I’ve been teaching a first year seminar this semester on the Tudors and I’m not sure it’s been a successful class. These topical seminars are required for freshmen, and they are hybrid in nature: half topic, half introduction to college. I’m not good at melding the two halves together, and while I have a few Tudor fans in the course, there are clearly some students who just got stuck with this particular topic. Everyone is very polite, but you can tell when students are not really invested in a course. Anyway, I tried to wow them last week with a presentation on Tudor food, and several yawns indicated that I was not successful (it doesn’t help that this course is at 3:00 in the afternoon). I did quite a bit of research, however, so this topic has to do double duty as I am inflicting it on all of you! I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year as well, an unusual role for me, so I put two and two together and conjured up a Tudor feast with the help of Thomas Dawson, the author of The good huswifes jewell and The Second part of the good Hus-wifes jewell (1596-97).

“The Blessing” by Flemish artist Gordius Geldorp; my two favorite Tudor cookbooks by Thomas Dawson (I have these very convenient Nova Anglia Press editions but they have been digitized.)

Three staples of the American Thanksgiving meal were available in Tudor England: turkies, pumpkins, and potatoes. The first two could have ended up in a late November feast: there are recipes for turkey roasts and various pumpkin preserves and confits from the later sixteenth century. No mashed potatoes though: it will take Englishmen and -women a little longer to warm up to this particular “root.”  For those who could afford a diet consisting of more than pottage and bread, meat and fowl were far more popular than fruits or vegetables, so it follows that turkeys were embraced before pumpkins, which were perceived to be some sort of exotic melon. Apparently they were driven to the London markets, and in the 1570s Thomas Tusser included turkey in his “Christmas Husbandry Fare.” By that time, perhaps turkeys were too common for the courtly table, but as all the Tudor monarchs loved very showy feasts, they might have gone for a multi-bird roast, the early modern version of today’s turdrucken. I’ve seen references to five-bird roasts and more, in particular a pigeon inside a partridge inside a chicken inside a goose inside a turkey, often encased in pastry. Thomas Dawson provides a recipe “to bake a Turkie and take out his bones” which might be preliminary to a more extravagant engastration (new word for me!)

Pumpkins (called pumpions or pompions) were introduced into England about the same time as turkeys, and they have a similar crest of popularity: sought-after rarity to more humble fare. By the end of the sixteenth century they are included in texts about kitchen gardens and foods which can decrease famines. The Tudors did not see pumpkins as squash, because they didn’t have squash, so it was often identified as a melon (and occasionally a cucumber!) Dawson has a couple of pumpkin recipes: “to make a conserve of Mellons, or Pompions,” to sweeten them, and to make them into “confections,” so they could be on the holiday table in those forms, but not as a pie or tart: the first pumpkin pie recipe in England dates from the seventeenth century. If we’re going to have a Tudor fruit pie, I think it would be filled with peaches, pears, plums, quinces, damsons or even medlars, a forgotten autumnal fruit. A Tudor table would definitely have a savory pie too, or a sweet and savory and spicy pie like this veal variation from The good huswives handmaid (1597).

A conspicuous pumpkin in Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, 1620s. Tate Museum: Dawson’s recipe for medlars in pastry, and two of Ivan Day’s beautiful pies with a recipe for Sweet Pies of Veal.

The Tudors did not embrace potatoes, so they would not be on either a courtly or husbandly table. I want to substitute mashed turnips or parsnips, but I don’t see any recipes, except for the occasional pudding. We always have creamed onions in my family, and that seems like a perfect Tudor dish, as they loved everything that was white and creamy—-but I could only find boiled onions. Stuffing is so Tudor: they stuffed (farsed) everything! There’s a perfect stuffing recipe in Dawson’s Second Part of the good Hus-wives jewell: “to farse all things.” Just take “a good handfull of tyme, Isope, Parselye, and three or foure yolkes of Egges hard rosted, and choppe them with hearbes small, then take white bread graited and raw eggs with sweet butter, a few small Raisons, or Barberies, seasoning it with Pepper, Cloves, Sinamon and Ginger, woorking it altogether as a paste, and the may you stuffe with it what you will.” There were no cranberries in England in the sixteenth century, but plenty of substitutes, whether you want a syrup (I would go for gooseberries) or the paste kind that comes out of can (Quince, of course!) And we call all wash it down with some Hippocras, a spiced wine “tonic” concoction named after the Father of Medicine.