TSI 2014 was a truly transformational experience for me—in teaching and in life! If you’ve been looking for the PD that reminds you why you started this work and gives you the spark to keep on going in fresh and thrilling new ways, this is it.

The Teaching Shakespeare Institute is back! Join us for an NEH funded institute at the newly renovated and reopened Folger. You'll find all the details at this link

Volvelles, Heck YES!! And, so it begins... 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇 Come to the FREE Pop-Up Books through the Ages exhibition @NewberryLibrary starting March 21 to get your own FREE pop-up Newberry kit!!

But they added a satisfying bite to a course on domesticity and its discontents. #interpretivecookery #theresistancebaker

I am not going to lie. These 'treats' not going to win any culinary awards. I would describe the taste as 'trashcan near a ballpark.'

Given the tilt on the cudgel in the foreground, you can see why the alternative name I gave this treat is the Falstaff (a figure whose basketing and cudgeling are pretty legendary, by the way).

I eventually admitted that the "cudgel in a basket" was not an authentic early modern food, but an edible (OK, marginally edible) parry to the banquet scene that closes The Taming of the Shrew/ The Taming of A Shrew.

There were some truly magnificent expressions of revulsion smothered by politeness. The sight of many of these in a cookie tin is a lot for anyone to handle.

Result: The Cudgel in a Basket. Ta-da!

And as my wonderful Course Assistants were distributing these baked goods from the tin canisters I had supplied, I continued my list: Onions, Red Wine Vinegar, Raisins, Garlic Jelly, Carraway Seeds... Hot Dogs.

Then I listed the main ingredients: Claret, Sugar, Flour, Egg Yolk, Salt, Mace, Cinnamon

I also toured them through the "Before Farm to Table" website, which is very gratifying to look at: https://t.co/H7HY86jLy9.

The "Cudgel in a Basket." I showed them the Hannah Woolley recipe from which I derived my "cate"--the Cornish Cake, excellently described by @Nicosia_Marissa in her blog, Cooking in the Archives https://t.co/4eNL4JvOvy

Which was pretty clever. Naturally, my response came in the form of a baked good. In the final minutes of today's meeting, I told them that I had prepared the early modern equivalent of a last-day-of-class celebratory cookie. Like many English foods, it had a quirky name:

Today, for the final meeting of my Shrews! class, I did a prank. Technically, it was a counter-prank. I had asked students to demonstrate how they might engage taming tropes without retrenching them. They responded by making an elaborate bingo game out of my weird vocabulary.

Me: for the purposes of some lesson-teaching on the home front I am in need of a robust cookie (the rubberier the better) with an unappetizing, turd-like appearance. Early modern cookery books: we are here for you.

An EEBO delight for Twitter friends: an hand-drawn restoration of the missing title page for the Comicall History of The Costlie Whore (*not a hit for reason, folks). A+ for the colophon.

The dog ate my son’s back-to-school Covid test.

https://t.co/Qpjmsqgt6r

Job Klaxon: Senior Instructional Professor and Director of Performance at TAPS at the University of Chicago. I am really excited about this search! See all the details here and please reach out if you have questions. https://t.co/bHLIqAsm5f