Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
A
Make every get together chill this Memorial Day. Get up to an extra thousand dollars off select top brand appliances like LG plus get free delivery at the Home Depot tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cubed ice and crushed ice. Shop Appliance Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See store online for details. Welcome to the New Books Network
- [00:35]
B
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be Speaking again with Dr. Marissa Nagosia, who is here to tell us about her latest book, just published in 2026 from Routledge, titled Shakespeare in the Kitchen. Now this book is doing a bunch of fun things all at once. I'm warning listeners now, we sadly do not have 12 hours to go through every single detail, but I think we're going to have fun because we're talking about obviously Shakespeare and all sorts of foods and recipes that show up in Shakespeare and what that means to investigate. And by investigate here, yes, I'm talking about sort of literary analysis and looking at poems and looking at plays. Absolutely. We're also talking about some cooking as well. There's some practical investigation involved too. So I think, listeners, you can probably get a sense of why I'm quite excited to have this conversation. So, Marissa, thank you so much for coming back onto the New Books Network to tell us about this book.
- [01:38]
A
It's an absolute delight to be back talking to you about this book.
- [01:41]
B
Miranda, could you start us off please, by introducing yourself, maybe for our listeners who haven't heard your previous discussion with me. But then tell us about this book. Why did you decide to look at Shakespeare through recipes and the kitchen?
- [01:55]
A
I'm a professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington and I'm based in Philadelphia and I have a long standing interest in Shakespeare and food. And this book is sort of what happens when you spend a decade teaching Shakespeare to undergraduate students every semester, often similar sets of plays, while also updating more than 100 historical recipes in your home kitchen. Or at least that's how I came to write this book. I have a long standing interest in Shakespeare that I explored in in certain ways in my my first book, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle play historical futures 1590-1660, where I think about how imagined pasts in the 16th and 17th century history played by Shakespeare and his contemporaries allows for imagining various futures. And I also have a long standing interest in food with my project Cooking in the Archives, which started when I was finishing up my degree, when I was still a grad student. And it was all about seeing if recipes from handwritten manuscripts, books that people kept in their houses to store culinary and medicinal knowledge, if those recipes would still work in 20th century kitchens in some way. And the answer was delightfully, yes, most of the time. So that's been a project I've been working on for since the First Post in 2014. And Shakespeare in the Kitchen was a delightful opportunity to bring those two strands of my academic work together in a fairly unconventional academic monograph where the recreation of a single historical recipe is a part of the reading I'm doing of one of Shakespeare's plays or some of Shakespeare's plays and poems together in each of the chapters of the book.
- [04:11]
B
Okay. That gives us a great foundation for the book and for how you sort of structured the information in it. Just so that we really are clear on this. You actually cooked or baked these things from like the 16th century, right?
- [04:24]
A
I absolutely did. Now there have to be. There are some caveats around this. So a lot of things that people cooked and baked and Brewed in the 16th and 17th centuries, those were embodied knowledge practices. They were things that people did every day so they didn't write them down. So in the handwritten cookbooks that we have, the manuscript cookbooks kept in people's homes that I'm sometimes calling recipe books, you don't always see recipes for daily bread or the basic way to make a, a nightly posset or how you're making your pottage. You're kind of stuck stew of, of greens and tubers and meat and, and grains that is. Is feeding everyone in the household from the, the main family through the servants, the, the dairy maids, the people tending fires. So there's a lot of culinary information that was people's embodied practical knowledge. And then we have this archive of handwritten and printed materials about food from the period. And that's where I've Dr. Recipes from that I've explored in Shakespeare in the Kitchen. And those recipes were written for a radically different set of culinary technologies than we now have. They were written for a hearth, work on a small brazier of coals, work in an, a beehive oven or another kind of bread oven that might be out in the kind of garden kitchen garden in, in a larger house. They're written for a whole different set of culinary technologies and also what ingredients were like in the 16th and 17th century. Our chickens are bigger, our eggs are bigger, our grain is different because our climate is different. And we also grow different kinds of grains today. So that said, I still think there's a lot that we can learn from trying out these instructions in our modern kitchens. There's a way that we can access some of the flavors, some of the methods about these recipes. And these recipes, understanding them really helped me think about Shakespeare's food references in ways that I'd never thought about them before. And in different cases throughout the book led me to different insights about moments in Shakespeare's plays that helped me see them and interpret them in new ways.
