Free Shakespeare's Kitchen by Francine Segan

grass-plot, in this very place,
To come and sport: her peacocks fly amain …
    THE TEMPEST, 4.1
      Peacock, long a symbol of nobility and immortality, was one of the most esteemed feast foods in Shakespeare’s time. Served roasted and placed back in its feathers, it was then dusted with real gold. Metal rods were inserted into the bird’s body so that it remained upright and seemingly alive. The peacock would be made to appear to breathe fire by the cook’s trick of placing a bit of camphor-soaked cotton in its mouth and lighting it just before serving. Despite these elaborate preparations, peacock was not considered tasty. Wrote one 1599 author, “Peacocke, is very hard meate, of bad temperature, and as evil juyce.”

Roasted Pheasant with Currants and Wine
SERVES 4 TO 6
     I N SHAKESPEARE’S DAY, the pheasant’s drumsticks were tipped with gold leaf, and the prettiest feathers from the bird were added for a festive touch. For elegant dishes such as pheasant, the serving platter was often garnished with carved vegetables and fruit cut to look like flowers, baskets, or animals.
¼ cup currants
¼ cup white wine
4 ounces pancetta, diced
4 ounces ground pork
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground mace
1 teaspoon salt
6 whole chestnuts, roasted and peeled
2 artichoke bottoms, cooked and diced
2 tablespoons pine nuts
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped pistachios
1 large egg, beaten
1 pheasant (3½ to 4 pounds)
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
    1.     Soak the currants in the wine for 1 hour.
    2.     Preheat the oven to 375°F. Cook the pancetta in a small sauté pan over medium heat for 1 minute, or until some fat is released. Add the pork, cloves, mace, and salt and cook for 5 minutes, or until the meat is done. Remove from the heat and stir in the chestnuts, artichoke bottoms, pine nuts, pistachios, and egg.
    3.     Season the outside and cavity of the pheasant with salt and pepper. Gently pack the stuffing in the cavity and under the neck flap. Brush the pheasant with the olive oil, place on a rack in a roasting pan, and roast for 1 hour, or until the leg juices run clear and the internal temperature is 160°F.
    4.     If you wish, decorative foil tips can be used to re-create the gilding that would have capped the drumsticks.
ORIGINAL RECIPE:
Other forcing for any dainty Foul; as Turkie, Chickens, or as Pheasants, or the like boil’d or rost
Take minced veal raw, and bacon or beef-suet minc’t with it; being finely minced, season it with cloves and mace, a few currans salt, and some boiled bottoms of artichocks cut in form of dice small, and mingle amongst the forcing, with pine-apple-seeds, pistaches, chesnuts and some raw eggs, and fill our poultrey, & c.
THE ACCOMPLISHT COOK, 1660
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Chefs strived to entertain guests with their culinary feats, creating such whimsical concoctions as the mythical creature the “cockatryce,” a combination of capon legs and the body of a suckling pig. Robert May, the author of The Accomplisht Cook, amused diners by baking deer-shaped baked dough filled with red wine so it appeared to “bleed” when pierced. He also built a table-size battlefield with dough battleships and tiny dough cannons ignited by real gunpowder and even provided the ladies with eggshells filled with scented water to be thrown on the floor to dispel the scent of the gunpowder.
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    Ring, bells, aloud; burn, bonfires,
clear and bright,
To entertain great England’s lawful king.
    KING HENRY VI, PART II, 5.1

Capon with Peppercorn and Onion Stuffing
SERVES 6
    Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? wherein
neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it?
    KING HENRY IV, PART I, 2.4
     T HIS ORIGINAL RECIPE was for a bread-based sauce for roast capon. Wood and cooking fuel were costly, so the working class often purchased already roasted meats from shops and street vendors. Cookbooks frequently contained recipes for sauces for these