Celebrating Elizabethan Cooking, with Sam Bilton

What did people really eat in Shakespeare’s England? In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, food historian Sam Bilton uncovers the vibrant and surprising world of early modern cuisine—where sugar was locked away like treasure, fresh salads were everyday fare, and a “banquet” meant a “post-feast after party” dessert course.

Bilton brings to life Shakespeare’s food references: mince pies, herb-packed green sauces, saffron-brightened tarts, and even whimsical dishes crafted to look like something else entirely. These foods reveal a world shaped by global trade, humoral medicine, and delight in spectacle.

In this episode, Bilton discusses how cooking, dining, and food imagery can open a new window onto Shakespeare’s plays and the people who lived, ate, and celebrated in his time.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published December 16, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and presenter of the award-winning Comfortably Hungry and A is for Apple podcasts. She has written books on the history of gingerbread, saffron and chocolate, and writes articles on food history for a variety of print and online publications. Sam has also hosted several Shakespeare-themed supper clubs over the years. You can find out more details about Sam on her website: sambilton.com.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: For many families, the holidays revolve around food.

Perhaps in your family, you see the same recipes every year: like green bean casserole, gingerbread cookies, or eggnog.

Some we can’t wait to taste each year, and others might be ready for retirement.

According to food historian Sam Bilton, if you’re looking to liven up your holiday table, you should consider adding an Elizabethan dish. Maybe try a carbonado of veal, a mince pie, or a pear frangipane tart?

In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, Bilton explores the surprisingly varied diet of early modern England.

Bilton’s previous books covered the histories of chocolate, saffron, and gingerbread. She’s also the host of the podcast Comfortably Hungry.

Here’s Sam Bilton, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: There is a lot of food, it turns out, in Shakespeare’s plays. There’s banquets and feasts and endless food metaphors.

SAM BILTON: Yeah, it’s actually a wealth of food in his plays and you don’t really think about it until you start looking for it. That’s the thing. It, sort of, glosses over it, almost, when you are watching a play. You don’t necessarily think, “Oh, that’s a food reference.” But there is a lot of food in his plays.

BOGAEV: Yeah, that’s true. It just seems to be like a kind of scene setting. As I was reading your book, I was thinking, “Oh, there’s so many quotes that are so wonderful that I didn’t really pay that much attention to in the theater or while reading.” For instance, one of my favorite ones is, “Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of “Greensleeves,” hail-kissing comfits, and snow”—is it eryngoes?

BILTON: Eryngoes, yes.

BOGAEV: Which is what, meringues? I don’t know what that is.

BILTON: Eryngoes? No, it’s not meringues. It would be nice if it were meringue. No, eryngoes are the root of the sea holly plant. And it had a reputation for being an aphrodisiac. So, it is not something you can go to a supermarket now and pick up. You would’ve probably been able to get it from an apothecary in Shakespeare’s day.

BOGAEV: Right, with your ginseng and horn of whatever.

BILTON: Yeah.

BOGAEV: And a lot of the food—we’re going to get to that—a lot of the food references involve aphrodisiacs.

BILTON: Yes.

BOGAEV: There’s a great one that ends, “Let there come a tempest of provocation” speaking of aphrodisiacs. It’s from The Merry Wives of Windsor. Because early modern people had such a different understanding of food and eating, and it was still all based on the humors, right? That food had its own humoral qualities.

BILTON: Yeah. That’s one of the joys and tricky things about reading food in Shakespeare because something that’s mentioned may not have the same meaning today as it did then. As you say, if they were really concerned about what they ate because what you ate could really affect your “complexion” as they called it—the four humors: your black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood,  they made up your complexion, your person, well, not personality, but your physical wellbeing. If they weren’t balanced, and it was very easy to throw them out of balance, if you overindulge in a particular food stuff, for example, then it could play havoc potentially.

BOGAEV: Right? It could affect your exercise and your sleep and your excretions and the whole deal.

BILTON: Yes.

BOGAEV: Which is, I mean, it’s not so different from our time. But did everyday people really think that much about these things though? I mean, what I’m thinking is most days, you know, people were just struggling just to eat anything, right?

BILTON: Well, this is the thing, you know. So, your everyday person in Shakespeare’s day, they were just more concerned about getting bread to fill their bellies. They weren’t really worried about whether they could afford meat because most people couldn’t afford meat, and if they had it, it was a rare treat.

