Fifteen Eighty Four

Did you know they did indeed have chocolate back in Shakespeare’s day, but it was served as a beverage with hot pepper?

Cindy Renfrow, the editor of the blog A Thousand Eggs  , is an expert in Elizabethan kitchens.

Her cookie recipe is pretty easy. Let us know if you try it!

They didn’t use baking soda or baking powder back then, so you won’t find a cookie recipe in the modern sense. Here is something close:

To make fine Cakes. Take a quantity of fine wheate Flower, and put it in an earthen pot. Stop it close and set it in an Oven, and bake it as long as you would a Pasty of Venison, and when it is baked it will be full of clods. Then searce your flower through a fine sercer. Then take clouted Creame or sweet butter, but Creame is best: then take sugar, cloves, Mace, saffron and yolks of eggs, so much as wil seeme to season your flower. Then put these things into the Creame, temper all together. Then put thereto your flower. So make your cakes. The paste will be very short; therefore make them very little. Lay paper under them. (From The Widowes Treasury by John Partridge, 1585.)

A searce is a sieve.  The pre-baked flour will be very hard and lumpy; you will need to rub it through a sieve in order to use it.  Clouted creame is fresh unpasteurized cream that has been allowed to sit in an earthenware pan near the hearth overnight.  The cream forms a thick wrinkled yellow crust called clouted or clotted cream.  If you don’t have clouted cream, use butter.  Here is a worked out recipe for you:

To every 3 cups of sifted baked flour, take the following:
1 1/2 cups butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon clove powder
1/4 teaspoon mace powder
1/2 pinch saffron, crumbled
3 egg yolks

Make sure to visit Cindy’s blog for more!

Throughout 2016 we are marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare by following key themes, controversies and research relating to the life and legacy of the man himself.

This month we’re celebrating Shakespeare’s legacy and each day running from 1st to 23rd April we will be giving away a different prize for FREE from Cambridge University Press’s fantastic range of Shakespeare books!

To enter our prize draw simply fill in your details on the form below to be in with a chance of winning! www.cambridge.org/shakespearewin

As we celebrate Shakespeare’s legacy throughout April we really want to know what Shakespeare means to you, and why his work still matters 400 years after his death. Join the conversation by commenting here on our blog or tweet us using @CambShakespeare – we’d love to know your thoughts!

– See more at: https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2016/04/much-ado-about-winning/#sthash.qXWIUJWj.dpuf

– See more at: https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2016/04/puzzle-put-cover-of-ncs-romeo-and-juliet-title-together/#sthash.ErbwX448.dpuf

www.cambridge.org/shakespearewin

– See more at: https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2016/04/king-richard-iii-has-come-undone/#sthash.pJ4RpUDw.dpuf

– See more at: https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2016/04/shakespeare-around-the-world/#sthash.mjNxlzgV.dpuf