The Satellite High School Drama

Weekly
Issue 49 “Bringing the drama to you, weekly.” May 14th,
2021

Did Shakespeare eat. . . Whale poop?!

The SHOCKING diet of the seemingly best playwrightand poet, William
Shakespeare, and others from his time. Number two will SHOCK you!
By Kameron Maier

For the longest time, William Shakespeare and other people have been looked to have romanticized
diets, filled with rich, heavy, and sweet dishes, with exotic flavors of rose and chocolate. However, not only is
the diet of nobles strange, but downright unhealthy! Peasants had no better, with boring, nutrient-lacking food.

Peasants in Elizabethan times had extremely unhealthy diets, with unvaried and spoiled food. Due to
usually not having clean, running water, the staple drink for peasants was cheap beer or ale, an extremely
unhealthy alternative. Most of the peasants' food was spoiled, as there were no sort of refrigeration devices. As
such, most meat went bad quickly after being processed, unless processed in the winter and stored, which most
was. Peasants were not allowed to have ovens, so the ether had to use primitive campfires, or pay a noble to use
theirs.

Not only was most of the peasants' food spoiled or unclean, their diets as a whole were unvaried. Most
peasants developed scurvy at a very young age, as most food they consumed did not have enough vitamin C.
The staples of a peasant diet included rye bread, as white bread was for nobles, cheese, eggs, milk, and ale or
beer. This was the basics of the working man’s meals, and food scarcely deviated from this.

During the 1590s, a series of poor field yields and lack of farmland, with most plots used to grow
sheep for nobles, left much of the commoner population starved for more than half a decade. In the cities,
landlords used farmers' land as grounds for factories, causing more widespread starvation.

Although most peasants were famished and malnutritioned, most nobles had no trouble with getting
enough food. Most nobles could eat meat every meal, and highly seasoned at that. Seasonings included
cinnamon, red peppers, cayenne, paprika, chilli, mace, saffron, pepper, ginger, cloves, raisins, and sugar, and
were heavily applied to most dishes. Most seasonings came from India, and mainly used to cover up the taste
of rotting food.

Most nobles ate a large number of desserts, such as pastries, tarts, cakes, and crystallized fruit. They
were given the luxury of being able to use ovens, eat manchet, or white bread. They had the largest amount of
obtainable spices, and usually had their meals made for them by high-ranking chefs. They had access to ovens,
and usually had the cream of the crop, when it came to crops. However, nobles' eccentric diets were still
subject to scurvy and other deficiencies. Like peasants, most of their diets were lacking in vitamin C and other
vital nutrients.

The common diets of nobles and peasants were easy to figure out, using a plethora of scientific
practices. Chemical analysis of bones, and paintings of feasts, and written records provided an accurate idea of
what a normal person ate. Finding out what the common noble or peasant ate is easy to figure out, but in order
to find out what eccentric poet Shakespeare ate, we need to dive into his poems and plays. We have collected
the top 5 craziest foods Shakespeare ate, based on his poems, and ranked them from mildest to weirdest.

5. Junkets - Nowadays, Junkets are sweetened milk curds, usually eaten for dessert or a snack. Back in
Shakespeare’s days, it was a incredibly hard to make delicacy, made from boiling out the gelatin from soft
bones, extracting it, and refining it. Referenced in The Taming of the Shrew, it was traditionally served at
weddings, as it was really worth it to make at very special events.
 4. Sallet - As opposed to salad, standard sallet is made by mixing onions, violets, and salmon.
Basically just wild salad, with the inclusion of more wildflowers, herbs, and meat. Referenced multiple times
in many plays, it was a very common food for both peasants and nobles.
3. Marchpane - More of an ornate centerpiece than a food dish, Marchpane is a pie made of ground
almonds and fruit, and the front molded with intricate patterns on the top of the pie. Referenced in the
upcoming play performed by The Satellite Theatre, Romeo and Juliet, it was used as a food centerpiece for
events that could be eaten as a dessert after the main feast
2. Periwinkles - Periwinkles are an edible, coast-dwelling type of snail, that was, and still is, eaten as a
snack in the United Kingdoms. As shown in the play As You Like It, Periwinkles were mostly only eaten as
nobles, because of their status as seafood, relative priciness, and that they were eaten as snacks, a thing most
peasants didn’t have the luxury of doing.