BOGAEV: And well-off people really did eat a dizzying array of meats and proteins at a meal. I mean, meals were pretty different in Shakespeare’s time, too.

BILTON: Yeah, I think that’s the hardest thing for people to get their heads around because when we talk about courses today, we think we might have a main course and then a dessert, all separate. We’d eat one, finish it, and then go on to the next course. But a course in Shakespeare’s day would consist of many dishes, so many dishes. Also, there wouldn’t be a delineation between sweet and savory. Quite a lot of dishes in this period combined dried fruits, for example, and spices with meat.

So, a mince pie is a classic example. For example, originally you had dried fruit and meat, like mutton, all mixed together in the pastry case and served up. That was perfectly normal. But within a course, you might have a mince pie served alongside a joint of venison or beef, and then also a custard put on the table.

That’s just the beginning of it. If you were serving a big feast, there was none of this, “Can you pass the custard down to the other end of the table?” You ate what was in front of you. So, if you wanted custard with your beef and it happened to be in front of you, that’s great. But if the beef was at the other end of the table, you just had to put up with the meats, for example, that were in front of you instead.

BOGAEV: Well, I think you list at one point, “Beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, rabbit, capon, red or fallow deer, various fish, and wild fowl.”

BILTON: Yeah—

BOGAEV: It’s just all…

BILTON: —and that’s just one course. Then, that would be taken away, and another course would come out with a similar array of dishes.

BOGAEV: It’s dizzying, yes. Let’s talk about fish because I had no real idea about this. So, fish was a big part of the early modern diet and, of course, prescribed by religion even after the Reformation. So, Fridays and Saturdays were set aside to eat fish. But Elizabeth I added Wednesdays. What was that about?

BILTON: Okay, so, the Reformation occurred under Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, and, in a way, we sort of relaxed our attitude to what we could and couldn’t eat, the fasting and feasting days of the year, because we no longer were a Catholic nation.

The downside of that was we didn’t necessarily need as much fish, so there weren’t necessarily as many people going out to fish. And that was an issue for Elizabeth I because she needed the manpower to power her Navy. It is believed that one of the reasons that she instigated this extra day was we needed people to be going out fishing so that they would have sailors that could operate the ships that went out and fought the Armada, for example. So, that was why. It was less to do with religion.

BOGAEV: So, supporting the fishing industry in order to support her military aims. That’s wild.

BILTON: Yeah. It was very little to do with religion by Elizabeth’s reign.

BOGAEV: Okay. Were there actual cookbooks towards the end of the 16th century? And who had them when so few people were literate, and books were so expensive? I mean, Mistress Quickly wouldn’t have had one, for instance.

BILTON: No, no, Mistress Quickly definitely wouldn’t have had a cookbook.

So, short answer is yes, they absolutely did have cookbooks like The Good Huswife’s Handmade for the Kitchin and The Good Huswifes Jewell which was by Thomas Dawson. They came out at the end of the 16th century. And then just over into the 17th century, you had Hugh Platt, Delightes for Ladies—

BOGAEV: Of course, all male authors.

BILTON: They’re all male. At this point, they are all male authors.

BOGAEV: Mansplaining housewifery.

BILTON: Yes. They are most definitely men. Actually, the Hugh Platt book, Delightes for Ladies, it does mostly deal with the candying and confectionery because that was—even in well-to-do households—that was overseen by the lady of the house because sugar was so expensive.

So, if they were candying stuff—like ginger root, for example, was a popular thing to candy or orange peels or making marmalades made from several oranges or quinces, largely—they would’ve required a huge quantity of this incredibly expensive sugar. Sugar was used largely as a spice, especially in savory recipes.

BOGAEV: And so, spices like sugar—and sugar was considered a spice, you say, kind of—

BILTON: Yeah, kind of.

BOGAEV: —were kept under lock and key because they were so expensive?

BILTON: Oh yes, absolutely. Even in the Elizabethan period, spices and the use of them indicated how wealthy you were.

BOGAEV: Right, because they’re coming from the East at great cost.

BILTON: Absolutely. So, if you had a highly spiced dish, it was an indication that you had the money to splurge on these wonderful exotic ingredients.

BOGAEV: Conspicuous confection.

BILTON: Indeed, yeah.

BOGAEV: Oh, so that explains in Romeo and Juliet when Lady Capulet tells the nurse to take her keys and fetch the spices.

BILTON: Yeah.

BOGAEV: So, we’re talking mace and nutmeg and cinnamon and ginger. What is mace anyway?

