OLD COOKERY BOOKS

AND ANCIENT CUISINE

BY
WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT

1886
Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine by William Carew Hazlitt.

This edition was created and published by Global Grey

©GlobalGrey 2018

globalgreyebooks.com
CONTENTS
Introductory
The Early Englishman and His Food
Royal Feasts and Savage Pomp
COOKERY BOOKS
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Diet of the Yeoman and the Poor
Meats and Drinks
The Kitchen
Meals
Etiquette of the Table
 1

INTRODUCTORY

Man has been distinguished from other animals in various ways; but
perhaps there is no particular in which he exhibits so marked a
difference from the rest of creation — not even in the prehensile faculty
resident in his hand — as in the objection to raw food, meat, and
vegetables. He approximates to his inferior contemporaries only in the
matter of fruit, salads, and oysters, not to mention wild-duck. He
entertains no sympathy with the cannibal, who judges the flavour of his
enemy improved by temporary commitment to a subterranean larder;
yet, to be sure, he keeps his grouse and his venison till it approaches the
condition of spoon-meat.

It naturally ensues, from the absence or scantiness of explicit or

systematic information connected with the opening stages of such
inquiries as the present, that the student is compelled to draw his own
inferences from indirect or unwitting allusion; but so long as conjecture
and hypothesis are not too freely indulged, this class of evidence is, as a
rule, tolerably trustworthy, and is, moreover, open to verification.

When we pass from an examination of the state of the question as

regarded Cookery in very early times among us, before an even more
valuable art — that of Printing — was discovered, we shall find ourselves
face to face with a rich and long chronological series of books on the
Mystery, the titles and fore-fronts of which are often not without a kind
of fragrance and goût.

As the space allotted to me is limited, and as the sketch left by Warner of

the convivial habits and household arrangements of the Saxons or
Normans in this island, as well as of the monastic institutions, is more
copious than any which I could offer, it may be best to refer simply to his
elaborate preface. But it may be pointed out generally that the
establishment of the Norman sway not only purged of some of their
Anglo-Danish barbarism the tables of the nobility and the higher classes,
but did much to spread among the poor a thriftier manipulation of the
articles of food by a resort to broths, messes, and hot-pots. In the poorer
districts, in Normandy as well as in Brittany, Duke William would
 2

probably find very little alteration in the mode of preparing victuals from
that which was in use in his day, eight hundred years ago, if (like another
Arthur) he should return among his ancient compatriots; but in his
adopted country he would see that there had been a considerable revolt
from the common saucepan — not to add from the pseudo-Arthurian
bag-pudding; and that the English artisan, if he could get a rump-steak
or a leg of mutton once a week, was content to starve on the other six
days.

Those who desire to be more amply informed of the domestic economy

of the ancient court, and to study the minutiae, into which I am
precluded from entering, can easily gratify themselves in the pages of
“The Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal
Household,” 1790; “The Northumberland Household Book;” and the
various printed volumes of “Privy Purse Expenses” of royal and great
personages, including “The Household Roll of Bishop Swinfield (1289-
90).”

The late Mr. Green, in his “History of the English People” (1880-3, 4
vols. 8vo), does not seem to have concerned himself about the kitchens
or gardens of the nation which he undertook to describe. Yet, what
conspicuous elements these have been in our social and domestic
progress, and what civilising factors!

To a proper and accurate appreciation of the cookery of ancient times

among ourselves, a knowledge of its condition in other more or less
neighbouring countries, and of the surrounding influences and
conditions which marked the dawn of the art in England, and its slow
transition to a luxurious excess, would be in strictness necessary; but I
am tempted to refer the reader to an admirable series of papers which
appeared on this subject in Barker’s “Domestic Architecture,” and were
collected in 1861, under the title of “Our English Home: its Early History
and Progress.” In this little volume the author, who does not give his
name, has drawn together in a succinct compass the collateral
information which will help to render the following pages more luminous
and interesting. An essay might be written on the appointments of the
table only, their introduction, development, and multiplication.

The history and antiquities of the Culinary Art among the Greeks are
handled with his usual care and skill by M.J.A. St. John in his “Manners
 3

and Customs of Ancient Greece,” 1842; and in the Biblia or Hebrew

Scriptures we get an indirect insight into the method of cooking from the
forms of sacrifice.

The earliest legend which remains to us of Hellenic gastronomy is

associated with cannibalism. It is the story of Pelops — an episode
almost pre-Homeric, where a certain rudimentary knowledge of dressing
flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it
descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar
passage in the Odyssey, recounting the adventures of Odysseus and his
companions in the cave of Polyphemus. Here, again, we are introduced
to a rude society of cave-dwellers, who eat human flesh, if not as an
habitual diet, yet not only without reluctance, but with relish and
enjoyment.

The Phagetica of Ennius, of which fragments remain, seems to be the

most ancient treatise of the kind in Roman literature. It is supposed to
relate an account of edible fishes; but in a complete state the work may
very well have amounted to a general Manual on the subject. In relation
even to Homer, the Phagetica is comparatively modern, following
the Odyssey at a distance of some six centuries; and in the interval it is
extremely likely that anthropophagy had become rarer among the
Greeks, and that if they still continued to be cooking animals, they were
relinquishing the practice of cooking one another.

Mr. Ferguson, again, has built on Athenaeus and other authorities a

highly valuable paper on “The Formation of the Palate,” and the late Mr.
Coote, in the forty-first volume of “Archaeologia,” has a second on the
“Cuisine Bourgeoise” of ancient Rome. These two essays, with the
“Fairfax Inventories” communicated to the forty-eighth volume of the
“Archaeologia” by Mr. Peacock, cover much of the ground which had
been scarcely traversed before by any scientific English inquirer. The
importance of an insight into the culinary economy of the Romans lies in
the obligations under which the more western nations of Europe are to it
for nearly all that they at first knew upon the subject. The Romans, on
their part, were borrowers in this, as in other, sciences from Greece,
where the arts of cookery and medicine were associated, and were
studied by physicians of the greatest eminence; and to Greece these
mysteries found their way from Oriental sources. But the school of
 4

cookery which the Romans introduced into Britain was gradually

superseded in large measure by one more agreeable to the climate and
physical demands of the people; and the free use of animal food, which
was probably never a leading feature in the diet of the Italians as a
community, and may be treated as an incidence of imperial luxury,
proved not merely innocuous, but actually beneficial to a more northerly
race.

So little is to be collected — in the shape of direct testimony, next to

nothing — of the domestic life of the Britons — that it is only by
conjecture that one arrives at the conclusion that the original diet of our
countrymen consisted of vegetables, wild fruit, the honey of wild bees —
which is still extensively used in this country — a coarse sort of bread,
and milk. The latter was evidently treated as a very precious article of
consumption, and its value was enhanced by the absence of oil and the
apparent want of butter. Mr. Ferguson supposes, from some remains of
newly-born calves, that our ancestors sacrificed the young of the cow
rather than submit to a loss of the milk; but it was, on the contrary, an
early superstition, and may be, on obvious grounds, a fact, that the
presence of the young increased the yield in the mother, and that the
removal of the calf was detrimental. The Italian invaders augmented and
enriched the fare, without, perhaps, materially altering its character; and
the first decided reformation in the mode of living here was doubtless
achieved by the Saxon and Danish settlers; for those in the south, who
had migrated hither from the Low Countries, ate little flesh, and indeed,
as to certain animals, cherished, according to Caesar, religious scruples
against it.

It was to the hunting tribes, who came to us from regions even bleaker
and more exacting than our own, that the southern counties owed the
taste for venison and a call for some nourishment more sustaining than
farinaceous substances, green stuff and milk, as well as a gradual
dissipation of the prejudice against the hare, the goose, and the hen as
articles of food, which the “Commentaries” record. It is characteristic of
the nature of our nationality, however, that while the Anglo-Saxons and
their successors refused to confine themselves to the fare which was
more or less adequate to the purposes of archaic pastoral life in this
island, they by no means renounced their partiality for farm and garden
produce, but by a fusion of culinary tastes and experiences akin to fusion
 5

of race and blood, laid the basis of the splendid cuisine of the
Plantagenet and Tudor periods. Our cookery is, like our tongue, an
amalgam.

But the Roman historian saw little or nothing of our country except those
portions which lay along or near the southern coast; the rest of his
narrative was founded on hearsay; and he admits that the people in the
interior — those beyond the range of his personal knowledge, more
particularly the northern tribes and the Scots — were flesh-eaters, by
which he probably intends, not consumers of cattle, but of the venison,
game, and fish which abounded in their forests and rivers. The various
parts of this country were in Caesar’s day, and very long after, more
distinct from each other for all purposes of communication and
intercourse than we are now from Spain or from Switzerland; and the
foreign influences which affected the South Britons made no mark on
those petty states which lay at a distance, and whose diet was governed
by purely local conditions. The dwellers northward were by nature
hunters and fishermen, and became only by Act of Parliament poachers,
smugglers, and illicit distillers; the province of the male portion of the
family was to find food for the rest; and a pair of spurs laid on an empty
trencher was well understood by the goodman as a token that the larder
was empty and replenishable.

There are new books on all subjects, of which it is comparatively easy

within a moderate compass to afford an intelligible, perhaps even a
sufficient, account. But there are others which I, for my part, hesitate to
touch, and which do not seem to be amenable to the law of selection.
“Studies in Nidderland,” by Mr. Joseph Lucas, is one of these. It was a
labour of love, and it is full of records of singular survivals to our time of
archaisms of all descriptions, culinary and gardening utensils not
forgotten. There is one point, which I may perhaps advert to, and it is the
square of wood with a handle, which the folk in that part of Yorkshire
employed, in lieu of the ladle, for stirring, and the stone ovens for
baking, which, the author tells us, occur also in a part of Surrey. But the
volume should be read as a whole. We have of such too few.

Under the name of a Roman epicure, Coelius Apicius, has come down to
us what may be accepted as the most ancient European “Book of
Cookery.” I think that the idea widely entertained as to this work having
 6

proceeded from the pen of a man, after whom it was christened, has no
more substantial basis than a theory would have that the “Arabian
Nights” were composed by Haroun al Raschid. Warner, in the
introduction to his “Antiquitates Culinariae,” 1791, adduces as a
specimen of the rest two receipts from this collection, shewing how the
Roman cook of the Apician epoch was wont to dress a hog’s paunch, and
to manufacture sauce for a boiled chicken. Of the three persons who bore
the name, it seems to be thought most likely that the one who lived
under Trajan was the true godfather of the Culinary Manual.