1. Ambergris - The number one weirdest thing Shakespeare ate, Ambergris, is a form of whale
excretion that can come from both ends. Extremely hard to get, Ambergris was used for seasonings, perfumes,
and alcohol dilutions. Referenced in the play Merry Wives of Windsor, this odd delicacy is still being used to
this day and can still make someone rich if they find a large chunk of it.

Food back in the 1600s was a wild gamble of delicious delicacies (If you were a noble) and
dangerously unrefrigerated and unsanitary meats and water (if you were a peasant). To back to that era would
be to see an extremely large gap between the high and low-ranking classes, and that gap could be seen readily
in the meals both classes ate on a day-to-day basis. However, throughout the 400 years of change, some food
trends stayed the same, like the abundance of cheese and bread, and the regular consumption of sweets. Food
trends have evolved over the centuries, so to look back at some of Shakespeare’s plays, is to take a piece of the
1600s, with all the odd fashions and fads that came with that time.
______________________________________________________________

Tales from Doctor Rotcod

(Note: due to recent outcries over some aspects of this article series, I have been asked to
say that the purpose of this article is satire)

Through the Ages

Blog #6 The 1600’s
 Hello faithful readers, and thank you for coming back for more
medicinal help and tales from my travels. In this installment I will give
advice on the best places to apply leeches, and how mummies were used as
medicine.
As many of you know, I test out medicinal practices from across the
ages, often on … less than willing participants. But on to today's matters:
testing out two very iconic medieval “medicines”; leeches and mummies. In
case you were wondering about how mummies were considered medicinal,
they were often ground up and sold as snake oils.
In the first experiment, I obtained a sick volunteer and attempted to
rebalance their humors by using leeches. I applied leeches onto his
cranium, as he had been reporting a headache. The result was, as expected,
rather disappointing, as the subject did not report feeling any better. For
the mummies I was able to test it on myself, and, as expected, nothing
happened. If anything, I felt worse after eating the ground-up mummy,
although that is likely because I had just eaten a corpse. Anyway, with the
tests finished, this was Doctor Rotcod, signing off!
Citations-

Backus, Paige Gibbons. “‘Medicine Has Scarcely Entered

Its Threshold’: Medicine in the 1700s.” American
Battlefield Trust, 13 Apr. 2021,
www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/medicine-has-scarcely-e
ntered-its-threshold-medicine-1700s.

Picard, Lisa. “Food in Elizabethan England.” The British

Library, The British Library, 17 Feb. 2016,
www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/food-in-elizabethan-engla
nd.

TEAM, ANCESTRY®. “What's For Dinner? What Your

Ancestors Ate Back in the Day.” Ancestry Blog,
Ancestry.com, 24 Sept. 2020,
blogs.ancestry.com/cm/whats-for-dinner-what-your-ancest
ors-ate-back-in-the-day/#:~:text=The%20poorest%20peop
le%20ate%20mostly,and%20ate%20sugar%20and%20ja
m.
“Health and Diet in Elizabethan England.” Edited by
NASCARfan0548, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12
May 2021,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_diet_in_Elizabethan_En
gland#:~:text=The%20diet%20in%20England%20during,a
nd%20vegetables%20were%20rarely%20eaten.

Cash, Cassidy. “10 Foods From Shakespeare's Plays That

Shakespeare (Probably) Ate Himself.” Renaissance
English History Podcast, Tudor History, 19 Mar. 2018,
www.englandcast.com/2018/03/10-foods-from-shakespear
es-plays-that-shakespeare-probably-ate-himself/.

Cartwright, Mark. “Food & Drink in the Elizabethan Era.”

World History Encyclopedia, World History Encyclopedia,
15 May 2021,
www.worldhistory.org/article/1578/food--drink-in-the-elizab
ethan-era/.