The Queen's Dumbshows by Sponsler Claire;
Author:Sponsler, Claire;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2014-02-27T16:00:00+00:00
Henry’s Coronation Feast and the Three Subtleties
Although sharing the general contours of food as performance that I have been describing, the feast and subtleties for Henry VI were shaped by a historical context that gave them specific meanings that would have been available to those who planned and participated in the feast. Signaling opulence and immunity to the dearth felt elsewhere in England that year, the lavishness of the three courses at the 1429 feast suggests an exceptional degree of culinary richness that stands out from the norm of ordinary and even aristocratic consumption.31 As Epstein observes, “the variety and the quantity of items, and the care taken to record each delicacy, give an impression of magnificent superfluity,” an impression designed to display the royal virtue of “magnificence” and thus to demonstrate the extent of the king’s wealth and power.32 Like the other events of the coronation, the banquet’s aims were the political ones of demonstrating the power of the monarchy and Henry VI’s fitness for the crown. While not all of the dishes would have been served to all of the diners, their buffet-like display, deftly captured in manuscript descriptions of them, presented the image of a cornucopia of abundance and was a reminder of royal largesse and might.33
While lavish, the menu was not especially exotic, instead displaying native bounty. The three courses included the full span of meat, fish, and fowl available in fifteenth-century England, such as venison, boar, beef, mutton, capon, chicken, pike, crane, pig, swan, egret, carp, and crab, among many others. This display of the English wild and cultivated game was accompanied by various custards, puddings, jellies, and fritters, including “furmentie” and “viande royal,” sweet porridge-like dishes typically served with meat; a “custade rooial,” presumably a custard-like tart; “leches,” thin slices of a pudding or jelly; and sweet or savory “fritours.”34 The peacock was served “enhakyll,” in its plumage. Rich, grand, opulent, but familiar, the feast was thoroughly grounded in English cookery and represented an expansion of ordinary meals, not a departure from them. This was an English feast for an English coronation, an assertion of native identity that seems calculated to respond to the tensions of the dual monarchy by acknowledging the claims of the homeland.
Where the dishes departed from ordinary fare was in their decorative use of heraldic emblems and patterns, which linked the food with the occasion’s political themes through the use of gold gilt, colors, geometric shapes, and animal figures found on heraldry: the “viande royal” in the first course was “plantid with lozenges of golde” (i.e., cut into saffron-dyed geometrical sections); the boarheads were in “castelles of earmed with golde” (i.e., a castle with black-and-white ermine spots with gold); the “redde lech” had white lions carved into it and the white “leches” featured a red antelope with a crown on a golden chain; the “custade rooial” had a golden leopard; the porkpie was “poudred” with leopards and fleur-de-lis; a cold bake-meat was shaped like a shield; and the fritter in
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