Elizabethan Food

Elizabethan Meals

The basic meal for an Elizabethan citizen, especially the peasants consisted of fish, bread, cheese, and honey mead. However, during special occasions even these people would prepare feasts suited for a noble. Different from the easy meal the poor ate, nobility and rich merchants would dine sweet foods in the morning, and feasts and hot spicing meals at daybreak and night. Their meal, instead of cheese and bread, these people ate many meats (e.g. lamb), fruits and pastries. Their drink would also be alcoholic, because the water was contaminated in those times.

Elizabethan Food Market

In the sixteenth century, there were no such thing as convenience stores, malls or plazas. Wherever people wished to sell items, they could do it in public property. If someone decided to buy food, it was easy to purchase it in small places that merchants gather (this is called a market). However, there were little variety in these items sold. Only places such as London had novelty and other various foods. 

Elizabethan Convenience Food

People in the Elizabethan era had convenience food! Biscuits were invented by the Crusaders. The “Ploughman’s Lunch” of bread and cheese was a stable diet of peasants. Many street bakeries were available in villages for selling these snacks. And pastries and pies were sold just as much as well-cooked meats. These biscuits were preferred stale in those times, and was occasionally eaten with mead or other alcoholic drinks. 

Elizabethan Food Presentation

Elizabethan food was important to be displayed with many visual features to provide nobility hosts a prideful effect. Even if it was popular to decorate tables and glamour dishes, the poor failed to have enough money to even support their meals. Various “props” were used to decorate the dining hall and its contents. These “props” included peacock feathers, flowers, vases, and even the food itself!

Elizabethan Cooking Methods

 There were five main cooking methods in the Elizabethan times to prepare food. These were: spit roasting, baking, boiling, smoking, and frying. Spit Roasting was the most basic method because it exposes the meat’s fat and cooks well and fast. Baking was loved in the Elizabethan era, the food was commonly cooked in a public oven which was done by heating the stones and metals in the oven in extreme temperatures. Boiling was a method that was often done by the poorest of the Elizabethan peoples, it was done by inserting raw food into a a pot of hot water. The name basically says it all. Smoking was the specialty method to cook meats, cooks would cure the meat by the exposure of smoke.

Even in the past, frying was a common method to cook meats, fish and vegetables. Cooks would take massive amounts of oil, pour it onto the raw food and heat it in a pan over a coal-made fire.

HERE IS A VIDEO FEATURING ELIZABETHAN FOOD: