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. In Act III,
Scene 3, Falstaff – who will be the focus of a future post – urges Mistress
Quickly, the hostess of the Eastcheap tavern that is his regular haunt, to
bring him breakfast: “Hostess ... go make ready breakfast “ (lines 168-69);
“Hostess, my breakfast, come!” (line 202).
Whilst no details are given of what Falstaff wants to eat for breakfast,
earlier in the same play the Chamberlain of a tavern in Rochester reports that
some travellers are up early and have called for “eggs and butter” (II, 1, 60)
before they depart. It’s not stated what
was done with these two ingredients – a hardboiled egg accompanied by butter on
bread? An egg fried in butter? An
omelette? Scrambled eggs? I opted for the latter, making scrambled eggs
without the milk that I usually add – which made a very rich buttery dish;
surely just what greedy Falstaff would like.
This got me thinking about breakfast in Shakespeare – and
more generally in literature – a meal that I would suspect (though I may be
proved wrong when I move onto later literature) is a rarely-mentioned meal in
drama, poetry or fiction. As Andrew and
Maureen Dalby write in The Shakespeare
Cookbook, breakfast would have been eaten very early – soon after dawn – in
Shakespeare’s time and would have been very light. Falstaff says elsewhere in Henry IV Part one that grace does not
need to be said before breakfast, suggesting it was deemed a less important and
substantial meal than other meals. As
with breakfasts nowadays we can probably assume that breakfast would have been
repeated with little variation day after day, making it an uninteresting meal
to comment on in literature. Breakfast
is also usually eaten within the privacy of the home, and there are “no
invitations to breakfast in Shakespeare”.[1] Where meals do appear on the stage in
Shakespeare they are – as with Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight (see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/festivities-at-medieval-court.html)
- usually banquets and feasts, set pieces that gather together a number of
characters, often to allow something dramatic to happen. Examples of this in Shakespeare would include
the exiled Duke Senior’s banquet in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It (c. 1599) which is interrupted by the play’s hero,
Orlando, who, fleeing for his life from his wrathful brother, Oliver, and
overwhelmed by hunger threatens the courtiers at knife point.
Orlando interrupts Duke Senior's banquet: As You Like It Act II, Scene 7 by Frederick William Davis (1902)
A far more sinister feast occurs at the end of Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), where the
eponymous protagonist serves up to his enemy Tamora, a pie containing her own
dead sons, as revenge for their rape and mutilation of his daughter,
Lavinia. So breakfast seems pretty tame
and uninteresting in comparison!
Arguably the handful of mentions of breakfast in Shakespeare
have a symbolic function, rather than telling us anything of significance about
what people ate for breakfast in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. Falstaff’s repeated demand
for breakfast serves to characterise him as a man whose every thought and
action is dominated by food and drink.
In Antony and Cleopatra (c.
1607), Shakespeare’s tragic retelling of the doomed love affair between two
powerful leaders of the classical world, a reference to breakfast is used to symbolise
the decadence of the Egyptian world (as opposed to the restraint of Rome, a
dramatic conflict that runs throughout the play). Enobarbus, Antony’s right-hand man who has
been spending time in Egypt with his love-sick superior, tells his Roman
counterparts about the life he has been leading in Cleopatra’s country. A Roman, Maecenas, asks him to verify the rumours
he has heard about the Egyptian diet:
“Eight whole boars roasted whole at a breakfast and but twelve persons
there. Is this true?” (II, 2, 191-2). Enobarbus says this is an understatement: “We
had much more monstrous matter of feast” (II, 2, 193-4). In fact Shakespeare’s source for this detail
– Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Life of Mark Antony – says the food was eaten in the evening. By changing it to breakfast Shakespeare
creates humour and further highlights the extravagances of Egypt.
And so to pancakes – which seems appropriate timing since
Shrove Tuesday was only a few days ago.
In the comedy As You Like It which
I mentioned above, the fool Touchstone tells a rather obscure and confusing
story of a knight who “swore by his honour” that the pancakes were “good” when
in fact they were nothing of the kind (I, 2, ll. 50-51), but because the knight
had no honour, he did not commit perjury when he lied about the pancakes. Well, the knight’s pancakes may not have been
any good, but these ones are; a recipe passed onto me by a Canadian friend (courtesy
of http://therepressedpastrychef.com/2008/09/14/buttermilk-pancakes/)
the buttermilk creates a rather thick consistency, ideal as in Shakespeare’s
time the word ‘pancake’ could refer to either a pancake as we know it or a
fritter.
BUTTERMILK BREAKFAST
PANCAKES – makes between 6 and 8
Dry Ingredients:
1 ½ cups plain flour
3 tablespoons caster sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon salt
Wet ingredients:
1 ½ cups buttermilk
3 tablespoons melted butter
2 eggs
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
Method:
Combine the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients in
separate bowls. Then pour the wet
ingredients into the dry; stir to combine but do not overbeat. Leave to rest for anywhere between 30 minutes
and overnight.
Spoon heaped tablespoonfuls of the batter onto a heated
oiled frying pan over a moderate heat. After
a minute or so, when bubbles begin to form on the surface, use a fish knife or
palette knife to turn over the pancake and cook for another minute or so on the
other side. Serve warm with maple syrup,
or fried bacon, or whatever takes your fancy.
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