One of Massinger’s characters (Holdfast) in the “City Madam,” 1658, is

made to charge the gourmets of his time with all the sins of extravagance
perpetrated in their most luxurious and fantastic epoch. The object was
to amuse the audience; but in England no “court gluttony,” much less
country Christmas, ever saw buttered eggs which had cost £30, or pies of
carps’ tongues, or pheasants drenched with ambergris, or sauce for a
peacock made of the gravy of three fat wethers, or sucking pigs at twenty
marks each.

Both Apicius and our Joe Miller died within £80,000 of being beggars —
Miller something the nigher to that goal; and there was this community
of insincerity also, that neither really wrote the books which carry their
names. Miller could not make a joke or understand one when anybody
else made it. His Roman foregoer, who would certainly never have gone
for his dinner to Clare Market, relished good dishes, even if he could not
cook them.

It appears not unlikely that the Romish clergy, whose monastic vows
committed them to a secluded life, were thus led to seek some
compensation for the loss of other worldly pleasures in those of the
table; and that, when one considers the luxury of the old abbeys, one
ought to recollect at the same time, that it was perhaps in this case as it
was in regard to letters and the arts, and that we are under a certain
amount of obligation to the monks for modifying the barbarism of the
table, and encouraging a study of gastronomy.

There are more ways to fame than even Horace suspected. The road to
immortality is not one but manifold. A man can but do what he can. As
the poet writes and the painter fills with his inspiration the mute and
void canvas, so doth the Cook his part. There was formerly apopular
 7

work in France entitled “Le Cuisinier Royal,” by MM. Viard and Fouret,
who describe themselves as “Hommes de Bouche.” The twelfth edition
lies before me, a thick octavo volume, dated 1825. The title-page is
succeeded by an anonymous address to the reader, at the foot of which
occurs a peremptory warning to pilferers of dishes or parts thereof; in
other words, to piratical invaders of the copyright of Monsieur Barba.
There is a preface equally unclaimed by signatures or initials, but as it is
in the singular number the two hommes de bouche can scarcely have
written it; perchance it was M. Barba aforesaid, lord-proprietor of these
not-to-be-touched treasures; but anyhow the writer had a very solemn
feeling of the debt which he had conferred on society by making the
contents public for the twelfth time, and he concludes with a mixture of
sentiments, which it is very difficult to define: “Dans la paix de ma
conscience, non moins que dans l’orgueil d’avoir si honorablement
rempli cette importante mission, je m’ecrierai avec le poete des
gourmands et des amoureux:

“Exegi monumentum aere perennius

Non omnis moriar.”*

* “In the peace of my conscience, not less than the pride of having so
honorably filled this important mission, I exclaimed with the poet of
gourmands and lovers:

I have erected a monument more enduring than bronze

I shall not die completely.

Horace, Ode 3:30

 8

THE EARLY ENGLISHMAN AND HIS FOOD

William of Malmesbury particularly dwells on the broad line of

distinction still existing between the southern English and the folk of the
more northerly districts in his day, twelve hundred years after the visit of
Caesar. He says that they were then (about A.D. 1150) as different as if
they had been different races; and so in fact they were — different in
their origin, in their language, and their diet.

In his “Folk-lore Relics of Early Village Life,” 1883, Mr. Gomme devotes
a chapter to “Early Domestic Customs,” and quotes Henry’s “History of
Great Britain” for a highly curious clue to the primitive mode of dressing
food, and partaking of it, among the Britons. Among the Anglo-Saxons
the choice of poultry and game was fairly wide. Alexander Neckani, in his
“Treatise on Utensils (twelfth century)” gives fowls, cocks, peacocks, the
cock of the wood (the woodcock, not the capercailzie), thrushes,
pheasants, and several more; and pigeons were only too plentiful. The
hare and the rabbit were well enough known, and with the leveret form
part of an enumeration of wild animals (animalium ferarum) in a
pictorial vocabulary of the fifteenth century. But in the very early
accounts or lists, although they must have soon been brought into
requisition, they are not specifically cited as current dishes. How far this
is attributable to the alleged repugnance of the Britons to use the hare
for the table, as Caesar apprises us that they kept it only voluptatis
causâ, it is hard to say; but the way in which the author of the
“Commentaries” puts it induces the persuasion that by lepus he means
not the hare, but the rabbit, as the former would scarcely be
domesticated.

Neckam gives very minute directions for the preparation of pork for the
table. He appears to have considered that broiling on the grill was the
best way; the gridiron had supplanted the hot stones or bricks in more
fashionable households, and he recommends a brisk fire, perhaps with
an eye to the skilful development of the crackling. He died without the
happiness of bringing his archi-episcopal nostrils in contact with the
sage and onions of wiser generations, and thinks that a little salt is
enough. But, as we have before explained, Neckam prescribed for great
 9

folks. These refinements were unknown beyond the precincts of the

palace and the castle.

In the ancient cookery-book, the “Menagier de Paris,” 1393, which offers

numerous points of similarity to our native culinary lore, the resources of
the cuisine are represented as amplified by receipts for dressing
hedgehogs, squirrels, magpies, and jackdaws — small deer, which the
English experts did not affect, although I believe that the hedgehog is
frequently used to this day by country folk, both here and abroad, and in
India. It has white, rabbit-like flesh.

In an eleventh century vocabulary we meet with a tolerably rich variety

of fish, of which the consumption was relatively larger in former times.
The Saxons fished both with the basket and the net. Among the fish here
enumerated are the whale (which was largely used for food), the dolphin,
porpoise, crab, oyster, herring, cockle, smelt, and eel. But in the
supplement to Alfric’s vocabulary, and in another belonging to the same
epoch, there are important additions to this list: the salmon, the trout,
the lobster, the bleak, with the whelk and other shell-fish. But we do not
notice the turbot, sole, and many other varieties, which became familiar
in the next generation or so. The turbot and sole are indeed included in
the “Treatise on Utensils” of Neckam, as are likewise the lamprey (of
which King John is said to have been very fond), bleak, gudgeon, conger,
plaice, limpet, ray, and mackerel.

The fifteenth century, if I may judge from a vocabulary of that date in

Wright’s collection, acquired a much larger choice of fish, and some of
the names approximate more nearly to those in modern use. We meet
with the sturgeon, the whiting, the roach, the miller’s thumb, the
thomback, the codling, the perch, the gudgeon, the turbot, the pike, the
tench, and the haddock. It is worth noticing also that a distinction was
now drawn between the fisherman and the fishmonger — the man who
caught the fish and he who sold it — piscator and piscarius; and in the
vocabulary itself the leonine line is cited: “Piscator prendit, quod
piscarius bene vendit.”

The whale was considerably brought into requisition for gastronomic

purposes. It was found on the royal table, as well as on that of the Lord
Mayor of London. The cook either roasted it, and served it up on the spit,
 10

or boiled it and sent it in with peas; the tongue and the tail were
favourite parts.

The porpoise, however, was brought into the hall whole, and was carved
or under-tranched by the officer in attendance. It was eaten with
mustard. The pièce de résistance at a banquet which Wolsey gave to
some of his official acquaintances in 1509, was a young porpoise, which
had cost eight shillings; it was on the same occasion that His Eminence
partook of strawberries and cream, perhaps; he is reported to have been
the person who made that pleasant combination fashionable. The
grampus, or sea-wolf, was another article of food which bears testimony
to the coarse palate of the early Englishman, and at the same time may
afford a clue to the partiality for disguising condiments and spices. But it
appears from an entry in his Privy Purse Expenses, under September 8,
1498, that Henry the Seventh thought a porpoise a valuable commodity
and a fit dish for an ambassador, for on that date twenty-one shillings
were paid to Cardinal Morton’s servant, who had procured one for some
envoy then in London, perhaps the French representative, who is the
recipient of a complimentary gratuity of £49 10s. on April 12, 1499, at his
departure from England.

In the fifteenth century the existing stock of fish for culinary purposes
received, if we may trust the vocabularies, a few accessions; as, for
instance, the bream, the skate, the flounder, and the bake.

In “Piers of Fulham (14th century),” we hear of the good store of fat eels
imported into England from the Low Countries, and to be had cheap by
anyone who watched the tides; but the author reprehends the growing
luxury of using the livers of young fish before they were large enough to
be brought to the table.

The most comprehensive catalogue of fish brought to table in the time of

Charles I. is in a pamphlet of 1644, inserted among my “Fugitive Tracts,”
1875; and includes the oyster, which used to be eaten at breakfast with
wine, the crab, lobster, sturgeon, salmon, ling, flounder, plaice, whiting,
sprat, herring, pike, bream, roach, dace, and eel. The writer states that
the sprat and herring were used in Lent. The sound of the stock-fish,
boiled in wort or thin ale till they were tender, then laid on a cloth and
dried, and finally cut into strips, was thought a good receipt for book-
glue.
 11

An acquaintance is in possession of an old cookery-book which exhibits

the gamut of the fish as it lies in the frying-pan, reducing its supposed
lament to musical notation. Here is an ingenious refinement and a
delicate piece of irony, which Walton and Cotton might have liked to
forestall.

The 15th century Nominale enriches the catalogue of dishes then in

vogue. It specifies almond-milk, rice, gruel, fish-broth or soup, a sort
of fricassee of fowl, collops, a pie, a pasty, a tart, a tartlet, a charlet
(minced pork), apple-juice, a dish called jussell made of eggs and grated
bread with seasoning of sage and saffron, and the three generic heads of
sod or boiled, roast, and fried meats. In addition to the fish-soup, they
had wine-soup, water-soup, ale-soup; and the flawn is reinforced by
the froise. Instead of one Latin equivalent for a pudding, it is of moment
to record that there are now three: nor should we overlook the rasher
and the sausage. It is the earliest place where we get some of our familiar
articles of diet — beef, mutton, pork, veal — under their modern names;
and about the same time such terms present themselves as “a broth,” “a
browis,” “a pottage,” “a mess.”

Of the dishes which have been specified, the froise corresponded to

an omelette au lard of modern French cookery, having strips of bacon in
it. The tansy was an omelette of another description, made chiefly with
eggs and chopped herbs. As the former was a common dish in the
monasteries, it is not improbable that it was one grateful to the palate. In
Lydgate’s “Story of Thebes,” a sort of sequel to the “Canterbury Tales,”
the pilgrims invite the poet to join the supper-table, where there were
these tasty omelettes: moile, made of marrow and grated bread, and
haggis, which is supposed to be identical with the Scottish dish so called.
Lydgate, who belonged to the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, doubtless
set on the table at Canterbury some of the dainties with which he was
familiar at home; and this practice, which runs through all romantic and
imaginative literature, constitutes, in our appreciation, its principal
worth. We love and cherish it for its very sins against chronological and
topographical fitness — its contempt of all unities. Men transferred local
circumstances and a local colouring to their pictures of distant countries
and manners. They argued the unknown from what they saw under their
own eyes. They portrayed to us what, so far as the scenes and characters
of their story went, was undeceivingly false, but what on the contrary,
 12

had it not been so, would never have been unveiled respecting
themselves and their time.

