Link to Original Project - Click Here
For this assignment, I chose to revisit this work because I felt there was more I could delve into in terms of the choices I made and the connections I could draw between my experiences and those of the people of the past. As one of the replies to my initial post read from Sydney Slate, in the modern day where food is once again becoming a symbol of wealth, exploration of food in time periods where wealth disparity was as extreme as it is today can make us feel, as she puts it "closer to the lower class." In this revision, I wanted to understand more about that closeness and explore it further, in addition to delving deeper into my fellow classmates' ideas about this project and their work that they completed this semester.
Exploring my classmates' posts, I particularly enjoyed reading one by my classmate Myra Montoya. Her post was from the same assignment I completed, though she chose to make something called Oven Cakes. Her recipe was a bit more labor intensive than mine, and included things like kneading and baking, though her ingredients list was still relatively simple. I have to say that the little rolls she made looked so cute! They were perfect and uniform, and looked like they came out of a British fairy tale. That is another thing that both her recipe and mine had in common, that our products looked very cute (in my humble opinion).
Picture of Myra's bread rolls - see linked post below
What I really attached to, though, from Myra's post, was her discussion of class and how it contributed to the foods that people in Shakespeare's day ate. I feel I touched on this subject in my initial work, that if I had mostly been exposed to simpler fare in my day-to-day life I would have been much more upset if someone had mentioned that I was undeserving as something as simple (to my modern tastebuds) as a plain sweetened cake. However I felt that Myra put this sentiment really beautifully in her post, stating "the rich [of the Elizabetha era] also enjoyed a variety of baked goods while the poor kept it simple with basic bread," connecting this to a moment within the play The Twelfth Night wherein Sir Toby mentions that he believes that the four elements of life seem unimportant compared to eating and drinking.
It is fascinating for me to try and understand in such a clear cut way the manner through which class disparity changed lives and the events of every day living just a few hundred years ago. Someone of my social class in Shakespeare's day was probably not able to bake bread in their own oven, to eat food outside of simple, basic fare, or to attend dramas and plays at a theater, never mind at the Globe. While wealth disparity exists in (some may say) even at a steeper difference in the modern day, most people still have access to what would be luxuries beyond almost the imagination for someone in Shakespeare's day. For me, revisiting this project, I think very deeply about how lucky I am not only to be able to plan and change my diet according to my tastes even though I am far from a wealthy person, but how far out of reach that would have been for a young woman of the working class in Elizabethan England.
Beyond the constraints of diet, I think specifically about Shakespeare and how he wove wealth and class disparities into his work. Sure, most of his works involve stories to do with the rich, noble, and famous, but it seems clear to me now at the closing of this class that Shakespeare was making clear commentary on things like sexism, racial differences, and class disparity that he saw around him in Elizabethan England. The fact that he is still so shrouded in mystery as a real figure is fascinating, and it only makes me wonder more. What did he eat? What did he see? What would he think of me as a somewhat poor and mostly comfortable young woman living on her own in a large city? What problems exist today that are similar enough to his own that I can recognize in the mirror that is his work?
Some of these questions are not going to be answered, but some of these questions I can pretend to answer, now, based on the knowledge I have gained and the understanding I feel I now have. I am lucky to take this class with so many minds all thinking and operating through different lenses working to try and understand these works that remain so important today, from cookbooks, to plays, to songs.
Link to Myra Montoya's well-written and very entertaining post -
Click here
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