To eat, or not to eat? Shakespeare scholar serves up The Bards best menu

Move over, celebrity chefs — there’s a new culinary star in town, and she’s raiding William Shakespeare’s pantry.Nearly 400 years after the Bard penned his immortal plays, one Philadelphia-area professor is bringing his menu back to life.Marissa Nicosia, a Renaissance literature expert at Penn State Abington, has penned a deliciously ambitious new book, “Shakespeare in the Kitchen,” which serves up a feast of history, literature and long-forgotten recipes.“I’ve been studying Shakespeare’s plays since I was a little girl,” Nicosia, 41, told The Post.“I started to notice there were a lot of plays that mentioned food.”Forget the stereotype of gruel and misery.

Elizabethans were adventurous eaters with global tastes, and loved to eat farm-to-table fresh ingredients centuries before they became fashionable.They foraged greens, herbs, fruits and nuts.Baked breads from different flours, ate every part of the animals they raised and flavored meats with aromatic spices.They also loved imported luxuries.Italian olive oil-drenched salads and cinnamon-spiced desserts, while Caribbean sugar sweetened everything in sight.“It was a world full of food curiosity and experimentation,” Nicosia said.Her favorite recipe is pear pie, which Shakespeare mentions in “The Winter’s Tale” — and which Nicosia details in the book.“They ate a lot of game meat like venison that someone had to go out and shoot,” she said.

“I made the recipe relevant for today so a cook making them can go to Shop Rite and buy a chicken.”After all, Shakespeare never had an oven timer.Recipes designed for open fires and roasting spits needed some 21st-century improvisation.And Shakespeare’s plays are surprisingly chock-full of food.From Hamlet’s famous “funeral baked meats” to mysterious “ill-roasted eggs” and Falstaff’s love affair with fortified wine, food was everywhere in the Bard’s world.

“Shakespeare is full of food references,” Nicosia said.“...