- [07:08]
B
Yeah. So let's talk about for an example of that. So looking at cakes based on the mention in Twelfth Night, how does actually baking those cakes maybe change or influence your perspective of that play?
- [07:23]
A
I really loved thinking about cakes in Twelfth Night and that's how that play and that recipe example became the introduction to the book. And in the introduction, I also give a lot of the background I've just said and even more background about Shakespeare's food culture and how we can know about it today from the documentary evidence that we have from the past. In Twelfth Night, there's a really iconic moment where Malvolio's chastised, dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? And cakes and ale is thinking about popular festivity. But the word cake could refer to all sorts of different kinds of cakes in the 16th and 17th centuries. So cakes could be pancakes, kind of crepe like, or more English style pancakes than the fluffy American pancakes. But they could be really quickly cooked cakes like that. Those were often seasoned with a lot of spices and kind of rich with fatty dairy. A cake could also refer to pounded fruit pulp with sugar set into kind of like jellies or gummies almost. Cake could also refer to the forebearers of modern Christmas cakes and fruitcakes. Really fruit, dried fruit dense, very elaborately decorated celebration cakes, the kind of cake that you might actually have at a celebration of Twelfth Night. Or it could refer to an array of small cake cookie, biscuit hybrids. And the cake recipe I ended up making and thinking about with Twelfth Night is very simple. It calls for sugar, butter, flour and ground cloves. And it makes a lovely shortbread cookie. Although that recipe is called instructions to make cakes in the original. And thinking with this particular kind of cake, thinking through all the different kinds of things Cakes could be. And thinking about this cake made me think about the spices that are involved in most of the 16th and 17th century cakes that I've talked about so far in pancakes, in little cakes like this recipe in elaborate form. Fruitcakes and the spices like cloves would have traveled from South Asia, from the Malaccas, from the Spice Islands to the Mediterranean on their way to Venice, where they then would have moved westward through into Western Europe, into where Shakespeare would have gotten close. And even with overseer overland trade routes shifting up throughout the Renaissance, cloves still only grew in a very specific tropical area. And that made me think about Twelfth Night as a shipwreck play in a different way. Because Viola and Sebastian are stranded in kind of fictional Illyria on the Adriatic Seacoast along the same routes that that spices would have been moving and catastrophic shipwreck was absolutely devastating to spice traders. We see that concern come up in some of Shakespeare's other plays like the Merchant of Venice. And it's also catastrophic for Viol and Sebastian, at least early in the play when they both believe they've lost their only living relative, then they've lost their twins and sibling. So thinking through the spices that season cakes got me into a different history than the. Than the kind of quip about popular festivity might take and making the kicks. I thought a lot about the different kinds of festive occasions where people might consume something like this. In fact, it was something I got to. I enjoyed having some of a batch of these cakes around the launch of my book, which is kind of the latest layer in my history with that particular recipe.
- [12:09]
B
That's always, I think, a good example to start with and definitely gives us a lot of ideas of how the thinking about the play, thinking about the food, making it, you know, all these things kind of go back and forth and layer on each other. And obviously cakes are like quite a fun way to start. I mean cookies, as you said in this case, like an easy thing to kind of make and pass around and sort of get everyone involved. But you talk about a lot of different kinds of food in the book. It's not all cakes. It's not even all kind of things that you chew. You also talk about drinks as well in this. And so moving from sort of potentially like celebratory and mice and cookies to drinks and maybe kind of a sketchy drink. Lady Macbeth makes some drinks. She obviously is up to a lot in that play. And we usually pay. We obviously pay a lot of attention to her and what she's Doing. We maybe don't pay attention to the drinks she's making, but maybe we should. Why?