The expenditure on festive occasions seems, from some of the entries in

the “Northumberland Household Book,” to present a strong contrast to
the ordinary dietary allowed to the members of a noble and wealthy
household, especially on fish days, in the earlier Tudor era (1512). The
noontide breakfast provided for the Percy establishment was of a very
modest character: my lord and my lady had, for example, a loaf of bread,
two manchets (loaves of finer bread), a quart of beer and one of wine,
two pieces of salt fish, and six baked herrings or a dish of sprats. My lord
Percy and Master Thomas Percy had half a loaf of household bread, a
manchet, a pottle of beer, a dish of butter, a piece of salt fish, and a dish
of sprats or three white herrings; and the nursery breakfast for my lady
Margaret and Master Ingram Percy was much the same. But on flesh
days my lord and lady fared better, for they had a loaf of bread, two
manchets, a quart of beer and the same of wine, and half a chine of
mutton or boiled beef; while the nursery repast consisted of a manchet, a
quart of beer, and three boiled mutton breasts; and so on: whence it is
deducible that in the Percy family, perhaps in all other great houses, the
members and the ladies and gentlemen in waiting partook of their
earliest meal apart in their respective chambers, and met only at six to
dine or sup.

The beer, which was an invariable part of the menu, was perhaps brewed
from hops which, according to Harrison elsewhere quoted, were, after a
long discontinuance, again coming into use about this time. But it would
be a light-bodied drink which was allotted to the consumption at all
events of Masters Thomas and Ingram Percy, and even of my Lady
Margaret. It is clearly not irrelevant to my object to correct the general
impression that the great families continued throughout the year to
support the strain which the system of keeping open house must have
involved. For, as Warner has stated, there were intervals during which
the aristocracy permitted themselves to unbend, and shook off the
trammels imposed on them by their social rank and responsibility. This
was known as “keeping secret house,” or, in other words, my lord
became for a season incognito, and retired to one of his remoter
properties for relaxation and repose. Our kings in some measure did the
same; for they held their revels only, as a rule, at stated times and places.
 13

William I. is said to have kept his Easter at Winchester, his Whitsuntide

at Westminster, and his Christmas at Gloucester. Even these antique
grandees had to work on some plan. It could not be all mirth and jollity.

A recital of some of the articles on sale in a baker’s or confectioner’s shop

in 1563, occurs in Newbery’s “Dives Pragmaticus”: simnels, buns, cakes,
biscuits, comfits, caraways, and cracknels: and this is the first occurrence
of the bun that I have hitherto been able to detect. The same tract
supplies us with a few other items germane to my subject: figs, almonds,
long pepper, dates, prunes, and nutmegs. It is curious to watch how by
degrees the kitchen department was furnished with articles which
nowadays are viewed as the commonest necessaries of life.

In the 17th century the increased communication with the Continent

made us by degrees larger partakers of the discoveries of foreign cooks.
Noblemen and gentlemen travelling abroad brought back with them
receipts for making the dishes which they had tasted in the course of
their tours. In the “Compleat Cook,” 1655 and 1662, the beneficial
operation of actual experience of this kind, and of the introduction of
such books as the “Receipts for Dutch Victual” and “Epulario, or the
Italian Banquet,” to English readers and students, is manifest enough;
for in the latter volume we get such entries as these: “To make a Portugal
dish;” “To make a Virginia dish;” “A Persian dish;” “A Spanish olio;” and
then there are receipts “To make a Posset the Earl of Arundel’s way;” “To
make the Lady Abergavenny’s Cheese;” “The Jacobin’s Pottage;” “To
make Mrs. Leeds’ Cheesecakes;” “The Lord Conway His Lordship’s
receipt for the making of Amber Puddings;” “The Countess of Rutland’s
receipt of making the Rare Banbury Cake, which was so much praised as
her daughter’s (the Right Honourable Lady Chaworth) Pudding,” and
“To make Poor Knights”— the last a medley in which bread, cream, and
eggs were the leading materials.

Warner, however, in the “Additional Notes and Observations” to his

“Antiquitates Culinariae,” 1791, expresses himself adversely to the
foreign systems of cookery from an English point of view.
“Notwithstanding,” he remarks, “the partiality of our countrymen to
French cookery, yet that mode of disguising meat in this kingdom
(except perhaps in the hottest part of the hottest season of the year) is an
absurdity. It is here the art of spoiling good meat. The same art, indeed,
 14

in the South of France; where the climate is much warmer, and the flesh
of the animal lean and insipid, is highly valuable; it is the art of
making bad meat eatable.” At the same time, he acknowledges the
superior thrift and intelligence of the French cooks, and instances the
frog and the horse. “The frog is considered in this country as a disgusting
animal, altogether unfit for the purposes of the kitchen; whereas, by the
efforts of French cookery, the thighs of this little creature are converted
into a delicate and estimable dish.” So sings, too (save the
mark!), our Charles Lamb, so far back as 1822, after his visit to Paris. It
seems that in Elizabeth’s reign a powdered, or pickled horse was
considered a suitable dish by a French general entertaining at dinner
some English officers.

It is difficult to avoid an impression that Warner has some reason, when

he suggests that the immoderate use of condiments was brought to us by
the dwellers under a higher temperature, and was not really demanded
in such a climate as that of England, where meat can be kept sweet in
ordinary seasons, much longer even than in France or in Italy. But let us
bear in mind, too, how different from our own the old
English cuisine was, and how many strange beasts calling for lubricants
it comprehended within its range.

An edifying insight into the old Scottish cuisine among people of the
better sort is afforded by Fynes Morisoh, in his description of a stay at a
knight’s house in North Britain in 1598.

“Myself,” he says, “was at a knight’s house, who had many servants to

attend him, that brought in his meat with their heads covered with blue
caps, the table being more than half furnished with great platters of
porridge, each having a little piece of sodden meat; and when the tables
were served, the servants did sit down with us; but the upper mess,
instead of porridge, had a pullet with some prunes in the broth. And I
observed no art of cookery, or furniture of household stuff, but rather
rude neglect of both, though myself and my companion, sent by the
Governor of Berwick upon bordering affairs, were entertained in the best
manner. The Scots . . . vulgarly eat hearth-cakes of oats, but in cities have
also wheaten bread, which, for the most part, was bought by courtiers,
gentlemen, and the best sort of citizens. When I lived at Berwick, the
Scots weekly upon the market day obtained leave in writing of the
 15

governor to buy peas and beans, whereof, as also of wheat, their

merchants to this day (1617) send great quantities from London into
Scotland. They drink pure wine, not with sugar, as the English, yet at
feasts they put comfits in the wine, after the French manner: but they
had not our vintners’ fraud to mix their wines.”

He proceeds to say that he noticed no regular inns, with signs hanging

out, but that private householders would entertain passengers on
entreaty, or where acquaintance was claimed. The last statement is
interestingly corroborated by the account which Taylor the Water-Poet
printed in 1618 of his journey to Scotland, and which he termed his
“Penniless Pilgrimage or Moneyless Perambulation,” in the course of
which he purports to have depended entirely on private hospitality.

A friend says: “The Scotch were long very poor. Only their fish, oatmeal,
and whiskey kept them alive. Fish was very cheap.” This remark sounds
the key-note of a great English want — cheaper fish. Of meat we already
eat enough, or too much; but of fish we might eat more, if it could be
brought at a low price to our doors. It is a noteworthy collateral fact that
in the Lord Mayor of London’s Pageant of 1590 there is a representation
of the double advantage which would accrue if the unemployed poor
were engaged to facilitate and cheapen the supply of fish to the City; and
here we are, three centuries forward, with the want still very imperfectly
answered.

Besides the bread and oatmeal above named, the bannock played its
part. “The Land o’ Cakes” was more than a trim and pretty phrase: there
was in it a deep eloquence; it marked a wide national demand and
supply.

The “Penny Magazine” for 1842 has a good and suggestive paper on
“Feasts and Entertainments,” with extracts from some of the early
dramatists and a woodcut of “a new French cook, to devise fine
kickshaws and toys.” One curious point is brought out here in the phrase
“boiled jiggets of mutton,” which shews that the French gigot for a leg of
mutton was formerly in use here. Like many other Gallicisms, it lingered
in Scotland down to our own time.

The cut of the French cook above mentioned is a modern composition;

and indeed some of the excerpts from Ben Jonson and other writers are
 16

of an extravagant and hyperbolical cast — better calculated to amuse an

audience than to instruct the student.

Mr. Lucas remarks: “It is probable that we are more dependent upon
animal food than we used to be. In their early days, the present
generation of dalesmen fed almost exclusively upon oatmeal; either as
‘hasty-pudding,’— that is, Scotch oatmeal which had been ground over
again, so as to be nearly as fine as flour; . . . or ‘lumpy,’— that is, boiled
quickly and not thoroughly stirred; or else in one of the three kinds of
cake which they call ‘fermented,’ viz., ‘riddle cake,’ ‘held-on cake,’ or
‘turn-down cake,’ which is made from oatcake batter poured on the ‘bak’
ston’’ from the ladle, and then spread with the back of the ladle. It does
not rise like an oatcake. Or of a fourth kind called ‘clap cake.’ They also
made ‘tiffany cakes’ of wheaten flour, which was separated from the bran
by being worked through a hair-sieve tiffany, or temse:— south of
England Tammy— with a brush called the Brush shank.”
 17

ROYAL FEASTS AND SAVAGE POMP

In Rose’s “School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth,” 1682, the
staff of a great French establishment is described as a Master of the
Household, a Master Carver, a Master Butler, a Master Confectioner, a
Master Cook, and a Master Pastryman. The author, who was himself one
of the cooks in our royal kitchen, tells Sir Stephen Fox, to whom he
dedicates his book, that he had entered on it after he had completed one
of a very different nature: “The Theatre of the World, or a Prospect of
Human Misery.”

