"Fat Rascals": In the Kitchen with John Tufts

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Tufts was playing Hal in a production of "Henry IV, Part 1" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Every night, he would call Falstaff “that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly.” Hal is calling Falstaff is gross and overstuffed, but Tufts started to think that a roast Manningtree ox sounded actually pretty good. That role inspired the actor and cook to write a cookbook, "Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table," a collection of over 150 recipes inspired by Shakespeare’s words and adapted from actual 16th- and 17th-century recipes. We hopped on Zoom and asked Tufts to tell us about the book and give us a remote cooking demonstration. He obliged by teaching our host, Barbara Bogaev, how to make a pork pasty inspired by Titus Andronicus and the mid-17th-century chef and author Robert May. Bon appétit! Award-winning actor John Tufts has performed at theaters across the country, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (where he is a member of the Acting Company and performed in over 20 of Shakespeare's plays), Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, Actor's Theater of Louisville, Ensemble Studio Theater, Guthrie Theater, Primary Stages, The Mint Theater Company, and others. He is the author of "Fat Rascals: Dining at Shakespeare’s Table," which is available on his website, john-tufts.com From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published December 8, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Make Two Pasties,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. We had technical help from Christine Albright-Tufts and Chris Spurgeon.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Shakespeare was a writer with a well-honed sense of what human beings do.
0:05.5	That's why in his plays we find passion, we find hate, we find victory, we find love,
0:13.7	and more than you'd probably recognized, we find food.
0:25.6	Music We find food. From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:30.5	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folcher's director.
0:33.6	John Tufts is an actor, an actor who mostly does Shakespeare.
0:38.3	And like a lot of actors, when he's not on stage talking, he's thinking about the play he's appearing in,
0:45.3	what it means, how it moves people, how it works.
0:50.3	In John's case, all that thinking led to an unusual place, because what he was thinking about
0:57.0	was food. All the times food is mentioned, all the times it's eaten, all the times it's alluded
1:04.3	to in Shakespeare, and then in turn, that thinking led him someplace else unusual.
1:16.5	John decided to research all those food references and turn them into a cookbook,
1:20.2	Fat Rascals Dining at Shakespeare's Table.
1:25.9	John's book doesn't pull out every food referenced in Shakespeare, but he pulls out most of them. And then, in the cases where he can, he gives you
1:29.3	the recipes so you can make it. Now, there are two ways to talk about a cookbook on a podcast.
1:36.5	You can just sit down and talk about it, or you can talk about it while you're actually cooking.
1:43.1	We decided to go with option number two.
1:47.3	Given the times we're living in, we needed to maintain social distance, of course.
1:52.0	So we cranked up our Zoom, we broke out our smartphone microphone apps and handed them to spouses,
1:58.6	and we placed everybody about as far away as they could get from each other within the continental United States.
2:06.3	John Tufts is in his kitchen in New York.
2:09.6	Our host, Barbara Bogave, is in her kitchen in Los Angeles.
	...

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