- [13:06]
A
I overlooked the fact that lady Macbeth drugs possets for years. I was teaching Macbeth for years and not. Not locating that detail. And I had just started the process of working on this book, and I was teaching Macbeth, and I thought, wait a second. Lady Macbeth is involved in cooking. She may not be the one who's actually preparing the possets, but she's certainly doing something with them. And now posset is a. A concoction of hot alcohol, spices, and dairy. And you either consume one right before bed as a. Like a drink that will help you have a good sleep and help you have good digestion. And there are also some possets that people like to have for breakfast, but it's a very normal thing for people in Shakespeare's England to have a posset before. Before sleep. And it really sits at that intersection between food being for sustenance and delight and food being medicine. A posset is supposed to be delicious, but it's also supposed to warm the body with its warming spices, like cinnamon and things like that. And it's also supposed to have a soporific effect, like a glass of warm milk before bed, something like that. And it's clear when you look at the scene where this happens, that the Macbeths have posset before dinner. Sorry, before. Before bedtime. Macbeth asks kind of, where is my posset? Right at one point. And Lady Macbeth says that she took the possets that were going to king Duncan's guards, and she added drugs to them. She says, I have drugged their possets. So at the castle, they've been hosting king Duncan and his whole train. They just had a whole. A whole afternoon and evening of feasting and wassail. They made sure that the guards who were guarding drunk Duncan got extra drunk so that they'd be able to commit their premeditated murder. And then Lady Macbeth adds drugs to those posits to make sure it's really going to work. So in my reading, I'm showing that lady Macbeth is actually as crucial to the act of murder as Macbeth is that her possets that are drugged are her. Adding the drugs to the posits are like Macbeth's daggers. That dagger that he uses to kill those guards to first kill Duncan while the guards are incapacitated, and then he uses the same daggers to kill the guards in the morning, kind of when he freaks out. And this is so interesting to me because Lady Macbeth has long been a character who we think about with Sleep and with milk as the play goes on. And Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are haunted by their guilt. They can't sleep anymore. Macbeth hath murdered sleep. And Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, rattling off the details of the murders that they've committed. So they lose the capacity to sleep. And that seemed to me to be really interestingly connected to the drugging of the posset. And Lady Macbeth is also connected to milk. Through all of the discussions of her past pregnancy and lost children. She talks about, about nursing. She talks about being unsexed and transformed her milk to gall, being turned into a murderous figure instead of a motherly figure. And learning more about possets, I learned that they had this whole history with the use of narcotics and that many possets were actually made in the household with human breast milk for various kinds of medical treatments, including treatments for sleep. So the posset, I think, one, it makes Lady Macbeth much more complicit in the murder when we attend to that detail. But it also helped me to reread the way the play was talking about motherhood, milk and sleep in new ways.
- [18:00]
B
Yeah, definitely raises lots of interesting points there. But if we're going to talk about your attention to detail, I think we have to talk about a different example. Because when you look at the creating of a pear pie in the Winter's Tale, it's not just a pear pie. It's like a specific kind of pear. Like, that's really detailed. Why does that detail matter?