At the time that the “School of Instructions” was written, the French and
ourselves had both progressed very greatly in the Art of Cookery and in
the development of the menu. DelaHay Street, Westminster, near Bird-
Cage Walk, suggests a time when a hedge ran along the western side of it
towards the Park, in lieu of brick or stone walls; but the fact is that we
have here a curious association with the office, just quoted from Rose, of
Master Confectioner. For of the plot of ground on which the street, or at
any rate a portion of it stands, the old proprieter was Peter DelaHaye,
master confectioner of Charles II. at the very period of the publication of
Rose’s book. His name occurs in the title-deeds of one of the houses on
the Park side, which since his day has had only five owners, and has
been, since 1840, the freehold of an old and valued friend of the present
writer.

It may be worth pointing out, that the Confectionery and Pastry were two
distinct departments, each with its superintendent and staff. The
fondness for confections had spread from Italy — which itself in turn
borrowed the taste from the East — to France and England; and, as we
perceive from the descriptions furnished in books, these were often of a
very elaborate and costly character.

The volume is of the less interest for us, as it is a translation from the
French, and consequently does not throw a direct light on our own
kitchens at this period. But of course collaterally it presents many
features of likeness and analogy, and may be compared with
Braithwaite’s earlier view to which I shall presently advert.
 18

The following anecdote is given in the Epistle to Fox: “Many do believe

the French way of working is cheapest; but let these examine this book,
and then they may see (for their satisfaction) which is the best
husbandry, to extract gold out of herbs, or to make a pottage of a stone,
by the example of two soldiers, who in their quarters were minded to
have a pottage; the first of them coming into a house and asking for all
things necessary to the making of one, was as soon told that he could
have none of these things there, whereupon he went away, and the other
coming in with a stone in his knap-sack, asked only for a Pot to boil his
stone in, that he might make a dish of broth of it for his supper, which
was quickly granted him; and when the stone had boiled a little while,
then he asked for a small bit of beef, then for a piece of mutton, and so
for veal, bacon, etc., till by little and little he got all things requisite, and
he made an excellent pottage of his stone, at as cheap a rate (it may be)
as the cook extracted Gold from Herbs.”

The kitchen-staff of a noble establishment in the first quarter of the

seventeenth century we glean from Braithwaite’s “Rules and Orders for
the Government of the House of an Earl,” which, if the “M.L.” for whom
the piece was composed was his future wife, Mistress Lawson, cannot
have seen the light later than 1617, in which year they were married. He
specifies —(1) a yeoman and groom for the cellar; (2) a yeoman and
groom for the pantry; (3) a yeoman and groom for the buttery; (3a) a
yeoman for the ewery; (4) a yeoman purveyor; (5) a master-cook, under-
cooks, and three pastry-men; (6) a yeoman and groom in the scullery,
one to be in the larder and slaughter-house; (7) an achator or buyer; (8)
three conducts [query, errand-boys] and three kitchen-boys.

The writer also admits us to a rather fuller acquaintance with the mode
in which the marketing was done. He says that the officers, among other
matters, “must be able to judge, not only of the prices, but also of the
goodness of all kinds of corn, cattle, and household provisions; and the
better to enable themselves thereto, are oftentimes to ride to fairs and
great markets, and there to have conference with graziers and
purveyors.” The higher officers were to see that the master was not
deceived by purveyors and buyers, and that other men’s cattle did not
feed on my lord’s pastures; they were to take care that the clerk of the
kitchen kept his day-book “in that perfect and good order, that at the end
of every week or month it be pied out,” and that a true docket of all kinds
 19

of provisions be set down. They were to see that the powdered and salted
meats in the larder were properly kept; and vigilant supervision was to
be exercised over the cellar, buttery, and other departments, even to the
prevention of paring the tallow lights.

Braithwaite dedicates a section to each officer; but I have only space to

transcribe, by way of sample, the opening portion of his account of “The
Officer of the Kitchen:” “The Master-Cook should be a man of years;
well-experienced, whereby the younger cooks will be drawn the better to
obey his directions. In ancient times noblemen contented themselves to
be served with such as had been bred in their own houses, but of late
times none could please some but Italians and Frenchmen, or at best
brought up in the Court, or under London cooks: nor would the old
manner of baking, boiling, and roasting please them, but the boiled
meats must be after the French fashion, the dishes garnished about with
sugar and preserved plums, the meat covered over with orangeade,
preserved lemons, and with divers other preserved and conserved stuff
fetched from the confectioner’s: more lemons and sugar spent in boiling
fish to serve at one meal than might well serve the whole expense of the
house in a day.” He goes on to describe and ridicule the new fashion of
placing arms and crests on the dishes. It seems that all the refuse was the
perquisite of the cook and his subordinates in a regulated proportion,
and the same in the bakery and other branches; but, as may be supposed,
in these matters gross abuses were committed.

In the “Leisure Hour” for 1884 was printed a series of papers on “English
Homes in the Olden Times.” The eleventh deals with service and wages,
and is noticed here because it affords a recital of the orders made for his
household by John Harington the elder in 1566, and renewed by John
Harington the younger, his son and High Sheriff of Somersetshire, in
1592.

This code of domestic discipline for an Elizabethan establishment

comprises the observance of decorum and duty at table, and is at least as
valuable and curious as those metrical canons and precepts which form
the volume (Babees’ Book) edited for the Early English Text Society, etc.

There is rather too general a dislike on the part of antiquaries to take

cognisance of matter inserted in popular periodicals upon subjects of an
archaeological character; but of course the loose and flimsy treatment
 20

which this class of topics as a rule receives in the light literature of the
day makes it perilous to use information so forthcoming in evidence or
quotation. Articles must be rendered palatable to the general reader, and
thus become worthless for all readers alike.

Most of the early descriptions and handbooks of instruction turn,

naturally enough, on the demands and enjoyments of the great. There is
in the treatise of Walter de Bibblesworth (14th century) a very interesting
and edifying account of the arrangement of courses for some important
banquet. The boar’s head holds the place of honour in the list, and
venison follows, and various dishes of roast. Among the birds to be
served up we see cranes, peacocks, swans, and wild geese; and of the
smaller varieties, fieldfares, plovers, and larks. There were wines; but the
writer only particularises them as white and red. The haunch of venison
was then an ordinary dish, as well as kid. They seem to have sometimes
roasted and sometimes boiled them. Not only the pheasant and partridge
appear, but the quail — which is at present scarcer in this country,
though so plentiful abroad — the duck, and the mallard.

In connection with venison, it is worth while to draw attention to a

passage in the “Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII” where, under date of
August 8, 1505, a woman receives 3s. d. for clarifying deer suet for the
King. This was not for culinary but for medicinal purposes, as it was
then, and much later, employed as an ointment.

Both William I. and his son the Red King maintained, as Warner shews
us, a splendid table; and we have particulars of the princely scale on
which an Abbot of Canterbury celebrated his installation in 1309. The
archbishops of those times, if they exercised inordinate authority, at any
rate dispensed in a magnificent manner among the poor and infirm a
large portion of their revenues. They stood in the place of corporations
and Poor Law Guardians. Their very vices were not without a certain
fascinating grandeur; and the pleasures of the table in which our
Plantagenet rulers outstripped even their precursors, the earlier
sovereigns of that line, were enhanced and multiplied by the Crusades,
by the commencing spirit of discovery, and by the foreign
intermarriages, which became so frequent.

A far more thorough conquest than that which the day of Hastings
signalised was accomplished by an army of a more pacific kind, which
 21

crossed the Channel piecemeal, bringing in their hands, not bows and
swords, but new dishes and new wines. These invaders of our soil were
doubtless welcomed as benefactors by the proud nobles of the Courts of
Edward II. and Richard II., as well as by Royalty itself; and the
descriptions which have been preserved of the banquets held on special
occasions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even of the
ordinary style of living of some, make our City feasts of to-day shrink
into insignificance. But we must always remember that the extravagant
luxury and hospitality of the old time were germane and proper to it,
component parts of the social framework.

It is to be remarked that some of the most disturbed and disastrous

epochs in our annals are those to which we have to go for records of the
greatest exploits in gastronomy and lavish expenditure of public money
on comparatively unprofitable objects. During the period from the
accession of Rufus to the death of Henry III., and again under the rule of
Richard II., the taste for magnificent parade and sumptuous
entertainments almost reached its climax. The notion of improving the
condition of the poor had not yet dawned on the mind of the governing
class; to make the artizan and the operative self-supporting and self-
respectful was a movement not merely unformulated, but a conception
beyond the parturient faculty of a member of the Jacquerie. The king,
prince, bishop, noble, of unawakened England met their constituents at
dinner in a fashion once or twice in a lifetime, and when the guests below
the salt had seen the ways of greatness, they departed to fulfil their
several callings. These were political demonstrations with a clear and
(for the age) not irrational object; but for the modern public dinner, over
which I should be happy to preach the funeral sermon, there is not often
this or any other plea.

The redistribution of wealth and its diversion into more fruitful channels
has already done something for the people; and in the future that lies
before some of us they will do vastly more. All Augaea will be flushed
out.

In some of these superb feasts, such as that at the marriage of Henry IV.
in 1403, there were two series of courses, three of meat, and three of fish
and sweets; in which we see our present fashion to a certain extent
reversed. But at the coronation of Henry V. in 1421, only three courses
 22

were served, and those mixed. The taste for what were termed
“subtleties,” had come in, and among the dishes at this latter
entertainment occur, “A pelican sitting on her nest with her young,” and
“an image of St. Catherine holding a book and disputing with the
doctors.” These vagaries became so common, that few dinners of
importance were accounted complete without one or more.

One of the minor “subtleties” was a peacock in full panoply. The bird was
first skinned, and the feathers, tail, head and neck having been laid on a
table, and sprinkled with cummin, the body was roasted, glazed with raw
egg-yolk, and after being left to cool, was sewn back again into the skin
and so brought to table as the last course. In 1466, at the enthronement
of Archbishop Nevile, no fewer than 104 peacocks were dressed.

The most extraordinary display of fish at table on a single occasion took

place at the enthronement feast of Archbishop Warham in 1504; it
occurred on a fast day; and consequently no meat, poultry or game was
included in the menu, but ample compensation was found in the lavish
assortment of confectionery, spices, beer and wine. Of wine of various
vintages there were upwards of 12 pipes, and of ale and beer, thirty tuns,
including four of London and six of Kentish ale.