BILTON: Ah, mace, which is actually one of my favorite spices because it’s so underused or underutilized in this day and age, is the outer casing of nutmeg.

BOGAEV: I never knew that. It tastes like nutmeg. That makes sense.

BILTON: It’s similar. I think it’s more citrusy than nutmeg, but it’s a beautiful spice. We should use it more often, I think.

BOGAEV: Huh. And also, saffron was popular at this time?

BILTON: That is one of my all-time favorite spices. I’ve even written an entire book on English saffron. In Shakespeare’s time, it was widely grown in this country. We had a thriving saffron industry in England at the time that Shakespeare was writing. It’s mentioned a couple of times in his plays. The most famous one is in The Winter’s Tale: “I must have saffron to color the warden pies.”

BOGAEV: Right. I have to go back to sweeteners, though, to sugar. Because is this era the beginning of the famed awful English teeth? Elizabeth I loved sweets and had allegedly, reportedly, just like brown stumps as she got older.

BILTON: Yeah, I mean, I am assuming that is true. It’s hard to know sometimes when you read these texts, whether it’s propaganda. But yeah, I think that the richer you were, the more luxury ingredients you could afford with that, spices or sugar. So, I know that there was a trend in her reign for gentlemen, particularly, to carry around silver toothpicks so that they could pick out morsels of food that were stuck between their teeth, or I’m guessing in the cavities of their teeth if they had rotted away from over-consumption of sugar. I’m not entirely sure that dental hygiene was a high priority.

If you were going to one of these sumptuous feasts where they were serving at the end, they had their course called a “banquet.” Which is again, another confusing thing with when we are talking about food from the early modern period, because a banquet actually referred to a standalone course, which consisted entirely or almost entirely of sweet things. So, fruits that had been candied.

BOGAEV: Oh, now, I have to ask you about this because it’s so confusing.

BILTON: It is.

BOGAEV: There’s a banquet, but then there’s a banquet course, which is kind of like a dessert course, like you’re saying, the sweet course. But didn’t it happen in, like, a private, little, antechamber somewhere and it’s really all about getting you juiced up, you know?

BILTON: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Kind of priming you for a dalliance.

BILTON: Yes. So, the banquets, as you can imagine, because they were serving stuff that had been candied or made with sugar, they were not the sort of thing you would want to invite everyone to anyway because it would cost you a small fortune.

BOGAEV: Right. So, it’s like an intimate gathering?

BILTON: I always say it’s like the post-feast after party. You know, like when they have the Oscars and they go off to the after parties. And some people get invited to some parties, and other people don’t. It’s kind of like that.

BOGAEV: The Vanity Fair party.

BILTON: Absolutely. So, you would go along, and you would have all these wonderful, sweet treats, but they would be served sometimes in just a side room. But some houses had entire buildings constructed for that purpose. They would be sometimes in the garden. There’s an account of Elizabeth, a house that she visited, they built like a little pavilion in the garden just for that purpose for the banqueting course.

BOGAEV: The banqueting house. I think they’re in Henry VIII, the play. Doesn’t Cardinal Woolsey arrange for a banquet course to be served in some privy chambers?

BILTON: Yes, he does, and that is actually very much the implication there. It’s so he can entertain Anne Boleyn after the masque that she’s been involved in. They’re going to retire to this banqueting house or this area that has been set aside for that purpose.

They really did attract quite a lot of criticism from the Puritans of the day. There was one in particular, Philip Stubbes. He says something like, “Women will have their banqueting houses to play the filthy persons.” I’m paraphrasing. I mean, he rants for quite—

BOGAEV: “The filthy person.”

BILTON: —he rants on for quite a period of time before he gets to that line. But it is all purely directed at women, which I find phenomenal, because I suspect it was mostly driven by the men. I don’t imagine the women were there saying, “Oh, come and see me in my private banqueting house.” I imagine it was very much as it’s depicted in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VIII. It’s been set up by a man.

BOGAEV: Always comes back to the slut shaming.

BILTON: It does, unfortunately.

BOGAEV: It’s the sugar slut shaming version here. Sugar was considered… what is it? “It has hot and moist qualities that would promote lustful urges.”

BILTON: Yeah. That’s very much the case. So, sugary things were not approved off by Philip Stubbes. He would not have been eating gingerbreads and marchpane and quince marmalades or anything like that. He would definitely—

BOGAEV: Marchpane. That’s marzipan, right?