- [18:21]
A
Oh, it was so interesting to learn about warden pairs. So warden pairs are this very specific kind of pair that come from Poir de Guarde. They're pairs that are specifically prized for their ability to be stored for a long time. And I get the sense of. And because I have not ever seen a warden pair or eaten or cooked with a warden pair. So I'd love to hear from listeners who do have, who do have access to warden pairs that I, I hear that they have to be cooked before they're eaten, much like in a similar way to a quince, rather than to the kind of Anjou or Bosch pear that I, that I'm used to, to enjoying, or a conference pair that I'm used to enjoying in season. And this pair becomes linked to Perdita, the lost daughter of Hermione Leontes, who's abandoned on the sea coast of Bohemia as an infant, taken in by shepherds and absent from the court of sicilia for a 16 year period in which she grows up. And we learn about the warden pairs because Perdita is planning to make warden pies for the sheep shearing festival. The clown or the sec. The shepherd's son says I must have saffron to color the warden pies. Mace dates, none. That's out of my note. Nutmeg, seven, eraser, two of ginger, and on and on in his grocery list. So we know that, that Perdita is planning to make some kind of pear pie. And for this she would have had to use cellared pears or pears that had previously been cooked and stored in sugar syrup of some kind to prepare the pie at the time of year when the sheep shearing festival might have happened. And there's a lot of ambiguity about that in the, in the play. So thinking about the specific warden pair got me thinking about the temporalities at work in the Winter's Tale and how we often talk about the preservation of Hermione in the form of a statue during the kind of wild fourth and fifth acts of the Winter's Tale. But this detail about the pear pie made me think in new ways about Perdita's preservation, that she was in a sense, kind of like a warden pear in her own suspended animation. And these particular pears were so interesting to learn about. And I do believe I have a couple of notes and links in my book that they are still grown in a couple areas in the UK as the Black Worcester pair. And if anyone has any more intelligence on how I might get my hands on a, on a, on a warden in, in the us, I would love to know. Yeah, it's so, it's so interesting where these kind of food varietals that are not common anymore, but all over 16th and 17th century recipe manuscripts and printed books. You find wardens everywhere because you find a lot of recipes for fruits and vegetables that have brief growing seasons that you'll want to preserve. Those are the kinds of things that get written down because there's only a maybe three week period every year where you might use that receipt, where you might use that recipe to preserve the material, the material foodstuff before it rots. Right. So there's wardens all over the recipe archive, but not so much in our orchards these days.
- [22:39]
B
Absolutely fascinating to understand a bit about that detail, staying on the theme then of fruit. Why did thinking about Othello lead you to make strawberry preserves?
- [22:51]
A
I was so curious about the handkerchief in Othello. I thought about it a number of different ways through reading the fantastic scholarship on Othello and material culture and Othello and critical race studies. And the handkerchief is A black work handkerchief with a strawberry pattern on it. And so I've been thinking about that handkerchief, and I thinking. Been thinking about strawberries. And then I was sitting in the rare book room at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was looking at a page of a recipe manuscript, and I saw this detail in this recipe to make conservy strawberries or to make strawberry conserve that talked about strawberries cooling heat, cooling the fever, cooling a hot temperature. And then I also saw this note that this recipe would be more wholesome if it was prepared with honey or more toothsome if it was prepared with sugar. And to me, that made the strawberries on the handkerchief on Othello become not just an embroidery pattern, as so many thoughtful and wonderful scholars have thought about, but as actual strawberry food. Because at so many moments in Othello, it seems like the strawberry handkerchief would stop his jealous rage. Part of me was wondering in a kind of thought experiment, if, if Othello had had access to strawberry conserve, would that have cooled his jealous humor? Would that have been a way to sort of stop the tragedy in Othello? And I know that that could be a kind of silly way to think about the action of a play, but it made me think about. About how this strawberry handkerchief fit into this play that was so much about appetite and policing different people's appetites and becoming jealous at the thought of someone like the thought, particularly Iago's poisonous lie, that Othello should be thinking about Desdemona's appetites as impure and unchaste and unnaturally. And the strawberry conserve honey sugar question is related as well. There was a huge debate in the 16th and 17th centuries about the medical benefits of honey versus sugar. Honey is a very familiar product. It's been used forever. It's been used in medical and in culinary preparations. Sugar's been around too. But because of the rise of Atlantic chattel slavery and of plantation sugar production, what Kim F. Hall calls in her fantastic new book, the sugar system, because of that, during Shakespeare's lifetime, sugar is becoming cheaper and cheaper as it's moving into England from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial holdings. And there are debates among physicians, apothecaries, dietary writers, cookery experts about if sugar or honey is better for you. And this particular recipe weighs in, and this recipe may be in dialogue with a cookbook by John Partridge that was printed where there's some similar notes about recipe, about this particular recipe. There's a kind of through line of manuscript and print connections in my notes that people who are interested in that can look at that in the book, but there's a debate about whether that sugar made prepared preparation or honey made preparation is going to be better for you. And I, I made it both ways. I put the honey recipe with more prominence in the book because I think it's really interesting to have a, a jam made with honey instead of with sugar, but it can be made with sugar as well. The sugar version really highlights the inherent floral taste of the strawberries. But the honey one takes on the, the whole, the flavor of the honey that you have in really interesting ways. The combination of that particular honey with your particular strawberries is just outrageously delicious.
