To eat, or not to eat? Shakespeare scholar serves up The Bard’s 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. “Some are ominous, some are ambiguous and some are just delightful.”

One ingredient particularly caught her attention: strawberries.

The playwright — who died in 1616 at age 52 — mentioned them in “Othello,” “Richard III” and “Henry V.” Nicosia includes a chapter devoted to strawberry conserve (something like jam), along with a recipe for a spiced strawberry tart adapted from a 17-century original.

For Nicosia, the obsession started long before the cookbook. Growing up in Verona, N.J. — yes, Verona, just like the setting of “Romeo and Juliet” — she fell hard for Shakespeare’s strange, witty and wonderfully puzzling language.

Now she spends her free time deciphering centuries-old recipes from dusty cookbooks and recreating them in her Bella Vista kitchen.

The book, which came out in April, features everything from clove shortbread cookies, venison pasties and something called posset, a creamy drink similar to eggnog.

And while 400 years separate modern cooks from Shakespeare’s era, some things haven’t changed.

Supply-chain problems, trade disruptions and ingredient shortages frustrated Elizabethans just as they frustrate shoppers today.

Nicosia, a married mother of a toddler with no formal culinary training, describes herself as an “enthusiastic home cook.”

She believes the book’s appeal comes down to one simple fact: Shakespeare still fascinates people.

“He wrote about love, loss, betrayal, greed and ambition,” she said.

And, of course, food.

“But if you’re engaging with Shakespeare, whether reading his works or seeing a play, it’s a delicious addition to cook something of his, too, in order to understand his world in a new way,” she added.