How shakepearan prepared foods?

Answer 1

Around the time of Shakespeare, food was usually baked or roasted. Pie was served several times a week in the same pie crust. This was done by making a very thick crust, adding the ingredients and baking it in a wood fired oven. The pie crust was carefully broken open and the contents served. The crust became a sort of casserole dish. The contents would included all of a plucked chichen or pheasant including the beak and feet all cut up into sections. Beef or lamb and root vegetables such as potato, turnips etc. Soups and broths boiled in a cauldron style pot and bread baked in the same oven. This of course was the middle class (shopowners, medium land holders, civil servants etc. The nobility would eat 'exotic foods' in addition to the afore mention fare. Pheasant stuffed with peacock tongues, for example. The richest people such as the King and his Court often ate foots decorated with gold gilt when holding a party or state event. It is believed that Henry VIII owed much of his ailing health to this. The common poor ate bread, turnips, leeks and potatoes. Meat was fairly rare unless from rats (good business for the local rat catcher) or 'poached' from the local land owner's estate. Country people usually ate better because they grew much of their own food and could hunt from time to time. Tenant farmers were also given a percentage of the crop or livestock they tended. The poor cooked on open fires in a hearth which doubled as the heating. An oven for an expensive commodity and some country people made an earthern 'oven' usually a pit in the floor (or outside) partially covered with a crockery lid (home made) or turves (a bit like a Maori or Hawaii'an system but withour big leaves).