- [27:40]
B
That does sound very delicious, but also like, we should probably move on to a different kind of flavor profile. Having discussed pear pies and now strawberry preserves, how about something perhaps a little bit healthier or at least healthier sounding? Can we discuss the phrase salad days from Cleopatra?
- [28:01]
A
Cleopatra's iconic quip about her salad days is part of how she's creating a autobiography. It's part of how she presents herself and stages herself in Antony and Cleopatra. And we've long, critics have long thought about Cleopatra's self staging and self narrativization, but I think we've misunderstood what she means when she says salad days. Now everyone agrees, and I would agree with this, I agree with this too, that, that she says she was green in judgment and cold in blood. And that's because in the humoral theory of the time, fresh greens were thought to be cooling and would give you colder blood. And also she was green in judgment. She was young, she was new, like that lettuce. That said, salads were not just a small plate of limp greens in the Renaissance. Salads were, were very elaborate and they often did have fresh greens. But those, those greens could be like parsley, soft herbs, it could be lettuces. For sure. There would be garden greens as well as foraged greens. People of all classes ate forms of salads when there was green stuff available. The salads would be layered and have hard cooked eggs and fresh or pickled cucumbers and nuts. And they'd be dressed with imported Italian olive oil. And they'd be garnished with edible flowers. Sometimes they'd have cooked meat arranged on them. Sometimes there'd be cut up carrots that were cut up just to look beautiful arranged in the salad. So a salad is actually a very large dish that would have been put out as a beautiful spectacle on a dinner table. Or it could have been on a credenza on a side table at A banquet to be enjoyed by. By everyone. So when Cleopatra is calling herself. Calling herself Salad, like, she's not just this kind of, like, minuscule little side salad. She is actually this, like, robust, intricate, varied dish. So I use that to look at language, calling her an Egyptian dish, talking about her infinite variety as it runs through the entirety of Shakespeare's Roman tragedy.
- [31:05]
B
Yeah, she's not saying I'm a side thing that you eat to make yourself feel healthy. She's saying I'm the center of attention with all this complexity and elaborate delightfulness. Right. Which is definitely a different take. Moving that. I think that might have been my favourite detail in the book, probably personally. But again, this is where we say, well, we can't stay on that one forever, Miranda, so we shall move on to another key character. I want to talk about fall stuff, because when we're talking about characters that eat a lot definitely comes to mind. And he seems to eat a lot. He certainly talked about as eating a lot, but not just in general. Not just like, dude, you're stuffing yourself. Right. But, like, specifically, he's eating particular things a lot. Why does that matter?
