Weekend Cooking: Supersizers Go Restoration

This week I thought that I would share a TV show that I find very interesting and amusing to watch! It's not a food show with recipes, but rather one that concentrates on a particular era from history and looks at the kind of food that they would have eaten on a daily basis and the effect that diet would have had on the body. They have doctors who look at their health before they do spend a week eating as they would have done in the era and then take a look at the impact that had on their bodies.

Supersizers Go is hosted by Giles Coren,a journalist and restaurant critic (and as he says in the intro unashamed glutton), and Sue Perkins who is a broadcaster and comedian. They take on the guise of a couple of the chosen time and look at not only the food but also the kinds of activities that the men and women of the time would have participated in.

There are a number of different eras that they visit including Wartime Britain, the Seventies, Victorian era, Elizabeth era and Regency Britain, all of which can be found on Youtube. There was a second series called Supersizers Eat where they also visited the court of Marie Antoinette and Ancient Rome as well as several other times.

This week, I thought I would share the Supersizer's Go episode that concentrates on one of my favourite periods in history to read about - The Restoration when Charles II returned to the throne during the 1660s. Having watched this episode though, I think I am pretty glad that I am eating in this time. To be fair though, if someone was to look back through my diet for the last few weeks they would possibly be just as mortified as I am looking at this Restorations diet.

The show goes for about an hour, but is broken up on Youtube into approximately 10 minute grabs.

Some of the things I found amusing or very interesting include:

• Breakfast consisters of a barrel of oysters, bread and cream, ale.
• 'Always with the sword'
• The pastry for the pies was made on one day a week. The pastry was made two inches thick and cooked but it was never eaten. Instead the filling was cooked inside the pastry crust and that had the effect of preserving the filling for up to a week.
• At one stage, Sue talks about being half drunk from 9am in the morning because they started drinking ale early each morning but there was no water or anything.
• Sue's mobile corn (as in hard skin on the feet corn) preparation! Ugh!
• The latest crazes were for using the difficult new eating implement, the fork, and for ice cream and pineapple.
• Sue's embroidery! lol

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. For more information, see the welcome post.