Food & Drink

Ann Leighton explains how food, folklore, and tradition all influenced the pilgrims' battle against disease.

H.A. Monckton offers a taste of the beer of Elizabethan England, a beverage reportedly, ‘dark in colour, not very heavily hopped, and probably rather sweet and vinous’.

Michael Strachan introduces one of the most conspicuous members of this celebrated Jacobean drinking and dining club centred on the Mermaid Tavern in London; the eccentric ‘legstretcher’ Thomas Coryate.

Charles Chevenix Trench explains how, from the reign of William the Conqueror until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poacher was restrained by savage penal laws.

Lord Kinross describes how, during the first half of the eighteenth century, gin-drinking became a serious social evil.

Pamela Vandyke Price offers us a draught of the ‘aromatised wine’ now familiar under the name of Vermouth.

The English aversion to eating horse flesh, recently highlighted in a number of food scandals, dates back to the coming of Christianity, as Jordan Claridge explains.

Alexander Lee finds a ‘lip-smacking smorgasbord of Tudor delights’ in the work of William Shakespeare.

S.M. Toyne investigates how, from earliest times, the migration of the herring has exercised an important influence on the history of the peoples living around the North Sea and the Baltic.

A.L. Lloyd savours modern Argentina, “a civilization of horses, cattle and leather”.