- [31:58]
A
Falstaff is the most famous eater in all of Shakespeare. He's also the most famous drinker in all of Shakespeare. And a lot of Shakespeare scholarship has focused on Falstaff's relationship to Sack. And Sack is a fortified wine that's imported from sacred Spain to England in the 16th and 17th centuries. It didn't actually exist as an import to England during the time that the plays are set. But Shakespeare does not care about Anachronism. And Falstaff is gluttonous in his drinking for sure. But I was really interested in how he was gluttonous in his eating. And when we first meet Falstaff in the first part of the Henry Four plays, Hal is berating him for his bad timekeeping and says, are you. Are you counting? I want to actually have this. Right. So unless hours were cups of sack and minutes, capons and clocks, the tongues of bawds and dials, the signs of leapy house, leaping houses. I had been thinking about that moment where capons are minutes and cups of sack are hours for a while. It's something I wrote about a little bit in my first book as well. So when I. When I turned to think about Falstaff, I was like, why? Why is he a great eater of capons? What's going on there? And I looked at the work of Joan Thirsk and Joan Fitzpatrick, two scholars whose work I cite throughout this book extensively. It's been the bedrock of what I'm doing. They say that Falstaff eats a lot of things that normal common people would have eaten in the 16th and 17th centuries, but he eats them them in volumes that are like, unheard of, unknown. So I said, okay. And then I started to learn about capons. And capons are castrated roosters who get very plump and fat after they've been castrated. And the procedure of caponization allows for this very plump roasting bird that's bigger that you can get any chicken in the Renaissance. It's only like, slightly smaller than the turkeys that they'd recently brought into English cookery from the American importation of the American turkey. Capons are a natural byproduct of any system where you're going to have chickens and eggs, where you're going to have chickens, eggs and chicken meat to eat. When you, when a chicken egg is. Is hatched, it's equally likely to be a hen, which can be laid, or a rooster. And when you have a flock, you really can only have one rooster or you're going to get into some rooster fighting problems. So when, when the chicken, when the chick reaches the point of maturity, that you can tell if it's going to go grow up to be a rooster. Grew up to be a hen. The roosters were castrated to become capons, and that gave them a niche in this culinary system. And they were an absolutely beloved feasting bird for the lower, middle and upper classes in the Renaissance and in the medieval period. So this learning about capons and caponization got me thinking about Falstaff as a corruptor of youth in a new way. So there becomes this. And I also got me thinking about Falstaff's corpulence in a new way. The way the play shames him for his size, the way it talks about his fatness. And capons were, were often crammed, they were often extra fed, extra before slaughter to make sure that they'd be really nice in and tasty. So I thought a lot in this chapter about Falstaff feasting on capons being called kind of like a puffed up, crammed up person who's kind of stuck in his own loop. And it also made me think a lot about Prince Hal and his time wasting. Is he also in this state of arrested growth, like a capon that's been caponized, or is he going to make it out and come into his adulthood as king? And that's something that's being jockeyed out in the Henry IV plays for sure.
- [37:06]
B
That's such a fun like nuance to be able to excavate and go, oh, hang on, there's kind of this other layer to the banter really happening there. So thank you for helping us understand what's going on in those discussions. We've now covered a bunch of plays, some pretty famous ones, and of course there's loads more plays we could talk about. But you also talk about some Shakespeare sonnets in the book. It's not just about the plays. So why did you decide to include the sonnets?
- [37:38]
A
I initially did not think I was going to write about the sonnets in this book. The research process during COVID and then in the kind of opening up after Covid led me to some. Some interesting places. And I found myself picking violets in, in Maine when I was on a writing retreat and looking up a recipe to. To preserve them. I knew that there were tons of preservation recipes for fleeting flowers in, in the archive of recipes. And I ended up locating one in Gerard's Herbal, which there's. There's much more I could say about that as a accurate and inaccurate and a compendium of herbal knowledge. Sarah Neville has a fantastic book where she shows about how the printing of botanical works was governed by this interesting dynamic between scientific communities and the print trade. And like what was going to sell well and publish well. But I ended up locating a recipe for syrup of violets and Gerard's Herbal. And as I'm making this syrup of violets, I keep thinking about these moments in Shakespeare's sonnets where violets show up. And in Sonnet 12, the violet shows up as a kind of plant clock. In Sonnet 99, the violet is color and also sweet flavor. And I realized as I was making this recipe and I was thinking about those palms that I had something I wanted to write about them. And in that chapter, I also bring violets into dialogue with pansies, which they're in the same botanical family. And the pansy, which is called pansy for Pensee in French, is also known as heart's ease and love in idleness. And that is the intoxicating blossom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. So thinking about these purple flowers in the pansy violet family that are so intertwined with matters of the heart in love, poetry and in drama, got me thinking about love and memory and what preservation by suspending something in sugar might do in relation to those plays and those flowers.