The narratives which have descended to us of the prodigious banquets

given on special occasions by our early kings, prelates and nobles, are apt
to inspire the general reader with an admiration of the splendid
hospitality of bygone times. But, as I have already suggested, these
festivities were occasional and at long intervals, and during the
intervening space the great ones and the small ones of mediaeval and
early England did not indulge in this riotous sort of living, but “kept
secret house,” as it was called, both after their own fashion. The extremes
of prodigality and squalor were more strongly marked among the poorer
classes while this country was in a semi-barbarous condition, and even
the aristocracy by no means maintained the same domestic state
throughout the year as their modern representatives. There are not those
ostentatious displays of wealth and generosity, which used to signalise
certain political events, such as the coronation of a monarch or the
enthronement of a primate; the mode of living has grown more uniform
and consistent, since between the vilain and his lord has interposed
himself the middle-class Englishman, with a hand held out to either.
 23

A few may not spend so much, but as a people we spend more on our
table. A good dinner to a shepherd or a porter was formerly more than a
nine days’ wonder; it was like a beacon seen through a mist. But now he
is better fed, clothed and housed than the bold baron, whose serf he
would have been in the good old days; and the bold baron, on his part,
no longer keeps secret house unless he chooses, and observes, if a more
monotonous, a more secure and comfortable tenor of life. This change is
of course due to a cause which lies very near the surface — to the gradual
effacement of the deeply-cut separating lines between the orders of
society, and the stealthy uprise of the class, which is fast gathering all
power into its own hands.
 24

COOKERY BOOKS
 25

PART I

The first attempt to illustrate this branch of the art must have been made
by Alexander Neckam in the twelfth century; at least I am not aware of
any older treatise in which the furniture and apparatus of a kitchen are
set forth.

But it is needless to say that Neckam merely dealt with a theme, which
had been familiar many centuries before his time, and compiled his
treatise, “De Utensilibus,” as Bishop Alfric had his earlier “Colloquy,”
with an educational, not a culinary, object, and with a view to facilitate
the knowledge of Latin among his scholars. It is rather interesting to
know that he was a native of St. Albans, where he was born in 1157. He
died in 1217, so that the composition of this work of his (one of many)
may be referred to the close of the twelfth century. Its value is, in a
certain sense, impaired by the almost complete absence of English
terms; Latin and (so called) Norman-French being the languages almost
exclusively employed in it. But we have good reason indeed to be grateful
for such a legacy in any shape, and when we consider the tendency of
ways of life to pass unchanged from one generation to another, and when
we think how many archaic and (to our apprehension) almost barbarous
fashions and forms in domestic management lingered within living
recollection, it will not be hazarding much after all to presume that the
particulars so casually supplied to us by Neckam have an application
alike before and after.

A student should also bear in mind that, from the strong Anglo-Gallic
complexion of our society and manners in early days, the accounts
collected by Lacroix are largely applicable to this country, and the same
facilities for administering to the comfort and luxuries of the table, which
he furnishes as illustrative of the gradual outgrowth from the wood fire
and the pot-au-feu among his own countrymen, or certain classes of
them, may be received as something like counterparts of what we
possessed in England at or about the same period. We keep the
phrase pot luck; but, for most of those who use it, it has parted with all
its meaning. This said production of Neckam of St. Albans purports to be
a guide to young housekeepers. It instructs them what they will require,
if they desire to see their establishment well-ordered; but we soon
 26

perceive that the author has in view the arrangements indispensable for
a family of high rank and pretensions; and it may be once for all
observed that this kind of literature seldom proves of much service to us
in an investigation of the state of the poor, until we come to the fifteenth
or even sixteenth century, when the artists of Germany and the Low
Countries began to delineate those scenes in industrial and servile life,
which time and change have rendered so valuable.

Where their superiors in rank regarded them as little more than

mechanical instruments for carrying on the business of life, the poor
have left behind them few records of their mode of sustenance and of the
food which enabled them to follow their daily toil. The anecdotes,
whatever they may be worth, of Alfred and the burnt cakes, and of Tom
Thumb’s mamma and her Christmas pudding, made in a bowl, of which
the principal material was pork, stand almost alone; for we get, wherever
we look, nothing but descriptions by learned and educated men of their
equals or betters, how they fed and what they ate — their houses, their
furniture, their weapons, and their dress. Even in the passage of the old
fabliau of the “King and the Hermit” the latter, instead of admitting us to
a cottage interior, has a servant to wait on him, brings out a tablecloth,
lights two candles, and lays before his disguised guest venison and wine.
In most of our own romances, and in the epics of antiquity, we have to be
satisfied with vague and splendid generalisations. We do not learn much
of the dishes which were on the tables, how they were cooked, and how
[Greek: oi polloi] cooked theirs.

The Liber, or rather Codex, Princeps in the very long and extensive
catalogue of works on English Cookery, is a vellum roll called the Form
of Cury, and is supposed to have been written about the beginning of the
fifteenth century by the master-cook of Richard II who reigned from
1377 to 1399, and spent the public money in eating and drinking, instead
of wasting it, as his grandfather had done, in foreign wars. This singular
relic was once in the Harleian collection, but did not pass with the rest of
the Mss. to the British Museum; it is now however, Additional Ms. 5016,
having been presented to the Library by Mr. Gustavus Brander. It was
edited by Dr. Pegge in 1780, and included by Warner in his “Antiquitates
Culinariae,” 1791. The Roll comprises 196 receipts, and commences with
a sort of preamble and a Table of Contents. In the former it is worth
noting that the enterprise was undertaken “by the assent and avisement
 27

of masters of physic and of philosophy, that dwelled in his (Richard II.‘s)

court,” which illustrates the ancient alliance between medicine and
cookery, which has not till lately been dissolved. The directions were to
enable a man “to make common pottages and common meats for the
household, as they should be made, craftily and wholesomely;” so that
this body of cookery was not prepared exclusively for the use of the royal
kitchen, but for those who had not the taste or wish for what are termed,
in contra-distinction, in the next sentence, “curious pottages, and meats,
and subtleties.” It is to be conjectured that copies of such a Ms. were
multiplied, and from time to time reproduced with suitable changes; but
with the exception of two different, though nearly coeval, collections,
embracing 31 and 162 receipts or nyms, and also successively printed by
Pegge and Warner, there is no apparent trace of any systematic
compilation of this nature at so remote a date.

The “Form of Cury” was in the 28 Eliz., in the possession of the Stafford
family, and was in that year presented to the Queen by Edward, Lord
Stafford, as is to be gathered from a Latin memorandum at the end, in
his lordship’s hand, preserved by Pegge and Warner in their editions.
The fellowship between the arts of healing and cooking is brought to our
recollection by a leonine verse at the end of one of the shorter separate
collections above described:—

“Explicit de Coquina

Quae est optima Medicina.”

The “Form of Cury” will amply remunerate a study. It presents the

earliest mention, so far as I can discern, of olive oil, cloves, mace, and
gourds. In the receipts for making Aigredouce and Bardolf, sugar, that
indispensable feature in the cuisine, makes its appearance; but it does
so, I should add, in such a way as to lead to the belief that the use of
sugar was at this time becoming more general. The difficulty, at first,
seems to have been in refining it. We encounter here, too, onions under
the name borrowed from the French instead of the Anglo-Saxon form
“ynne leac”; and the prescriptions for making messes of almonds, pork,
peas, and beans are numerous. There is “Saracen sauce,” moreover,
possibly as old as the Crusades, and pig with sage stuffing (from which it
was but one step to duck). More than one species of “galantine” was
already known; and I observe the distinction, in one of the smaller
 28

collections printed by Warner, between the tartlet formed of meat and

the tartlet de fritures, of which the latter approaches more nearly our
notion. The imperfect comprehension of harmonies, which is illustrated
by the prehistoric bag-pudding of King Arthur, still continued in the
unnatural union of flesh with sweets. It is now confined to the cottage,
whence Arthur may have himself introduced it at Court and to the
Knights of the Round Table.

In this authority, several of the dishes were to be cooked in white grease,

which Warner interprets into lard; others demanded olive oil; but there
is no allusion to butter. Among the receipts are some for dishes “in
gravy”; rabbits and chickens were to be treated similarly; and the gravy
appears to have consisted merely of the broth in which they were boiled,
and which was flavoured with pounded almonds, powdered ginger, and
sugar.

The “Liber Cure Cocorum,” which is apparently extant only in a fifteenth

century Ms., is a metrical treatise, instructing its readers how to prepare
certain dishes, condiments and accessories; and presents, for the most
part, a repetition of what has already occurred in earlier and more
comprehensive undertakings. It is a curious aid to our knowledge of the
manner in which the table of the well-to-do Englishman was furnished in
the time of Henry VI., and it is so far special, that it deals with the
subject more from a middle-class point of view than the “Regulations for
the Royal Household,” and other similar compilations, which I have to
bring under notice. The names, as usual, are often misleading, as
in blanc manger, which is very different from our blanc-mange; and the
receipt for “goose in a hog pot” leaves one in doubt as to its adaptability
to the modern palate. The poetical ambition of the author has proved a
source of embarrassment here and there; and in the receipt “for a service
on a fish-day” the practitioner is prayed within four lines to cover his
white herring for God’s sake, and lay mustard over his red for God’s love,
because sake and love rhyme with take and above.

The next collection of receipts, which exists in a complete and

homogeneous shape, is the “Noble Book of Cookery,” of which an early
Ms. copy at Holkham was edited in 1882 by Mrs. Napier, but which had
already been printed by Pynson in 1500, and subsequently by his
successor, John Byddell. This interesting and important volume
 29

commences with a series of descriptions of certain royal and noble

entertainments given on various occasions from the time of Henry IV. to
that of Edward IV., and then proceeds to furnish a series of directions for
the cook of a king’s or prince’s household; for, although both at the
outset and the conclusion we are told that these dishes were calculated
for all estates, it is abundantly obvious that they were such as never then,
or very long subsequently, reached much lower than the court or the
aristocracy. There is a less complete copy here of the feast at the
enthronement of Archbishop Nevile. I regret that neither of the old
printed copies is at present accessible. That of 1500 was formerly in the
library at Bulstrode, and I was given by the late Mr. Bradshaw to
understand that the same copy (no other being known) is probably at
Longleat. By referring to Herbert’s “Typographical Antiquities,” anyone
may see that, if his account (so far as it goes) is to be trusted, the printed
copy varies from the Holkham Ms. in many verbal particulars, and gives
the date of Nevile’s Feast as 1465.

The compilation usually known as the “Book of St. Albans,” 1486, is,
perhaps, next to the “Noble Book of Cookery,” the oldest receptacle for
information on the subject in hand. The former, however, deals with
cookery only in an incidental and special way. Like Arnold’s Chronicle,
the St. Albans volume is a miscellany comprehending nearly all the
matters that were apt to interest the few educated persons who were
qualified to peruse its pages; and amid a variety of allied topics we come
here across a catalogue of terms used in speaking of certain dishes of that
day. The reference is to the prevailing methods of dressing and carving.
A deer was said to be broken, a cony unlaced, a pheasant, partridge, or
quail winged, a pigeon or a woodcock thighed, a plover minced, a
mallard unbraced. They spoke of a salmon or a gurnard as chined, a sole
as loined, a haddock as sided, an eel as trousoned, a pike as splatted, and
a trout as gobbeted.

