Cleopatra's salad days

Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. In her new book, Shakespeare in the Kitchen, Marissa Nicosia, the scholar behind the popular Cooking in the Archives blog, asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works. Each chapter includes a historical recipe updated for modern cooks.

Below is an excerpt from her chapter, “Salad / Antony and Cleopatra.”

I first heard the phrase “salad days” long before I read or saw a performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra. There were two sides to the phrase as I first understood it: Crisp greens and youthful exploits fondly remembered. Longing for absent Antony, Cleopatra reminisces about the time in her life when she was amorously entangled with Caesar: “My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood.” Cleopatra recalls her inexperience through the culinary metaphor of a green salad and the humoral commonplace that fresh vegetables cool the blood. She also invokes the long‑standing association of youth with new, green plant growth. When Cleopatra likens her youth to salad, she performs an act of vegetable self‑narrativization.

In Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy adapted from Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Antonius, a troubled romance unfolds during the shaky second triumvirate. Shakespeare’s retelling of Antony and Cleopatra’s doomed love makes the tragic couple larger than life whether they are on the stage together or separately, whether they are talking about themselves or telling tales about one another or are (inevitably) gossiped about by others, whether they are amorous or brawling. Roman imperial expansion in earlier years first brought Julius Caesar to Cleopatra’s Egypt, and these are the “salad days” that she reflects on in her iconic quip. Antony has taken Caesar’s place both as governor in conquered Egypt and also as Cleopatra’s lover. At the start of the play, Antony is called back to Rome to help his fellow triumvirs fend off Pompey’s rebellion. But Antony cannot stay away from Cleopatra or from Egypt. On his return, they find themselves embroiled in battle with Octavius Caesar, which they lose through a combination of love‑sick incompetence and poor military strategy.

Everyone likes to talk about Cleopatra. At the very start of Shakespeare’s play, Philo sets the scene for a messenger who has just arrived from Rome. In a speech that paints Egypt as exotic and Cleopatra as alluring, Philo laments that Antony is too much in love with Cleopatra to attend to his administrative duties: A “pillar of the world transformed / Into a strumpet’s fool” (1.1.13–14). Antony’s beloved Cleopatra is a “strumpet” and, moreover, she has dark skin, a “tawny front,” and has taken over his heart with her insatiable desires: “His captain’s heart, / […] is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gypsy’s lust” (1.1.6, 6–10). Cleopatra is set apart from the very opening lines of the play as the focus of all of Antony’s attention due to her Egyptian—“gypsy”— identity, her skin color, and her erotic appeal. When Antony and Cleopatra walk on stage volleying declarations of love, they are clearly enraptured, and their presence brushes away Philo’s disparaging descriptions (although not his concerns about Antony’s lax governance) as their romance, literally and metaphorically, takes center stage. Indeed, later in the play, Enobarbus delivers a famous and luminous speech in which he describes Cleopatra on her barge. From this account of her first meeting with Antony, all hyperbolic amatory oaths seem natural. Of course, the resplendent Egyptian Queen drove Antony to distraction. Perfumed incense and sweet flute music drifted from a golden barge bedecked with purple sails and rowed with silver oars. Enobarbus struggles to describe Cleopatra’s incredible beauty:

For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion—cloth‑of‑gold, of tissue—
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature.
(2.2.234–238)

He protests that she is beyond description. Only by envisioning a painting of Venus, and imagining a woman more beautiful than art can depict, can we approximate the incredible sight of the Egyptian queen in her pavilion wrapped in cloth glistening with golden threads.

In Philo and Enobarbus’s speeches, we see how Roman descriptions of Cleopatra oscillate between the lewd and the glorious. But when she talks about herself, she speaks in a different register, as in the salad description with which I  began: Her verdant, crisp, leafy autobiography. To understand the terms of Cleopatra’s self‑description, we need to know more about early modern salads. Salads were complex dishes in the Renaissance, and studying them in the kitchen has helped me think through the edible, vegetal rhetoric surrounding Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Although salads seem healthful at best and innocuous at worst to twenty‑first‑century readers, in Renaissance England, the raw ingredients in their mixture made salads a complicated nutritional matter. Joan Fitzpatrick writes that “[e]arly modern salads usually contained cooked as well as raw vegetables, herbs, flowers and perhaps fruit” and “salad was believed to be cooling” because of the preponderance of raw foods it contained. Cleopatra’s description of her younger, salad‑like self as “cold in blood” refers to this humoral understanding of the dish (1.5.89). Moreover, cookbook authors presented salads as exotic: They commented on their continental origins, suggested serving them on credenzas at celebratory banquets, and listed copious ingredients that might be layered on broad platters to achieve a spectacular array.