- [40:38]
B
That's definitely a reason to include it. So thank you for Sharing that thinking, taking, then this whole project kind of together. Were there any sort of really surprising recipes or cooking instructions that you came across and then tried? Like, did any of these surprises work?
- [40:59]
A
I had some interesting surprises in the meat recipes. So the recipe for capons in my chapter on the Henry Ford plays and in my venison pasty recipe in as you. My chapter on as yous Like It. So the capons, the capon recipe is a lovely seasoning for the capon. The wine and the oranges are a beautiful pairing with that really succulent meat. But the recipe was written for you. Spit. Cooking the capon in front of the fire. Ivan Day is very clear that you cook in front so you can have your dripping pan. Your drippings don't go into the flames. They go into a dripping pan to help season something you're cooking under. Under the, the, the. The spit. So the capon was meant to be cooked in totally different technology. And it's meant to be like half roasted and then broken up and like put into a different container. So I tried. So there was a one point where I'm like handling this 450 degree Fahrenheit capon and like hot fat is going everywhere and I'm going, oh no, what am I doing? And following instructions that were meant for different technology. So I, I've adapted that. So it's a bit different in the recipe that's in the book. But if you have access to spit roasting and you want to try it the original way, that the details are there and I'd love to hear from you about how it turned out. And the other thing was a surprise with how hard it was for me to find venison that I could buy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And that's because of U.S. department of Agricultural Rules around hunted game. So I see deer every time I leave the city and sometimes I've seen them in, within the bounds of the city in certain areas, and that meat just cannot be sold to me. And because I didn't have access to hunting communities at that particular time, I ended up buy imported farmed venison. And that did allow me some interesting perspectives on the structures of forest law that govern as you like it and create a lot of challenges for people trying to form couples, get married, be recognized as actual heirs, not be in exile in the woods. And also how a lot of 16th, 17th, and even 18th century recipes have instructions to dress things like mutton, like lamb or beef to taste like venison, because venison was so prized and desirable, but often not accessible to people. So the my problems of of access really helped me understand some of what was going on in those materials.
- [44:18]
B
I was hoping you would mention that aspect of the book. I found it really interesting to think about the difficulties that like obviously time creates, right and technology in recreating these recipes, but also these things around law too. So I think that is a good place to end our discussion about the book because it brings together so many of the things that you've done and have told us about. So my last question is just what might you be working on in the kitchen or outside of it? Now that this book is done, I'm
- [44:46]
A
continuing my work on recipes and Renaissance literature. I'm tentatively working on a third book that might be called Seasonal Tastes that's about both temporality and seasonality in recipes, how to literature and lyric epic and drama. And I'm also thinking of hosting on Cooking in the Archives, a series I'm thinking of calling the Complete Works of Shakespeare in the Kitchen, which will allow me to explore some of the food references in plays that I cook could not cover in Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So readers of that site should stay tuned for more updated recipes. They'll they'll keep coming of all different kinds, but also of recipes that where I think about some other references in Shakespeare that I I just didn't get a chance to think through. I had wanted to write about pies and Hamlet. I'd wanted to write a little bit about strawberries and Henry V this but we'll see if those things come together on the site in the future.
- [46:09]
B
Well, in the meantime, listeners can read Shakespeare in the Kitchen, published by Rutledge in 2026. Marissa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [46:18]
A
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's always a delight to talk to you.
- [46:22]
B
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform.
- [46:35]
A
You can browse all of our episodes
- [46:36]
B
on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ebooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox. Sam.