It must, I think, be predicated of Tusser’s “Husbandry,” of which the last

edition published in the writer’s lifetime is that of 1580, that it seems
rather to reproduce precepts which occur elsewhere than to supply the
reader with the fruits of his own direct observation. But there are certain
points in it which are curious and original. He tells the ploughman that,
after confession on Shrove Tuesday, he may go and thresh the fat hen,
 30

and if he is blindfold, kill her, and then dine on fritters and pancakes. At
other times, seed-cakes, wafers, and other light confections.

It appears to have been usual for the farmer at that date to allow his
hinds roast meat twice a week, on Sundays and on Thursday nights; but
perhaps this was a generous extreme, as Tusser is unusually liberal in his
ideas.

Tobias Venner, a Somersetshire man, brought out in 1620 his “Via Recta
ad Vitam Longam.” He was evidently a very intelligent person, and
affords us the result of his professional experience and personal
observation. He considered two meals a day sufficient for all ordinary
people — breakfast at eleven and supper at six (as at the universities);
but he thought that children and the aged or infirm could not be tied by
any rule. He condemns “bull’s beef” as rank, unpleasant, and
indigestible, and holds it best for the labourer; which seems to indicate
more than anything else the low state of knowledge in the grazier, when
Venner wrote: but there is something beyond friendly counsel where our
author dissuades the poor from eating partridges, because they are
calculated to promote asthma. “Wherefore,” he ingenuously says, “when
they shall chance to meet with a covey of young partridges, they were
much better to bestow them upon such, for whom they are convenient!”

Salmon, turbot, and sturgeon he also reckoned hard of digestion, and

injurious, if taken to excess; nor does he approve of herrings and sprats;
and anchovies he characterises as the meat of drunkards. It is the first
that we have heard of them.

He was not a bad judge of what was palatable, and prescribes as an

agreeable and wholesome meal a couple of poached eggs with a little salt
and vinegar, and a few corns of pepper, some bread and butter, and a
draught of pure claret. He gives a receipt — the earliest I have seen in
print — for making metheglin or hydromel. He does not object to
furmety or junket, or indeed to custards, if they are eaten at the proper
seasons, and in the middle or at the end of meals. But he dislikes
mushrooms, and advises you to wash out your mouth, and rub your teeth
and gums with a dry cloth, after drinking milk.

The potato, however, he praises as nutritious and pleasant to the taste,

yet, as Gerarde the herbalist also says, flatulent. Venner refers to a mode
 31

of sopping them in wine as existing in his time. They were sometimes

roasted in the embers, and there were other ways of dressing them. John
Forster, of Hanlop, in Bucks, wrote a pamphlet in 1664 to shew that the
more extended cultivation of this root would be a great national benefit.

Venner, who practised in the spring and autumn at Bath as a physician,

had no relish for the poorer classes, who did not fare well at the hands of
their superiors in any sense in the excellent old days. But he liked the
Quality, in which he embraced the Universities, and he tenders them,
among other little hints, the information that green ginger was good for
the memory, and conserve of roses (not the salad of roses immortalised
by Apuleius) was a capital posset against bed-time. “A conserve of
rosemary and sage,” says he, “to be often used by students, especially
mornings fasting, doth greatly delight the brain.”

The military ascendency of Spain did not fail to influence the culinary
civilisation of those countries to which it temporarily extended its rule;
and in a Venetian work entitled “Epulario, or the Italian Banquet,”
printed in 1549, we recognise the Spanish tone which had in the
sixteenth century communicated itself to the cookery of the Peninsula,
shewing that Charles V. and his son carried at least one art with them as
an indemnity for the havoc which they committed.

The nursery rhyme of “Sing a song of sixpence” receives a singular and

diverting illustration from the pages of this “Epulario,” where occurs a
receipt “to make Pies that the Birds may be alive in them, and fly out
when it is cut up.” Some of the other more salient beads relate to the
mode of dressing sundry dishes in the Roman and Catalonian fashion,
and teach us how to seethe gourds, as they did in Spain, and to make
mustard after the manner of Padua.

I propose here to register certain contributions to our acquaintance with

early culinary ideas and practices, which I have not specifically
described:—

1. The Book of Carving. W. de Worde. 4to, 1508, 1513. Reprinted down to

1613.

2. A Proper New Book of Cookery. 12mo, 1546. Often reprinted. It is a

recension of the “Book of Cookery,” 1500.
 32

3. The Treasury of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets. By John

Partridge. 12mo, 1580, 1586; and under the title of “Treasury of Hidden
Secrets,” 4to, 1596, 1600, 1637, 1653.

4. A Book of Cookery. Gathered by A.W. 12mo, 1584, 1591, etc.

5. The Good Housewife’s Jewel. By Thomas Dawson. In two Parts, 12mo,

1585. A copy of Part 2 of this date is in the British Museum.

6. The Good Housewife’s Treasury. 12 mo, 1588.

7. Cookery for all manner of Dutch Victual. Licensed in 1590, but not
otherwise known.

8. The Good Housewife’s Handmaid for the Kitchen. 8vo, 1594.

9. The Ladies’ Practice; or, a plain and easy direction for ladies and
gentlewomen. By John Murrell. Licensed in 1617. Printed in 1621, and
with additions in 1638, 1641, and 1650.

10. A Book of Cookery. By George Crewe. Licensed in 1623, but not

known.

11. A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen. 12mo, 1630.

12. The Ladies’ Cabinet Opened. By Patrick, Lord Ruthven. 4to, 1639;
8vo, 1655.

13. A Curious Treasury of Twenty Rare Secrets. Published by La

Fountaine, an expert Operator. 4to, 1649.

14. A New Dispensatory of Fourty Physical Receipts. Published by

Salvatore Winter of Naples, an expert Operator. 4to, 1649. Second
edition, enlarged: same date.

The three last are rather in the class of miscellanies.

15. Health’s Improvement; or, Rules comprising the discovering the

Nature, Method, and Manner of preparing all sorts of Food used in this
Nation. By Thomas Muffet (or Moffat), M.D. Corrected and enlarged by
Christopher Bennett, M.D. 4to, 1655.

16. The Queen’s Closet opened. Incomparable secrets in physick,

chirurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery. . . . Transcribed from the
 33

true copies of her Majesties own Receipt Books. By W.M., one of her late
Servants. . . . London, 1655, 8vo. The same, corrected and revised, with
many new and large Additions. 8vo, 1683.

17. The Perfect Cook: being the most exact directions for the making all
kinds of pastes, with the perfect way teaching how to raise, season, and
make all sorts of pies. . . . As also the Perfect English Cook. . . . To which
is added the way of dressing all manner of Flesh. By M. Marmette.
London, 1686, 12mo.

The writer of the “French Gardener,” of which I have had occasion to say
a good deal in my small volume on that subject, also produced, “Les
Délices de la Campagne,” which Evelyn excused himself from translating
because, whatever experience he had in the garden, he had none, he says,
in the shambles; and it was for those who affected such matters to get it
done, but not by him who did the “French Cook” 1. He seems to imply
that the latter, though an excellent work in its way, had not only been
marred in the translation, but was not so practically advantageous to us
as it might have been, “for want of skill in the kitchen”— in other words,
an evil, which still prevails, was then appreciated by intelligent observers
— the English cook did not understand her business, and the English
mistress, as a rule, was equally ignorant.

One of the engravings in the “French Gardener” represents women

rolling out paste, preparing vegetables, and boiling conserves.

There is a rather quaint and attractive class of miscellaneous receipt-

books, not made so on account of any particular merit in their contents,
but by reason of their association with some person of quality. Ms.
Sloane 1367, is a narrow octavo volume, for instance, containing “My
Lady Rennelagh’s choice Receipts: as also some of Capt. Gvilt’s, who
valued them above gold.” The value for us, however, is solely in the link
with a noble family and the little touch about the Captain. There are
many more such in public and private libraries, and they are often mere
transcripts from printed works — select assemblages of directions for
dressing food and curing diseases, formed for domestic reference before
the advent of Dr. Buchan, and Mrs. Glasse, and Mrs. Rundell.

1 I have not seen this book, nor is it under that title in the catalogue of the British Museum.
 34

Among a valuable and extensive assemblage of English and foreign

cookery books in the Patent Office Library, Mr. Ordish has obligingly
pointed out to me a curious 4to Ms., on the cover of which occurs, “Mrs.
Mary Dacres her booke, 1666.”

Even in the latter part of the seventeenth century the old-fashioned

dishes, better suited to the country than to the Court taste, remained in
fashion, and are included in receipt-books, even in that published by
Joseph Cooper, who had been head-cook to Charles I, and who styles his
1654 volume “The Art of Cookery Refined and Augmented.” He gives us
two varieties of oatmeal pudding, French barley pudding, and hasty
pudding in a bag. There is a direction for frying mushrooms, which were
growing more into favour at the table than in the days when Castelvetri,
whom I cite in my monograph on Gardening, was among us. Another
dainty is an ox-palate pie.

Cooper’s Preface is quaint, and surely modest enough. “Though the

cheats,” says he, “of some preceding pieces that treated on this subject
(whose Title-pages, like the contents of a weekly Pamphlet, promised
much more than the Books performed) may have provided this but a
cold intertainment at its first coming abroad; yet I know it will not stay
long in the world, before every rational reader will clear it of all alliance
to those false pretenders. Ladies, forgive my confidence, if I tell you, that
I know this piece will prove your favourite.”

Yet Cooper’s performance, in spite of its droll, self-complacent vein in

the address to the Reader, is a judicious and useful selection, and was, in
fact, far more serviceable to the middle-class gentry than some of those
which had gone before. It adapted itself to sundry conditions of men; but
it kept in view those whose purses were not richly lined enough to pay
for dainties and “subtleties.” It is pleasant to see that, after the countless
centuries which had run out since Arthur, the bag-pudding and hot-pot
maintained their ground — good, wholesome, country fare.