Cleopatra’s salad days may be in the past, but in this chapter, I consider salad as an apt food metaphor for her beauty and flair for staging herself before Roman occupiers or potential love interests—what Enobarbus calls her “infinite variety” (2.2.277). As I read about Renaissance salads, I grew more intrigued by Cleopatra’s choice to use this varied dish to make sense of her past. Salads can be healthful or cause a humoral imbalance. They might be a foreign food trend or an English tradition. Salads are visually splendid and gastronomically complex dishes laden with exotic imported ingredients, and they are also simple vegetable preparations, prepared with greens gathered from the garden or foraged in the meadow. If the coldness of salad defined Cleopatra’s youth and the infinite variety of this dish offers an ongoing analogy for her personhood, how are we to read her culinary autobiography?

Renaissance Salad Fashioning

Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Names” opens with a metaphor that speaks to the inherent capaciousness of salad. He writes, “No matter how varied the greenstuffs we put in, we include them all under the name of salad” and so too will he proceed in his study of names and naming. Montaigne demonstrates a contemporary Renaissance understanding of salad as varied matter gathered together by no more than a name. The Oxford English Dictionary first provides the definition of salad as mixed raw vegetables and subsequently, “figurative and allusively, as a type of something mixed.” This meaning of salad as mixture coexisted with its understanding as perishable greenstuff that might imbue cold, and potentially destabilizing, humoral properties once consumed.

Perhaps I was primed to hear the word salad as flexible, multitudinous because of the shifts in salad trends during my own adult life. As Margaret Eby writes in her inviting 2024 cookbook You Gotta Eat, “You may think salad means ‘sad privation meal of lettuce,’ but actually salad is a loose category that roughly translates to ‘haphazard assembly of things tied together by dressing.’” In her history of salads, Judith Weinraub tackles this same definitional problem:

Dishes that have been called salads include wild herbs or cultivated leafy greens with a salted dressing; cold vegetable dishes designed to correct an imbalance within the body as set out by the theory of humours articulated by the prominent second‑century physician and philosopher Galen; cresses, herbs and lettuces set alongside large roasted meats in Renaissance and post‑Renaissance banquets; cold dishes with a kind of salad dressing that don’t even contain vegetables except for a whisper of lettuce[. …] Salads have been individual courses in the sequence of a meal, side‑dishes or, sometimes—especially in the late twentieth and early twenty‑first centuries—the entire meal.

Salad has meant many things in the course of its history, but it almost always includes some raw, green vegetables, and it always involves a mixture. In my experience, Renaissance salads have much more in common with the maximalist salad dinner bowls of the 2020s than the limp side salads of yesteryear.

I first came across Montaigne’s apologia for inquisitive word‑salad as the epigraph in Madeline Masson’s twentieth‑century edition and adaptation of John Evelyn’s late‑seventeenth‑century salad treatise Acetaria (the Latin word for salad which comes from acetum, vinegar, used in salad dressings). Although Evelyn’s comprehensive guide to salads was published in 1699, long after Shakespeare’s death, I find its dressing instructions, salad ingredient proportion charts, and catalog of the humoral properties of individual vegetables quite useful as a compendium of early modern salad‑making practice. Framing Evelyn’s salad scholarship for readers of this lovely, hand‑lettered edition, Masson writes that “Elizabethan salads were exotic, made with violet buds and other flowers, and the green leaves of sage, rosemary, borage and lettuce covered by strange new dressings.” Evelyn is the inheritor of a long salad tradition.

Culinary commentators and food scholars, like Masson, often use adjectives such as “exotic” and “strange” to describe Renaissance English salads. These descriptions link salad traditions to Italy and continental Europe as well depict as their inherent variety. Despite this penchant for calling English Renaissance salads imported, innovative, and new, salad has been eaten in England for quite a long time. For example, Esther B. Aresty notes that “crisp green ‘salat’” made from parsley, sage, garlic, various onions, leeks, borage, mint, fennel, cress, rue, rosemary, and purslane dressed with vinegar and salt, was served in the medieval court of King Richard II and documented in The Forme of Cury. She draws a clear connection between this medieval salad and the salads in Gervase Markham’s 1615 English Huswife. Markham’s simplest green salad includes “all young Lettice, Cabage lettice, Purslan, and diuers other hearbes which may bee served simply without any thing, but a little Vinegar, Sallet oyle, and Sugar.” Similar salads have been consumed in England for quite a long time.

