Simmering liquids, temperamental chefs, grim-faced judges looking silly trying to frown while they chew, and other devilled, curried, basted, larded, whipped, whisked, casseroled, sautéed and scalloped oddities are collectively a 21st century television phenomenon. From a few amiable, skillet-wielding artists of bygone kitchens the genre has spawned, as its interim piéce de résistance, the hilarious bathos of Iron Chef America.
Imagine if Shakespeare had dabbled in cuisine as a sideline. Dishes such as 'eye of newt', 'fillet of fenny snake', 'toe of frog' would have been a sensation. He could have embellished a lurid gastronomic reputation with his TV show — had technology permitted — called The G Word: G for Gadzooks which, like 'zounds' and 'sblood', was a particularly offensive reference to the crucifixion, though of course, Shakespeare-chef could have claimed it as standing simply for garlic, then as now a potent ingredient.
'I had rather live/With cheese and garlic in a windmill,' says his Henry IV, announcing a derisive preference, while Bottom, instructing his rude mechanicals in A Midsummer's Night's Dream, entreats: 'And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath,' and Lucio, in Measure for Measure, ambiguously commends the Duke as one who 'would eat mutton on Fridays ... and ... mouth with a beggar, though she smelt of brown bread and garlic'.
For all Shakespeare's polymathic capacities, his prodigious range of reference, his oeuvre is not big on food in the way that it is replete with just about every other reference you can imagine. Food, however, preoccupied the minds and fancies of many of his contemporaries — pervasively and powerfully. One chronicler noted that 'beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, cony, capon [and] pig' adorned the tables of the nobility and that their kitchens were presided over by 'cooks [who] are for the most part musical-headed Frenchmen'.
If Shakespeare, on the strength of this shamefully thin evidence, might be seen as the first 'foody' to emerge from the obscurity of Stratford-upon-Avon, then it is fascinating to look to his successor, who was much more celebrated, immediately more notorious and infinitely less gentle. Enter: Gordon Ramsay — born in Scotland, like Macbeth, but brought up from the age of five in Stratford.
In London the 35-year-old Shakespeare built a theatre in 1599. Barely 400 years later, Ramsay, aged 31, established his first London restaurant. The Globe theatre on Bankside was a stunning