After the fall of the Monarchy in 1648, the chef de cuisine probably found
his occupation gone, like a greater man before him; and the world may
owe to enforced repose this condescension to the pen by the deposed
minister of a king.
 35

Soon after the Restoration it was that some Royalist brought out a small
volume called “The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, commonly called
Joan Cromwell, the wife of the late Usurper, truly described and
represented,” 12mo, 1664. Its design was to throw ridicule on the
parsimony of the Protectoral household. But he recites some excellent
dishes which made their appearance at Oliver’s table: Dutch puddings,
Scotch collops of veal, marrow puddings, sack posset, boiled woodcocks,
and warden pies. He seems to have understood that eight stone of beef
were cooked every morning for the establishment, and all scraps were
diligently collected, and given alternately to the poor of St. Margaret’s,
Westminster, and St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The writer acquaints us
that, when the Protector entertained the French ambassador and the
Parliament, after the Sindercome affair, he only spent £1,000 over the
banquet, of which the Lady Protectress managed to save £200. Cromwell
and his wife, we are told, did not care for suppers, but contented
themselves with eggs and slops.

A story is told here of Cromwell and his wife sitting down to a loin of
veal, and his calling for an orange, which was the sauce he preferred to
that joint, and her highness telling him that he could not have one, for
they were not to be had under a groat.

The Mansion House still retains the ancient usage of distributing the
relics of a great feast afterwards among the poor, as Cromwell is said just
above to have made a rule of his household. It was a practice highly
essential in the absence of any organised system of relief.

The reign of Charles II., which witnessed a relationship with France of a

very different character from that which the English maintained during
the Plantagenet and earlier Tudor rule, was favourable to the
naturalisation of the Parisian school of cookery, and numerous works
were published at and about that time, in which the development of
knowledge in this direction is shown to have taken place pari passu with
the advance in gardening and arboriculture under the auspices of Evelyn.

In 1683 we come to a little volume entitled “The Young Cook’s Monitor,”

by M.H., who made it public for the benefit of his (or her) scholars; a
really valuable and comprehensive manual, wherein, without any
attempt at arrangement, there is an ample assemblage of directions for
preparing for the table all kinds of joints, made dishes, soups and
 36

broths, frigacies, puddings, pies, tarts, tansies, and jellies. Receipts for
pickling are included, and two ways are shown how we should treat
turnips after this wise. Some of the ingredients proposed for sauces seem
to our ears rather prodigious. In one place a contemporary peruser has
inserted an ironical calculation in Ms. to the effect that, whereas a cod’s
head could be bought for fourpence, the condiments recommended for it
were not to be had for less than nine shillings. The book teaches us to
make Scotch collops, to pickle lemons and quinces, to make French
bread, to collar beef, pork, or eels, to make gooseberry fool, to dry beef
after the Dutch fashion, to make sack posset two ways, to candy flowers
(violets, roses, etc.) for salads, to pickle walnuts like mangoes, to make
flummery, to make a carp pie, to pickle French beans and cucumbers, to
make damson and quince wines, to make a French pudding (called a
Pomeroy pudding), to make a leg of pork like a Westphalia ham, to make
mutton as beef, and to pot beef to eat like venison.

These and many other precepts has M.H. left behind him; and a sort of
companion volume, printed a little before, goes mainly over the same
ground, to wit, “Rare and Excellent Receipts Experienced and Taught by
Mrs. Mary Tillinghast, and now printed for the use of her scholars only,”
1678. The lady appealed to a limited constituency, like M.H.; but her
pages, such as they are (for there are but thirty), are now publici juris.
The lesson to be drawn from Mistress Tillinghast’s printed labours is
that, among our ancestors in 1678, pies and pasties of all sorts, and sweet
pastry, were in increased vogue. Her slender volume is filled with
elucidations on the proper manufacture of paste of various sorts; and in
addition to the pies designated by M.H. we encounter a Lombard pie, a
Battalia pie, an artichoke pie, a potato (or secret) pie, a chadron
[Footnote: A pie chiefly composed of a calf’s chadroa] pie, and a herring
pie. The fair author takes care to instruct us as to the sauces or dressings
which are to accompany certain of her dishes.

“The Book of Cookery,” 1500, of which there was a reprint by John

Byddell about 1530 was often republished, with certain modifications,
down to 1650, under the titles of “A Proper New Book of Cookery,” or
“The Book of Cookery.” Notwithstanding the presence of many
competitors, it continued to be a public favourite, and perhaps answered
the wants of those who did not desire to see on their tables the foreign
 37

novelties introduced by travellers, or advertised in collections of receipts

borrowed from other languages.

In fact, the first half of the seventeenth century did not witness many
accessions to the store of literature on this subject. But from the time of
the Commonwealth, the supply of works of reference for the housekeeper
and the cook became much more regular and extensive. In 1653, Selden’s
friend, the Countess of Kent, brought out her “Choice Manual of Physic
and Chirurgery,” annexing to it receipts for preserving and candying;
and there were a few others, about the same time, of whose works I shall
add here a short list:—

1. The Accomplished Cook. By Robert May. 8vo, 1660. Fifth edition, 8vo,
1685.

2. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected. By Will. Rabisha. 8vo, 1661.

3. The Queen-like Closet: a Rich Cabinet, stored with all manner of rare
receipts. By Hannah Wolley. 8vo, 1670.

4. The True Way of Preserving and Candying, and making several sorts
of Sweetmeats. Anon. 8vo, 1681.

5. The Complete Servant-Maid. 12 mo, 1682-3.

6. A Choice Collection of Select Remedies. . . . Together with excellent

Directions for Cooking, and also for Preserving and Conserving. By G.
Hartman [a Chemist]. 8vo, 1684.

7. A Treatise of Cleanness in Meats and Drinks, of the Preparation of

Food, etc. By Thomas Tryon. 4to, 1682.

8. The Genteel Housekeeper’s Pastime; or, The mode of Carving at the

Table represented in a Pack of Playing Cards. 8vo, 1693.

9. A New Art of Brewing Beer, Ale, and other sorts of Liquors. By T.

Tryon. 12mo, 1690-91.

10. The Way to get Wealth; or, A New and Ready Way to make twenty-
three sorts of Wines, equal to that of France . . . also to make Cyder. . . .
By the same. 12mo, 1702.
 38

11. A Treatise of Foods in General. By Louis Lemery. Translated into

English. 8vo, 1704.

12. England’s Newest Way in all sorts of Cookery. By Henry Howard,

Free Cook of London. Second edition, 8vo, 1708.

13. Royal Cookery; or, the Complete Court-Cook. By Patrick Lamb, Esq.,
near 50 years Master-Cook to their late Majesties King Charles II., King
James II., King William, Mary, and to her present Majesty, Queen Anne.
8vo, 1710. Third edition, 8vo, 1726.

14. The Queen’s Royal Cookery. By J. Hall, Free Cook of London. 12mo,
1713-15.

15. Mrs. Mary Eales’ Receipts, Confectioner to her late Majesty, Queen
Anne. 8vo, 1718.

16. A Collection of three hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physic, and

Surgery. In two parts, 8vo, 1729.

17. The Complete City and Country Cook. By Charles Carter. 8vo, 1732.

18. The Complete Housewife. Seventh edition, 8vo, 1736.

19. The Complete Family Piece: A very choice Collection of Receipts.

Second edition, 8vo, 1737.

20. The Modern Cook. By Vincent La Chapelle, Cook to the Prince of

Orange. Third edition. 8vo, 1744.

21. A Treatise of all sorts of Foods. By L. Lemery. Translated by D. Hay,

M.D. 8vo, 1745.

This completes the list of books, so far as they have fallen in my way, or
been pointed out by the kindness of friends, down to the middle of the
last century.

It was probably Charles, Duke of Bolton (1698-1722), who was at one

time Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and who in the beginning of his ducal
career, at all events, resided in St. James’s Street, that possessed
successively as head-cooks John Nott and John Middleton. To each of
these artists we owe a volume of considerable pretensions, and the
“Cook’s and Confectioner’s Dictionary,” 1723, by the former, is positively
 39

a very entertaining and cyclopedic publication. Nott inscribes his book

“To all Good Housewives,” and declares that he placed an Introduction
before it merely because fashion had made it as strange for a book to
appear without one as for a man to be seen in church without a neckcloth
or a lady without a hoop-petticoat. He congratulates himself and his
readers on living in a land flowing with milk and honey, quotes the saw
about God sending meat and somebody else sending cooks, and accounts
for his omission of pigments by saying, like a gallant man, that his
countrywomen little needed such things. Nott opens with Some
Divertisements in Cookery, us’d at Festival-Times, as Twelfth-Day, etc.,
which are highly curious, and his dictionary itself presents the novelty of
being arranged, lexicon-wise, alphabetically. He seems to have been a
fairly-read and intelligent man, and cites, in the course of his work, many
celebrated names and receipts. Thus we have:— To brew ale Sir Jonas
Moore’s way; to make Dr. Butler’s purging ale; ale of health and strength,
by the Viscount St. Albans; almond butter the Cambridge way; to dress a
leg of mutton à la Dauphine; to dress mutton the Turkish way; to stew a
pike the City way. Dr. Twin’s, Dr. Blacksmith’s, and Dr. Atkin’s almond
butter; an amber pudding, according to the Lord Conway’s receipt; the
Countess of Rutland’s Banbury cake; to make Oxford cake; to make
Portugal cakes; and so on. Nott embraces every branch of his subject,
and furnishes us with bills of fare for every month of the year, terms and
rules of carving, and the manner of setting out a dessert of fruits and
sweetmeats. There is a singular process explained for making China
broth, into which an ounce of china is to enter. Many new ways had been
gradually found of utilising the materials for food, and vegetables were
growing more plentiful. The carrot was used in soups, puddings, and
tarts. Asparagus and spinach, which are wanting in all the earlier
authorities, were common, and the barberry had come into favour. We
now begin to notice more frequent mention of marmalades, blanc-
manges, creams, biscuits, and sweet cakes. There is a receipt for a
carraway cake, for a cabbage pudding, and for a chocolate tart.

The production by his Grace of Bolton’s other chef, John Middleton, is

“Five Hundred New Receipts in Cookery, Confectionary, Pastry,
Preserving, Conserving, Pickling,” and the date is 1734. Middleton
doubtless borrowed a good deal from his predecessor; but he also
appears to have made some improvements in the science. We have here
 40

the methods, to dress pikes à la sauce Robert, to make blackcaps (apples

baked in their skins); to make a Wood Street cake; to make Shrewsbury
cakes; to dress a leg of mutton like a gammon of bacon; to dress eggs à la
Augemotte; to make a dish of quaking pudding of several colours; to
make an Italian pudding, and to make an Olio. The eye seems to meet for
the first time with hasty pudding, plum-porridge (an experiment toward
the solidification of the older plum-broth), rolled beef-steaks, samphire,
hedgehog cream (so called from its shape, currants being used for the
eyes, and cut almonds for the bristles), cocks’-combs, orange, spinach
and bean tarts, custards in cups (the 1723 book talks of jellies served on
china plates), and lastly, jam — the real jam of these days, made to last,
as we are told, the whole year. There is an excellent prescription for
making elderberry wine, besides, in which Malaga raisins are to be
largely used. “In one year,” says our chef, “it will be as good and as
pleasant as French wine.”

