Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

45 results

Page 1 of 3

  • 7 - How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative

  • Edited by Madeline Bassnett, Western University, Ontario, Hillary Nunn, University of Akron, Ohio
  • Book:
    In the Kitchen, 1550-1800
    Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 November 2024
    Print publication:
    20 November 2022, pp 151-176

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Scholars credit Robert May and William Rabisha with a central role in the development of seventeenth-century English courtly cuisine. Focusing on a recipe common to both of them—the ‘bisque’ or ‘bisk’—I argue that in the hands of these authors, this ‘grand boyled meat’ ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Working within the framework of Restoration hospitality, Rabisha and May attempt to transform society by harmonizing foreign influences in order to expand the culinary, religious, and political boundaries of Englishness. The bisk symbolizes a table at which all England shares in a national commensality, even as aspects of that commensality remain fiercely debated.

    Keywords: tolerance, hospitality, Restoration, assimilation, courtly cookery, commensality

    ‘How to Make a Bisk’ opens the seventh chapter, ‘Which teacheth to make all manner of hot boyled meats of flesh’, of William Rabisha's The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661). The bisk forms the meat of my argument here in two senses: first, because in the hands of Rabisha and his contemporary, Robert May, this ‘grand boyled meat’ ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Second, the bisk encapsulates the grand project of incorporation for which these authors strive. Working in the first years of the Restoration, Rabisha and May attempted to transform English society by means of two principles, both abstracted from the experiential practice of cookery, especially recipes such as the bisk: hospitality and assimilation. These principles overlap and often work in tandem, but sometimes also operate in productive tension with each other, contrasting two subtly different views—contained paradoxically, as I will show, within the same recipes and cookbooks—of how to address foreign influences upon English society. I trace the development of this project along culinary, religious, and political lines, showing that both Rabisha and May employ this approach to cookery and cookery writing in the interest of inculcating a culinary tolerance that transcends, in limited but nevertheless important ways, religious, national, and social divisions inherited from the Interregnum, and which builds upon the analogy of how the physical body itself encounters, plays host to, and absorbs the foreign organisms that form its food.

  • Chapter 1 - Commensality

  • from Part I - Origins
  • Edited by Gitanjali G. Shahani, San Francisco State University
  • Book:
    Food and Literature
    Published online:
    26 June 2018
    Print publication:
    28 June 2018, pp 39-58

  • Summary

    Literary and historical studies have tended to focus primarily on what social scientists call the culinary, or the “what of eating”—the food on our plates, how it got there, and what it does to us. But of equal importance is the commensal, or the “how of eating”—how acts of sharing food help construct self-other relationships, group interactions, and indeed whole societies. This essay considers the role of commensality in literature through several lenses, using illustrations from works from the Greeks to the contemporary period. Texts discussed include Plato’s Gorgias, Aristophanes’ Knights, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s plays, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting.

Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England
  • David B. Goldstein
  • Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    07 November 2013
  • David B. Goldstein argues for a new understanding of Renaissance England from the perspective of communal eating. Rather than focus on traditional models of interiority, choice and consumption, Goldstein demonstrates that eating offered a central paradigm for the ethics of community formation. The book examines how sharing food helps build, demarcate and destroy relationships – between eater and eaten, between self and other, and among different groups. Tracing these eating relations from 1547 to 1680 - through Shakespeare, Milton, religious writers and recipe book authors - Goldstein shows that to think about eating was to engage in complex reflections about the body's role in society. In the process, he radically rethinks the communal importance of the Protestant Eucharist. Combining historicist literary analysis with insights from social science and philosophy, the book's arguments reverberate well beyond the Renaissance. Ultimately, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England forces us to rethink our own relationship to food.

Page 1 of 3