Aresty also comments on the visual splendor of Markham’s salads which perhaps contributes to their exoticism. She writes, “Apparently, they often doubled as decorative centerpieces. Few housewives today would go to the effort of preparing the tremendous affair of fruits, nuts, and meadow and garden greens that Markham called Compound Sallet.” Markham’s instructions, “To compound an excellent Sallat, and which indeede is usuall at great feasts, and vpon Princes tables,” bring together a mix of locally‑harvested and imported ingredients as it calls for blanched almonds, raisins, figs, capers, olives, dried currants, tender leaves of red sage and spinach, cabbage, red cauliflower leaves, oranges, lemons, and a dressing of sugar, vinegar, and oil. Ken Albala’s discussion of Markham also highlights the “tremendous” “decorative” impressiveness of salads. He explains, “It is clear from some of [Markham’s] recipes that the household was wealthy enough to afford fashionable and exotic Mediterranean ingredients worthy of royal tables.” Markham’s other recipes in this section discuss using pickled and preserved ingredients as well as boiling both root vegetables and spinach to prepare a form of cooked salad. He tantalizingly also includes a description of “Sallats for shewe only” that were intended to adorn the table and delight the eye. For these salads, boiled “Carret roots of sundrie colours” were cut into the shapes of knots, birds, weapons, and wild beasts. More than a mess of mere leaves, the Renaissance salad was a regal affair. Layered with fresh and preserved fruits and vegetables and adorned with edible flowers and herbs, salads were served year‑round on sideboards or as part of the cold first courses of luxurious dinners. The delicious cacophony of salads is made possible by both fresh and preserved ingredients.

Salad preparation—the selection of components and dressing—profoundly influences the humoral properties of the finished dish. Evelyn’s late‑seventeenth‑century salad‑making suggests that a cook might compose and dress salads according to humoral principles as well as flavor preferences. He writes,

There is therefore Skill and Judgment requir’d, how to suit and mingle our Sallet‑Ingredients, so as may best agree with the Constitution of the (vulgarly reputed) Humors of those who either stand in need of, or affect these Refreshments, and by so adjusting them, that as nothing should be suffer’d to domineer, so should none of them lose their genuine Gust, Savour, or Vertue.

A delicate balancing act is required to “mingle” ingredients to best “affect” the temperaments of diners gathered at the table. Evelyn suggests that by making a salad well, you will not only fashion a delicious dish, but also actually remake yourself.

You prepare your salad, you eat your salad, you become your salad. Evelyn’s instructions concur with Galenic humoralism on the one hand, and Renaissance ideas of the self on the other hand. As Michael Schoenfeldt writes, “The goal of medical intervention” in the Galenic system was “to restore each individual’s proper balance, either through ingestion of substances possessing opposite traits, or purgation of excess, or both.” Eating is usually part of any treatment to restore a healthy disposition and a healthy body. In Renaissance Self Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt begins from the insight that “in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self‑consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” and that this “fashioning may suggest the achievement of a less tangible shape: a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving.” As a result, the practice of salad making is a kind of self‑fashioning by which vegetables influence humors and create personality. In a way, this is an amplification of Jean Anthelme Brillat‑Savarin’s famous aphorism, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” Tell me who you want to be and how you are fixing your salad.

With all this in mind, how do we understand Cleopatra’s “salad days”? Well‑made salads could be visually stunning, showcase the variety of the garden and kitchen stores, and be prepared to imbue the eater with good health. The metaphorical salad of Cleopatra’s youth may have been unbalanced: Too cold. But by turning to a salad to describe her days with Caesar, Cleopatra likens her life to this layered, dressed, composed, and displayed dish meant to astonish as well as nourish. She may have been young and naive, but her salad days with Caesar—her Caesar salad days as we might call them—were nevertheless impressive. Comparing her younger self to a salad is bravado, not diminution. While Cleopatra asserts that she is no longer young, inexperienced, or lettuce‑cold, the spectacular visual and gustatory appeal of salad remains part of her identity.

“A Sallett of All Manner / of Hearbes”

When I first read this recipe “To make a sallett of all manner / of hearbes,” it brought to mind not only Cleopatra’s “salad days,” but also her “infinite variety”—or what Enobarbus identifies as her irrepressible appeal. I set out to make this salad to help me understand how a salad can stand in metaphorically for both her self‑narrativization and how others narrate her.