BILTON: That is marzipan, yeah. And, again, an indication of how rare these treats were, there is in the scene in Romeo and Juliet the servants… basically, one of them says, “Save me a bit of marchpane at the end, if there’s any left.” Because, you know, that’s the only time they would’ve been able to sample things like marchpane, because it was so expensive and had also had expensive almonds in it as well.

BOGAEV: So, a lot of these things, as we said, spices and people, it’s well known, are coming from foreign countries and from colonies at this point. Was anything coming from the recently colonized Americas to England during Shakespeare’s time? For instance, there are references to turkeys.

BILTON: Yes.

BOGAEV: A couple of them in Shakespeare.

BILTON: Well, that’s the interesting thing because we have turkeys. We know they have potatoes. We’ve already mentioned that famous quote. And the potatoes they were eating were probably the sweet potato variety rather than white potatoes.

BOGAEV: Oh, right, and you have a sweet potato pie recipe in the book.

BILTON: Yeah. This is a classic example of where I’ve curtailed the recipe because you can’t get cox sparrow brains and I’m not suggesting for a minute that anyone goes out and kills lots of little, tiny birds to put their brains in a pie. And eryngoes roots, which we already—

BOGAEV: For so many reasons that’s not appetizing.

BILTON: For so many reasons. So, I’ve left those ingredients out. But yeah, the curious thing with chocolate and vanilla is, I suspect—certainly vanilla I would expect us to be familiar with because I should think that we travel quite well.

Chocolate’s a curious one. It doesn’t really take off here till the following century. So, the 17th century. So, there are no references that I’ve found in Shakespeare’s plays directly to chocolate. I don’t know why it took so long to take off in the UK. You would think, given our relationship— because it was certainly known in Spain and Italy and France, it’s kind of weird that it didn’t make a big impact here. I suspect it was known about, but it wasn’t very popular in that period.

BOGAEV: You mentioned how you have changed these recipes. For instance, you’re not featuring bird brains. But how did you even develop the recipes given that cookbooks at the time, they were so vague about measurements and quantities.

BILTON: Yeah.

BOGAEV: Also, they’re open fire. So, how do you know the cooking times or temperatures?

BILTON: You don’t. It’s a simple answer. And quite often, if there are any references to quantities, they’re huge quantities. Because these books were essentially written as aide-memoires for people cooking in large houses for lots of people.

BOGAEV: Yeah, 16 pounds of lard.

BILTON: Yeah, that sort of thing. So, you take a recipe and they usually… I mean, they might say, “A handful of this.” Well, you know, my hand isn’t going to necessarily be the same size as a cook’s hand, especially if they’re a male cook. So, you have to kind of just use your judgment.

I’ve cooked for most of my life, and I’ve written about food and drink for a long time. So, I just rely on my own expertise in that regard. But it’s quite easy to adapt them and make them work in a modern kitchen, and I think they would be pretty faithful to the originals.

The cooking method is different, although I will agree. Because obviously we have ovens now and we are not cooking over an open fire.

BOGAEV: Well, that’s always the thing, right? We don’t really know what the food tasted like back then, really. I mean, do you have a sense of whether ingredients were tastier than they are now or healthier since there were no pesticides or chemicals?

BILTON: Well, I say at the beginning of the book if you want to play devil’s advocate, I would argue that no one can faithfully recreate the food from our past unless you get a time machine. And yes, to answer your question, things have changed. Even vegetables are completely different to what they would’ve been back then. I mean, carrots weren’t orange, for example. They were purple. And yet, I’m not even sure entirely sure we really would’ve had carrots per se. They would’ve had things like skirret, which are kind of a bit like a carrot cross with a parsnip.

BOGAEV: Oh, that sounds good.

BILTON: Yeah, but they wouldn’t have been big like we have today. They would’ve looked quite weedy and insignificant compared to what we’re used to today.

BOGAEV: Like the kind I grow! Okay, everyone’s going to get really mad at me unless we get to some recipes. You start with bread in the book, which is wonderful because everyone ate it and ate it at probably every meal, so very democratic. Wealthier people though, you write, “ate manchet bread.” What was that like? Is that like brioche?

BILTON: Not quite like brioche, although it does have some similarities as far as a lot of the recipes you find are having milk, sometimes eggs as well. So, I suppose we’re getting brioche-y—

BOGAEV: So, a richer white bread?

