Feast

The 2009-2010 session of the society was concluded with a feast. Using recipes from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, participants prepared a delicious spread of medieval and early modern dishes. A lot of pastry was eaten.


After supping on pottage, the revellers devoured spiced mincemeat pies, spinach tarts, salmon (encased in salmon-shaped pastry) and a salad of herbs, before the table was cleared for apple and berry tart, rasten, and syllabub.

Pastry Salmon
Rasten

A civilised game of chess (with marzipan figures on a simnel-cake chessboard) descended into carnage as a queen was seized and promptly eaten. A similar fate awaited her companions.

Simnel cake with marzipan chess pieces

Several short dramatic excerpts were then performed, bringing to a close the year's series of staged readings. Scenes with a culinary emphasis were favoured, including Edel Semple's contribution of Act 2, scene 1 of Middleton's tragicomedy No wit/Help like a Woman's (c.1611). In this scene, the widow Lady Goldenfleece is treated to a banquet by her pompous suitor, Weatherwise. Edible astrological signs, probably made from marzipan and sugar, form the centrepiece of this feast and provide much material for bawdy humour.
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from Lines on the Mermaid Tavern

I have heard that on a day
Mine host’s sign-board flew away,
Nobody knew whither, till
An astrologer’s old quill
To a sheepskin gave the story,
Said he saw you in your glory,
Underneath a new old-sign
Sipping beverage divine,
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.
- John Keats (1795–1821)

On Ben Jonson and a Country Man

Ben Johnson in a tavern once began
Rudely to talk to a plain Country man.
And thus it was, Thou dull laborious Moyle
That I beleeve wert made for nought but toyle
For every Acre of thy Land I have
Twenty of wit: Such Acres Sir, are brave,
Replyed the Country man: What great Mistakers
Have we been of your wealth, Mr Wise-Acres.
- Thomas Jordan (from Jewels of Ingenuity. 1660?)

The Sun which doth the greatest comfort bring

...what things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid: heard words that have been
So nimble, so full of subtil flame …
Then when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justifie the Town
For three days past, wit that might warrant be
For the whole City to talk foolishly
Till that were cancell'd, and when that was gone,
We left and Air behind us which alone,
Was able to make the two next Companies
Right witty; though but downright fools, more wise.
- Beaumont's epistle to Jonson (1605?)