The verb “garnishe” tells me that this salad should be beautiful as well as delectable and healthful. It is a carefully arranged dish overflowing with fresh herbs or greens, cucumber or almonds, dressed with a light sweet vinaigrette, and bedecked with colorful, edible blossoms and a striking hardboiled egg. This recipe is inherently adaptable because the specific greens and flowers are not prescribed and instead depend on the produce of the garden, the season, and the cook’s discretion in selecting and layering ingredients. Like some of Markham’s compound salads, this recipe calls for a blend of dressed greens and flowers enhanced with heartier ingredients such as hard‑cooked eggs. I suspect that this recipe provides an option for omitting cucumbers and including almonds instead for a few reasons: First, cucumbers were only available fresh seasonally, they were also notoriously cold and wet (a disruptive vegetable for a delicate stomach according to humoral theory), and, finally, almonds were more shelf‑stable if also imported and expensive. The version that I prepared includes both almonds and cucumbers (because I am neither seasonally restricted from purchasing cucumbers nor concerned about their humoral properties) as well as the hardboiled eggs.

When this salad recipe calls for herbs, it uses the word in the technical sense described in this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: An herb is “A plant of which the stem does not become woody and persistent (as in a shrub or a tree), but remains more or less soft and succulent, and dies down to the ground (or entirely) after flowering.” According to this definition, lettuce is technically an herb even though in twenty‑first‑century American culinary categorization we might reserve the label “herb” for highly seasoned greens used in smaller proportions in dishes. Markham’s salad recipes listing “diuers other hearbes” among ingredients recalls other contemporary salad recipes that use the word herb to refer to all sorts of soft, succulent, and perishable plants.

Selecting and washing these greens was a rather important part of salad assembly. First, greenstuff, herbs, and lettuces were quite diverse: Even common lettuce has many varieties, and Joan Thirsk notes that “[John] Parkinson [in 1629] knew 11 or 12 different kinds of lettuce, and did not think his readers would believe there could be so many.” Evelyn implores his readers “Preparatory to the Dressing,” to “let your Herby Ingredients be exquisitely cull’d, and cleans’d of all worm‑eaten, slimy canker’d, dry, spotted, or in any way vitiated Leaves. And then that they be rather discreetly sprinkl’d, than over‑much sob’d with Spring‑Water, especially Lettuce.” I stood in the supermarket and marveled at all the fresh greens and herbs that I could rinse, chop, pluck, toss, and layer to make a flavorful and visually interesting salad. I selected a big box of peppery arugula (also known as rocket), a bundle of parsley, and plastic clamshells full of dill. I wanted my green leaves to have bold edges and to contrast with the lacy frills of the dill. I was glad that I had planted nasturtium seeds on a whim and had, as I often do, planted pansies and marigolds as soon as my tiny back garden awoke from its winter slumber. Purple, orange, yellow, and red edible flowers would brightly contrast with a foundational layer of greens, translucent slices of cucumber, pale flecks of sliced almonds, and carefully arranged wedges of hardboiled eggs. For a salad‑scholar like Evelyn, however, the flowers were not only for decoration, but rather as essential for providing healthful properties as the well‑washed quality lettuces. This recreated salad will work with the greens you have to hand and will be even more beautiful if you can spare a few edible flowers from a window box or garden as a finishing touch.

In the principles of dressing outlined in Acetaria, Evelyn is very concerned with the quality and quantity of oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, and mustard that will be used to dress a salad. Although the original recipe calls for vinegar, acidic lemon juice or verjuice (a sour juice made from immature grapes) could also be used in the dressing. When my mother tested the recipe as I was developing it for this book, she appreciated the flexibility of the recipe, but cautioned against omitting the sugar for the special zest it adds to the dish. Sugar, of course, is a crucial flavoring in many Renaissance salads for its flavor, health properties, and its high‑value and related prestige.

Infinite Variety

Shakespeare’s play depicts a clash of Roman and Egyptian cookery cultures, mostly through describing impressive feats of feasting. For playgoers and playreaders, stories of these Alexandrian revels might conjure visions of English feasts: The kind of celebratory meals where resplendent compound salads would bedeck a table and a midday meal would last for hours. Maecenas and Enobarbus muse about all‑night merry‑making and outrageous, wasteful consumption such as a “monstrous matter of feast” served at breakfast that exceeded “Eight wild boars roasted whole” for twelve people (2.2.218, 215). Jockeying for power, Pompey dismisses Antony’s prowess with the notion that feasting is a perpetual activity in Alexandria and thus “Mark Antony / In Egypt sits at dinner, and will make / No wars without doors” (2.1.14–16). As Pompey later jibes to Antony in a scene where they forge a new alliance, “Your fine Egyptian cookery shall have / The fame. I have heard that Julius Caesar / Grew fat with feasting there” (2.6.81–83). Travel to Egypt disrupts Roman appetite and digestion.

