Food and drink

Looking for inspiration for your holiday table? Look no further than the Folger’s adaptations of recipes in our collection—from early modern stuffing to sweet potato pudding to pumpkin pie, even mini-turkey pies!

Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty shares the extraordinary history of rice across the world resulting in horchata, a deeply personal drink for him.

Learn about the rich history of foraging and the many pleasures and benefits of gathering and eating plants like dandelion, elderberry, mushrooms, and many others.

Three Taylor Swift-themed cocktails inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipes from our collection.

We rummage through the pantry of Shakespeare’s plays for quotations about food and drink.

Marissa Nicosia adapts an early modern recipe for heartsease cordial. This purple pansy syrup was used to “clear the heart” – to treat the chest and lungs or to reduce fever – but also for healing heartaches.

With the Folger’s four-year Before ‘Farm to Table’ project drawing to a close, we’re revisiting three of the most popular early modern recipes adapted by the project team and shared on the Shakespeare & Beyond blog. Before ‘Farm to Table’:…

Before there were Starbucks and the quirky coffeeshops masquerading as cozy work corners for many of us, there was the mid-17th century coffeeshop boom in England. During the 1600s, the general conversation about coffee nodded to its status as the…

You might not think of a potato pie as traditionally English, yet 17th-century cookery books show that English people enjoyed pies made with mashed or blended sweet potatoes mixed with condensed milk, eggs, and spices as this adapted recipe shows.

We’ve created some delicious combinations of our early modern recipe adaptations for you to experiment with over the holidays and beyond.

Follow the turkey on its fascinating journey from America to Europe to the Mughal and Ottoman empires, through early modern trade networks.

Learn about the early modern precursor to turducken. Think a huge turkey pie with duck but no chicken. Then, make your own mini turkey pies using this adapted recipe for modern cooks from the Folger collection.