BILTON: It’s a richer, softer, crumbed white bread. The thing with the flour then is that to get it to be more pure, it had to be bolted multiple times or sifted multiple times. That was a labor-intensive process. So, white flour was very expensive. That’s not the sort of bread an everyday person was eating necessarily.

BOGAEV: No, the everyday bread was called cheat bread. Why cheat bread?

BILTON: Well, they had several kinds of everyday bread, but cheat bread was kind of the halfway house, if you like, between your fine manchet and your courser bread that the really poor people ate. It would’ve had a lot of the breads still included, but perhaps not quite so much.

As I said, the really rough bread that even gets referred to sometimes is horse bread because it was the stuff that they would normally give to horses. But that’s what people ate when they were either really poor or there’s been a massively bad harvest and they were forced to eat.

BOGAEV: So, horse bread because it’s made of like oats or other things, barley, that you’d give to a horse?

BILTON: Yeah, it’s the stuff you’d give to a horse. heat bread was kind of like your one quarter white flour to three quarters brown flour. It’s kind of funny really that nowadays we sort of hold whole meal bread in higher esteem or higher regard than they would’ve done in those days.

BOGAEV: Well, now we know why it’s good for you to eat like a horse. I didn’t know until I read your book that dairy, like milk and butter and cheese, was called white meat for centuries before this early modern period. And it was considered food for the poor.

BILTON: Yeah, well this is, again, one of those tricky ones because yes, it was considered food for the poor, but it also kind of goes back to these days where we weren’t allowed to eat meat when we were a Catholic nation. I know there were periods like Lent where you weren’t supposed to have dairy either, but certainly white meats were deemed as the sort of thing you ate when you were restricting your diet and fasting in some way, even if it was just for a day.

But there were also, things like cheese which were associated as being something the poor people ate. What’s striking in the cookbooks is you rarely find recipes containing cheese.

BOGAEV: It’s weird because people ate cheese, right? After meals as a course. And there are a lot of references to cheese in Shakespeare.

BILTON: Well, this is what the confusing thing is. So, you know, if you look to the recipe books, you’d think we didn’t eat cheese at all. So, the assumption I think now with food historians is that it must have been eaten as a kind of standalone, as you say, at the end of a meal, perhaps, or as a meager meal. But it wasn’t worth mentioning in a recipe book because you don’t need a recipe for a chunk of cheese and a chunk of bread. So, yeah.

BOGAEV: I think it was the Welsh person, I forget his name, he looks forward to cheese and apples after his supper in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

BILTON: Yeah, so the thing is with cheese, different nationalities are characterized by their love of certain food stuffs. And the Welsh in Shakespeare’s plays at least, with the notable exception of the leeks in Henry IV (I think both parts) and Henry V, it’s always cheese. The Welsh always seem to be mentioned in reference to cheese.

BOGAEV: The Welsh are cheesy. [laughs]

Now we’ve already talked a little bit about mutton, but I really love your recipe for lamb “pears” with barley. It just looks amazing. It’s ground lamb that has been molded into the shape of pears, two pears, and they’re upright, vertical, in a bowl of barley, kind of a super stew. But where does that idea come from? And was it common that meat would be fashioned to look like something else?

BILTON: This goes back at least to the medieval period, probably earlier, the idea of this trompe l’oeil idea where you make a food to look like something that it isn’t. I think it’s Henry IV who had golden apples served at his coronation feast in 1399. They were apples that had been coated in a saffron colored batter to make them look golden and then they had a leaf stuck in the top.

And then, meatballs were poached, coated in a batter, and dried in front of a fire. They went to the table and they would look like apples. They would also sometimes coat them in like a green batter, so they literally look like apples.

So, this whole idea of food is theater as well, providing that added interest to a feast where you get a plate put in front of you and you’re like, “Oh, a bowl of apples.” Or, “A bowl of pears. Oh, no, they’re not, they’re meatballs.”

BOGAEV: I love it. If anybody listening makes this recipe, the lamb “pears,” please send us a photo. We’d love that. We’ll reference you on a future podcast.

BILTON: Thank you.

BOGAEV: What is a carbonado?

BILTON: So, a carbonado is a grilled meat effectively. We were talking earlier about the fact that they didn’t have the same equipment as we have nowadays to cook. But they did have the ability to grill. And they would put things in like, I believe, almost like little cages so they could hold them over the fire. So, they would grill. And I’m imagining you would get the score lines like you would in a griddle pan today, because there’s a reference in, I forget which play, but someone having their face marked.

BOGAEV: All’s Well.

