Tudor food and drink

Tudor food is the food consumed during the Tudor period of English history, from 1485 through 1603. A common source of food during the Tudor period was bread, which was sourced from a mixture of rye and wheat. Meat was eaten from Sundays to Thursdays, and fish was eaten on Fridays and Saturdays and during Lent. New foods were being brought from the newly discovered Americas, such as tomatoes and potatoes. The rich commonly held banquets that consisted of a large variety of courses. Ale and wine were the common drinks of the time.

Food

See also: English cuisine § Sixteenth century

Parsley is one of the herbs the rich used to add flavor to their meals.

The common vegetables used in the Tudor period were onions and cabbages. However, nearer the end of the Tudor period, new foods were brought over from the Americas; these included tomatoes and potatoes. Herbs were often used by rich Tudors to flavour their meals. They created separate herb gardens to grow what they needed, such as parsley, mint, rosemary, thyme, and sage.

Fruit was also eaten as part of the meal as ingredients or eaten separately. Some of the fruit eaten were apples, gooseberries, grapes, oranges, and plums. However, dietaries of the time believed that eating too much unprocessed fruit was bad for the humors.

Tudors of all classes consumed bread in all of their meals as the main source of carbohydrates; however, its quality varied. The cheapest bread available was Carter's bread, which was a mixture of rye and wheat. The middle class or prosperous tenants ate ravel—also known as yeoman's bread—made of wholemeal. The most expensive bread was manchet, made of white wheat flour. It was often telling what social status one belonged to by what type of bread they ate.

The common folk ate whatever they could catch from the rivers and the sea, like haddock and sole. The rich had more of a variety with sturgeon, seal, crab, lobster, and shrimp. The poor ate whatever meat they could find, such as rabbits, blackbirds, pheasants, partridges, hens, ducks, and pigeons. Meanwhile, the rich people also ate more costly varieties of meat, such as swan, peafowl, geese, boar, and deer (venison).

Banquets and feasts

The aristocrats held banquets and feasts consisting of different courses where each course had a variety of dishes brought out at the same time. People then could choose what they wanted to eat.

Meat and poultry

Tudor foods laid during a re-enactment

Tudor pies on pewter plates at Hampton Court

• beef
• mutton
• veal
• lamb
• heron
• pigeon
• chicken
• venison pasty and haunch
• pheasant
• partridge
• quail
• sparrow
• goose

Fish

• lamprey
• haddock
• pike
• salmon
• chub
• sturgeon
• trout
• perch
• crayfish
• bass
• crab
• lobster
• shrimp
• herring

Sweet dishes

• tarts
• doucets (sweet flans)
• fritters
• eggs
• custards
• jelly
• cream of almonds
• fruit, baked and unbaked

Beverages

Everyone drank ale during the Tudor period, as water was considered unhealthy. Ale at the time was brewed without hops, and was not particularly alcoholic. The rich also drank wine, which was mostly imported from Europe, though some wine was produced by vineyards in Southern England. In the early 16th century, wine was expensive for most commoners; an Act from 1536 therefore decreed that wine imported from France would have a price ceiling, with those imported from Greece and especially Spain with an even higher maximum selling price.

The rich drank from wine glasses imported from Italy, which were very expensive, while the poor drank from wooden goblets and cups.

Eating out

By the time Shakespeare was producing his plays, eating or dining out was commonplace. Before the 1400s, there were no public eating-houses in the City of London. Before this, there were cookshops that acted as the fast food of the times. Martha Carlin stated, "It was meant to be eaten immediately, like a hamburger and fries today, but no seats or tables were provided, since fast-food cooks generally worked from cramped storefronts or from movable stalls."

By the 1370s, there were pavement cafes in the Westminster suburbs but no eating-houses proper. Inns and taverns were the first to do restaurant-like business as these establishments already had rooms with tables and chairs set aside for dining. The earliest evidence for this change is from the 1420s. Eating-houses appear around the 1550s.

Table manners

Having clean hands was very important, as several people would dig into a common dish with their fingers. Therefore, they were advised to wash their hands out in the open where everyone could see, to make sure that they were clean. Besides that, manuals for manners from the Renaissance and Middle Ages listed some activities that were frowned upon at the dinner table, including:

• Putting fingers in the ears.
• Putting hands on the heads.
• Blowing nose with the hands.
• Men were told to refrain from scratching.
• Blowing noses off or wiping off sweat with napkins.
• Poking around on a plate, possibly looking for a better piece of food.
• Throwing bones on the floor. The proper place for bones was a platter.
• The release of wind.

Further reading

• Alison Sim (1997) Food and Feast in Tudor England. Stroud: Sutton
• Peter Brears (2003) Tudor Cookery: Recipes & History; revised. Swindon: English Heritage
• Peter Brears (2015) Cooking & Dining in Tudor & Early Stuart England. Totnes: Prospect