Hearse Pies and Pastry Coffins: Material Cultures of Food, Preservation, and Death in the Early Modern British World

Abstract

With a long history as a vehicle for preserving perishable fillings against spoilage, pie was imagined as both a lavish banqueting centerpiece and an edible symbol of globalization in the seventeenth and eighteenth century British and early American worlds. Filled with expensive and difficult-to-obtain ingredients, and frequently sent over long distances in a culture of performative gift-exchange, pies were complex and multivalent objects. By examining the pie’s reputation as a means of preserving food alongside its widespread–but now largely forgotten–cultural association with death and dying, we suggest that for elite consumers, these pastry “coffins” could fulfill a similar function to memento mori: a reminder of the impermanence of organic matter and the inevitability of death and decomposition. Taking pie, an edible and ephemeral food, as a subject of material-cultural analysis, we can open unexpected avenues for understanding some of the emotions evoked by global consumption.