When Caesar laments Antony’s louche lifestyle in Egypt— the “lascivious wassails” during which Antony “drinks, and wastes / The lamps of night in revel”—he recalls what his fellow triumvir ate during his renowned military career (1.4.65, 1.4.4–5). Roman dietary ideals are starkly different. In the face of starvation in the Alps near Modena, Antony slaked his thirst with horse urine, ate bark and berries like a stag, reportedly, Antony ate “strange flesh,” a euphemism for cannibalism (1.4.77). Antony bore these troubles “so like a soldier” that he did not even succumb to the lean and hungry look, the “lanked” “cheek” of the starving (1.4.80–81). Although Caesar waxes poetic about Antony’s resilience in the face of profound suffering, the diet of this Roman military campaign is far from appealing, especially when contrasted with the tales of Alexandrian feasting that populate the play.

Caesar’s praise of Antony’s reported endurance (or cannibalism) casts a pall over the edible metaphors that surround Cleopatra. When Cleopatra compares herself to “salad,” she presents herself as a feast for the eyes as well as the tastebuds, yet her culinary metaphor resonates more darkly when Shakespeare’s Romans invoke her visual beauty and delicious taste. Enobarbus calls her an “Egyptian dish” to say that she is both attractive and edible (2.6.156). Even Antony remarks, “I found you as a morsel cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher,” describing her as old, leftover food on the edge of a bread plate (3.13.146–147). A discarded gobbet of food that is edible, but not even eaten, is a far cry from a splendid salad.

Pompey’s epitaph for the Egyptian queen—“Salt Cleopatra”— imagines her as both an edible dish and a cook and, moreover, has a surprising connection to salad. Pompey hopes his rebel‑lion will succeed because amorous Cleopatra will keep Antony subdued in Alexandria rather than beside Octavius Caesar in his full military prowess:

But all the charms of love,
Salt Cleopatra, soften thy wanned lip!
Let witchcraft join with beauty, lust with both;
Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts;
Keep his brain fuming. Epicurean cooks
Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite,
That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honor
Even till a Lethe’d dullness—
(2.1.25–32)

By seasoning dishes with the metaphorical salt of her love, Cleopatra might render Antony complacent, forgetful, adrift in days and nights of feasting and lovemaking. “Salt Cleopatra” (and her Egyptian cooks) might prepare Alexandrian feasts that profoundly alter Antony’s Roman constitution. When Pompey puts seasoning salt in Cleopatra’s metaphorical kitchen, he also invokes an echo of salad. The word “salad” came into English from the Latin word “salt” and the verb “to salt” in various Romance and Germanic languages.  Salad did not quite mean salted in Shakespearean English, but the homophone—salt echoing in the variant spelling of “salad” as “sallett”—remained an obsolete resonance. The delight of flavor, like salt sprinkled over dishes by “Epicurean cooks,” keeps Antony in Egypt “feeding.” Pompey’s words also invoke the seasoned salads on elite tables. Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” that makes her so irresistible to Antony is specifically described as a matter of flavor. I have already mentioned the story of Cleopatra and Antony’s first meeting and the description Enobarbus shares of Cleopatra on her barge—a description that asserts her beauty is beyond description. After hearing this account, Agrippa asks if Antony will tire of Cleopatra, and Enobarbus emphatically asserts, “Never. He will not” (2.2.275). Enobarbus turns to gustatory metaphor to support his claim:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
(2.2.276–279)

The infinite variety of Cleopatra is not just her person or the visual, aural, olfactory display she puts on from her luxurious barge, but also gastronomic. According to Enobarbus, Cleopatra makes her lovers hungry and satisfies their hunger in a perpetual cycle. She does not “cloy” in the sense of overloading “with food, so as to cause loathing” or “to surfeit […] with richness, sweetness, or sameness of food.” The appetite that Cleopatra provokes in Antony—and others—neither completely satiates nor annoys. Her changeability ensures that she is never boring. Even when lovers are accustomed to her company, her appeal does not decrease. Age has not diminished her either, even if, as she put it earlier, her salad days are in the past. But perhaps the salad metaphor does still explain her perpetual appeal. Like a salad full of many elements arranged in infinite, limitless combinations, Cleopatra’s variety inspires unquenchable delight. The Egyptian queen’s “salad days” of youthful naïveté may be over, but if we expand our understanding of her salad‑like self‑fashioning, we can better understand how Cleopatra is perpetually, boundlessly, consumable to Antony like a beautiful salad served on a dinner table.

About the author

Marissa Nicosia is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University–Abington College, USA. She is the author of Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590–1660 (2023) and the public history website Cooking in the Archives.

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