used it to treat medical problems, Cavanagh says. Queen Elizabeth I was an especial fan, she adds, with the “infamous black teeth” to show it.
Commoners, especially those living in cities, often lacked kitchens altogether.
“You might get fed where you worked,” says Cavanagh, “or you might be out in the fields for a long time and require sustenance.”
The solution? Fast food.
“People often assume street food is a later invention,” she says, but in the Tudor era, many people lived on food sold by vendors, particularly in cities.
“When I first took early-modern cookery classes, we deep fried a hand pie that looked like something you’d get at McDonalds,” she says. “People could buy it and stick it in their pocket or pouch to eat later in the day.”
The lack of kitchens in most homes persisted for centuries. Cavanagh fast forwards 200 years for another literary example.
In “A Christmas Carol,” written by Charles Dickens in 1843, “the Cratchits take their Christmas goose to a baker’s kitchen in order to cook it. And Scrooge himself sends out for food, too.”
As Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” In other words, when it comes to eating and convenience, history repeats itself.
