Food and Feast in Tudor England

A readable overview of Tudor food and eating habits.

Popular representations of the Tudors at the table have caricatured them as loud, gross and lacking any manners. This is actually far from the case, as food and dining were used as social display by the upwardly mobile. For those with money, meals became extravagantly sophisticated, with a staggering number of courses and breathtaking displays. Even those lower down the social scale enjoyed some of the benefits of increasing prosperity and the new markets which England's merchants exploited, bringing new foodstuffs into the country and new ideas about eating. Alison Sim also explores Tudor ideas about healthy eating as they were aware of the effects of various foods on the body and the health-giving properties of certain ingredients. Etiquette, too, was treated with great seriousness in this period, as those who wished to impress a potential patron or benefactor were keen to show off their good manners. What emerges from this evidence is a more balanced and certainly more attractive picture of the Tudors at table.

Résumé
Chapters cover food and society in the sixteenth century, kitchens and cooking, what people drank, food and health (including Tudor ideas on healthy eating), setting the table and table manners, feasting and banquets. Alison Sim shows that dining habits in the sixteenth century were not the same as those of the Middle Ages and that Tudor dining, at least for the wealthier section of the population, was much more sophisticated than it is generally given credit for.