BILTON: They’ve been carbonadoed. yeah, yeah, so that they’ve been scarred. So, you can imagine that’s how they did it. It’s a fancy way of saying grilled, essentially, or broiled.

BOGAEV: Yeah, I think the clown in All’s Well kind of implies that Bertram’s scarred face has been carbonadoed. And there’s another one in Coriolanus, this is from your book: “He scotched him and notched him like a carbonado.”

BILTON: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

BOGAEV: So, your recipe is carbonado of veal or pork with Verde sauce, green sawce, which is common.

BILTON: It’s my favorite sauce.

BOGAEV: Oh, me too. Is it the kind of green sauce we know today? Kind of a vinegary one with lots of greens.

BILTON: Well, it’s a wonderful sauce because it’s got the fresh herbs, as you say. And you can vary those. I think I use predominantly mint and parsley. This version in the book has got garlic in it as well, but it’s also got spices in it, a little bit of ginger, a little bit of pepper. So, it’s got that sort of piquancy there. And again, my favorite saffron, which really makes the sauce pop. It really enhances the green color. I know it sounds weird, but it really does enhance the green color of the sauce. So, it looks amazing and tastes amazing as well.

BOGAEV: Interesting. You know, you have a whole chapter on fresh vegetables and salad. And I just don’t associate early modern British cooking with those courses, those dishes. But they were common, of course. People were eating out of their gardens, right?

BILTON: Yeah, and again, it’s not something you necessarily find a lot of recipes for because I think it was kind of just a given that they definitely ate salads.

If you look at the herbals of the day, which are sort of more medical book, less recipe led, more medical treatise. They were produced by people like John Gerard. In fact, John Gerard wrote Acetaria, which is a whole book devoted to salads. So, that just goes to show how important they were. But it was something you could throw together if you had a cottage garden. They were very good, thought to be quite good for you, and it was just a given that you served them with oil and vinegar. You didn’t need a recipe much in the same way as you kind of don’t really need a recipe today to just do a green salad.

BOGAEV: Well, no offense, but what happened to British cooking that the salads and the fresh vegetables seem to have vanished for a couple of centuries.

BILTON: Yeah, we could talk about that one. Again, that was another whole podcast. I think our cookery gets a bad rap from rationing in World War II.

BOGAEV: Post-war?

BILTON: Yeah, post-war. I may be wrong here, but I believe someone like Mrs. Beaton suggested you boil sprouts or cabbage for like half an hour. But again, you know, varieties were probably different. Who knows? Who’s to say that the brussels sprouts and the cabbages we get today, maybe they’re…

BOGAEV: Less tough.

BILTON: Less tough, yeah.

BOGAEV: Tenderer, yeah.

BILTON: You know, who’s to say?

BOGAEV: You’ve hosted Shakespeare supper clubs. Do you have a privy chamber?

BILTON: No, I don’t, Philip Stubbes wouldn’t approve, would he? I used to host them from my house before COVID. I would host dinners for, you know, up to 12 people. I don’t have a massive house so I couldn’t have like massive banqueting tables full of loads of people. But yeah, they were good fun to do, really good fun to do. And always incredibly popular.

BOGAEV: Well, it’s so fun. Maybe to send us off since it’s the holidays, you could suggest a recipe that someone could make for a holiday gathering?

BILTON: Well, I know they’re not particularly big in the US, but mince pies—

BOGAEV: Eww! [Laughs.] Make the case, please.

BILTON: —because I feel that the traditional mince pie should make a comeback. Because even in this country, we no longer put meat in our mince pie. And I mentioned it earlier, but originally it was classically a mixture of meat. Usually, muton but sometimes beef, and it’s mixed with some dried fruits, teensy bit of sugar, but again, more like a spice than anything else because the fruits are quite sweet in themselves. And spices. And actually people pull a face but I always say imagine eating a North African tagine.

BOGAEV: Ooh, you make it sound like a really delicious empanada.

BILTON: Yeah, exactly. I think if you make the analogy with something that people are familiar with today the ick factor goes away.

BOGAEV: Okay, you convinced me, that’s great. Mince pies for all!

BILTON: Mince pies, yeah.

BOGAEV: Thank you so much. It was just really delightful to talk with you, and I love the book.

BILTON: Oh, thank you very much. I’m glad you like it.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Sam Bilton, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion is out now from Shakespeare’s Globe and Headline Publishing.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Melis Uslu in London, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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Until next time, thanks for listening!