Elizabeth's Kitchen: She Fed Power, Not Hunger

There is a dish I keep returning to in my mind — not one I have eaten, but one that has been described to me so precisely, by someone who had reconstructed it from a sixteenth-century household account, that I can almost taste it. A subtlety made of marzipan, shaped into the Tudor rose, gilded with real gold leaf, placed before a queen who understood — better than anyone at her table — that every plate set before her was also a statement of survival.

I have been thinking about Elizabeth I this week. Not the myth of her, not the portrait with the pale face and the ruff like a satellite dish, but the woman who sat down to eat in a world that was actively trying to decide whether she had any right to be there.

She was crowned in January 1559, walking into a kingdom that had been through five monarchs in twelve years, that had burned Protestants and then Catholics and then Protestants again, that was exhausted and fractured and hungry in every sense. And she was a woman, which in the language of her century meant that the first question in every room she entered was not what she thought, but who she would marry. The table she presided over was not merely ceremonial — it was political theatre, every dish a move in a game that had no good ending if you played it wrong.

What strikes me about Elizabeth's relationship with food — and the historians who study her court have documented this carefully — is that she understood hunger as leverage. She ate sparingly and publicly. She performed abstinence at the very table that demonstrated her power. While her courtiers consumed the elaborate productions of her kitchens — the roasted swans, the venison, the towers of marchpane — she moved through it all like someone who knew that to be seen wanting something was to be vulnerable to the person who controlled its supply.

This is not so different from what I watch great chefs do. The best ones — the ones who have built something that lasts — understand that the kitchen is never just about food. It is about the story the food tells, the power it confers, the intimacy it creates or denies. I have sat across from chefs at 2am, after service, when the adrenaline has gone and what is left is just a person trying to explain why they do what they do, and almost all of them arrive at the same place: the table is where things get decided. Not just what to eat. Everything.

Elizabeth's cooks were alchemists in the truest sense — transforming the available into the spectacular, doing with sugar and spice and imported currants what the knights and diplomats could not always do with words. The Elizabethan banquet was a piece of foreign policy. When she received ambassadors, the food they were served communicated England's wealth, its sophistication, its command of trade routes that stretched to the Ottoman Empire and beyond. The ginger in the gingerbread. The pepper in the sauce. The saffron that turned everything the colour of gold. Every ingredient was a flag planted.

Malta knows this. The Knights of St John understood food the same way — the dining rooms of Valletta were not restaurants, they were arguments. The silver plate on the table was not decoration, it was a declaration. When the grand masters entertained, the menu was a map of the Order's reach, the spices a record of the ports they controlled. I think about this every time I eat somewhere in Valletta that still has that quality — that sense that what is on the plate is also a position.

The thing that moves me about Elizabeth, though, is something quieter. Beneath the performance of power, she was a woman who had been imprisoned, who had watched her mother executed, who had grown up in a court where trust was a luxury nobody could actually afford. And she ate. She kept a table. She fed people. Even in the years before she was queen, when her survival was genuinely uncertain, the records show her maintaining the rituals of hospitality that the period demanded. There is something in that which I recognise — the act of setting a table as an act of faith. Not religious faith. Human faith. The belief that there will be another meal, that there will be people to share it with, that the ordinary business of nourishment is worth continuing even when everything else is uncertain.

I have met people who cook from that place. Mark Weingard built Iniala after losing everything and turned it into somewhere that feeds people and funds children — the table as an act of reconstruction. Jack Croft and Will Murray at F