Let us extract the way “to make Black-caps”:—“Take a dozen of good

pippins, cut them in halves, and take out the cores; then place them on a
right Mazarine dish with the skins on, the cut side downwards; put to
them a very little water, scrape on them some loaf sugar, put them in a
hot oven till the skins are burnt black, and your apples tender; serve
them on Plates strew’d over with sugar.”

Of these books, I select the preface to “The Complete Housewife,” by E.

Smith, 1736, because it appears to be a somewhat more ambitious
endeavour in an introductory way than the authors of such undertakings
usually hazard. From the last paragraph we collect that the writer was a
woman, and throughout she makes us aware that she was a person of
long practical experience. Indeed, as the volume comprehends a variety
of topics, including medicines, Mrs. or Miss Smith must have been
unusually observant, and have had remarkable opportunities of making
herself conversant with matters beyond the ordinary range of culinary
specialists. I propose presently to print a few samples of her
workmanship, and a list of her principal receipts in that section of the
book with which I am just now concerned. First of all, here is the Preface,
which begins, as we see, by a little piece of plagiarism from Nott’s
exordium:—

“Preface.
 41

“It being grown as unfashionable for a book now to appear in publick

without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a hoop-
petticoat, I shall conform to custom for fashion-sake, and not through
any necessity. The subject being both common and universal, needs no
arguments to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of
the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the
practice of it; since there are but few now-a-days who love not good
eating and drinking. Therefore I entirely quit those two topicks; but
having three or four pages to be filled up previous to the subject it self, I
shall employ them on a subject I think new, and not yet handled by any
of the pretenders to the art of cookery; and that is, the antiquity of it;
which if it either instruct or divert, I shall be satisfied, if you are so.

“Cookrey, confectionary, &c., like all other sciences and arts, had their
infancy, and did not arrive at a state of maturity but by slow degrees,
various experiments, and a long tract of time: for in the infant-age of the
world, when the new inhabitants contented themselves with the simple
provision of nature, viz. the vegetable diet, the fruits and production of
the teeming ground, as they succeeded one another in their several
peculiar seasons, the art of cookery was unknown; apples, nuts, and
herbs, were both meat and sauce, and mankind stood in no need of any
additional sauces, ragoes, &c., but a good appetite; which a healthful and
vigorous constitution, a clear, wholesome, odoriferous air, moderate
exercise, and an exemption from anxious cares, always supplied them
with.

“We read of no palled appetites, but such as proceeded from the decays
of nature by reason of an advanced old age; but on the contrary a craving
stomach, even upon a death-bed, as in Isaac: nor no sicknesses but those
that were both the first and the last, which proceeded from the struggles
of nature, which abhorred the dissolution of soul and body; no
physicians to prescribe for the sick, nor no apothecaries to compound
medicines for two thousand years and upwards. Food and physick were
then one and the same thing.

“But when men began to pass from a vegetable to an animal diet, and
feed on flesh, fowls, and fish, then seasonings grew necessary, both to
render it more palatable and savoury, and also to preserve that part
which was not immediately spent from stinking and corruption: and
 42

probably salt was the first seasoning discover’d; for of salt we read, Gen.
xiv.

“And this seems to be necessary, especially for those who were advanced
in age, whose palates, with their bodies, had lost their vigour as to taste,
whose digestive faculty grew weak and impotent; and thence proceeded
the use of soops and savoury messes; so that cookery then began to
become a science, though luxury had not brought it to the height of an
art. Thus we read, that Jacob made such palatable pottage, that Esau
purchased a mess of it at the extravagant price of his birthright. And
Isaac, before by his last will and testament he bequeathed his blessing to
his son Esau, required him to make some savoury meat, such as his soul
loved, i.e., such as was relishable to his blunted palate.

“So that seasonings of some sort were then in use; though whether they
were salt, savoury herbs, or roots only; or spices, the fruits of trees, such
as pepper, cloves, nutmeg; bark, as cinnamon; roots, as ginger, &c., I
shall not determine.

“As for the methods of the cookery of those times, boiling or stewing
seems to have been the principal; broiling or roasting the next; besides
which, I presume scarce any other were used for two thousand years and
more; for I remember no other in the history of Genesis.

“That Esau was the first cook, I shall not presume to assert; for Abraham
gave order to dress a fatted calf; but Esau is the first person mentioned
that made any advances beyond plain dressing, as boiling, roasting, &c.
For though we find indeed, that Rebecca his mother was accomplished
with the skill of making savoury meat as well as he, yet whether he
learned it from her, or she from him, is a question too knotty for me to
determine.

“But cookery did not long remain a simple science, or a bare piece of
housewifry or family ceconomy, but in process of time, when luxury
entered the world, it grew to an art, nay a trade; for in I Sam. viii. 13.
when the Israelites grew fashionists, and would have a king, that they
might be like the rest of their neighbours, we read of cooks,
confectioners, &c.

“This art being of universal use, and in constant practice, has been ever
since upon the improvement; and we may, I think, with good reason
 43

believe, is arrived at its greatest height and perfection, if it is not got

beyond it, even to its declension; for whatsoever new, upstart, out-of-
the-way messes some humourists have invented, such as stuffing a
roasted leg of mutton with pickled herring, and the like, are only the
sallies of a capricious appetite, and debauching rather than improving
the art itself.

“The art of cookery, &c., is indeed diversified according to the diversity of

nations or countries; and to treat of it in that latitude would fill an
unportable volume; and rather confound than improve those that would
accomplish themselves with it. I shall therefore confine what I have to
communicate within the limits of practicalness and usefulness, and so
within the compass of a manual, that shall neither burthen the hands to
hold, the eyes in reading, nor the mind in conceiving.

“What you will find in the following sheets, are directions generally for
dressing after the best, most natural, and wholesome manner, such
provisions as are the product of our own country, and in such a manner
as is most agreeable to English palates: saving that I have so far
temporized, as, since we have to our disgrace so fondly admired the
French tongue, French modes, and also French messes, to present you
now and then with such receipts of French cookery, as I think may not be
disagreeable to English palates.

“There are indeed already in the world various books that treat on this
subject, and which bear great names, as cooks to kings, princes, and
noblemen, and from which one might justly expect something more than
many, if not most of these I have read, perform, but found my self
deceived in my expectations; for many of them to us are impracticable,
others whimsical, others unpalatable, unless to depraved palates; some
unwholesome, many things copied from old authors, and recommended
without (as I am persuaded) the copiers ever having had any experience
of the palatableness, or had any regard to the wholesomness of them;
which two things ought to be the standing rules, that no pretenders to
cookery ought to deviate from. And I cannot but believe, that those
celebrated performers, notwithstanding all their professions of having
ingenuously communicated their art, industriously concealed their best
receipts from the publick.
 44

“But what I here present the world with is the product of my own
experience, and that for the space of thirty years and upwards; during
which time I have been constantly employed in fashionable and noble
families, in which the provisions ordered according to the following
directions, have had the general approbation of such as have been at
many noble entertainments.

“These receipts are all suitable to English constitutions and English

palates, wholesome, toothsome, all practicable and easy to be performed.
Here are those proper for a frugal, and also for a sumptuous table, and if
rightly observed, will prevent the spoiling of many a good dish of meat,
the waste of many good materials, the vexation that frequently attends
such mismanagements, and the curses not unfrequently bestowed on
cooks with the usual reflection, that whereas God sends good meat, the
devil sends cooks.

“As to those parts that treat of confectionary, pickles, cordials, English

wines, &c., what I have said in relation to cookery is equally applicable to
them also.

“It is true, I have not been so numerous in receipts as some who have
gone before me, but I think I have made amends in giving none but what
are approved and practicable, and fit either for a genteel or a noble
Table; and altho’ I have omitted odd and fantastical messes, yet I have
set down a considerable number of receipts.

“The treatise is divided into ten parts: cookery contains above an

hundred receipts, pickles fifty, puddings above fifty, pastry above forty,
cakes forty, creams and jellies above forty, preserving an hundred, made
wines forty, cordial waters and powders above seventy, medicines and
salves above two hundred; in all near eight hundred.

“I have likewise presented you with schemes engraven on copper-plates

for the regular disposition or placing the dishes of provision on the table
according to the best manner, both for summer and winter, first and
second courses, &c.

“As for the receipts for medicines, salves, ointments, good in several
diseases, wounds, hurts, bruises, aches, pains, &c., which amount to
above two hundred, they are generally family receipts, that have never
been made publick; excellent in their kind, and approved remedies,
 45

which have not been obtained by me without much difficulty; and of

such efficacy in distempers, &c., to which they are appropriated, that
they have cured when all other means have failed; and a few of them
which I have communicated to a friend, have procured a very handsome
livelihood.

“They are very proper for those generous, charitable, and Christian
gentlewomen that have a disposition to be serviceable to their poor
country neighbours, labouring under any of the afflicted circumstances
mentioned; who by making the medicines, and generously contributing
as occasions offer, may help the poor in their afflictions, gain their good-
will and wishes, entitle themselves to their blessings and prayers, and
also have the pleasure of seeing the good they do in this world, and have
good reason to hope for a reward (though not by way of merit) in the
world to come.

“As the whole of this collection has cost me much pains and a thirty
years’ diligent application, and I have had experience of their use and
efficacy, I hope they will be as kindly accepted, as by me they are
generously offered to the publick: and if they prove to the advantage of
many, the end will be answered that is proposed by her that is ready to
serve the publick in what she may.”
 46

PART II

Select Extracts From an Early Receipt-Book.

The earliest school of English Cookery, which had such a marked Anglo-
Norman complexion, has been familiarised to us by the publication of
Warner’s Antiquitates Culinaricae, 1791, and more recently by the
appearance of the “Noble Book of Cookery” in Mrs. Napier’s edition, not
to mention other aids in the same way, which are accessible; and it
seemed to be doing a better service, when it became a question of
selecting a few specimens of old receipts, to resort to the representative
of a type of culinary philosophy and sentiment somewhere midway
between those which have been rendered easy of reference and our own.
I have therefore given in the few following pages, in a classified shape,
some of the highly curious contents of E. Smith’s “Compleat Housewife,”
1736, which maybe securely taken to exhibit the state of knowledge in
England upon this subject in the last quarter of the seventeenth century
and first quarter of the succeeding one. In the work itself no attempt at
arrangement is offered.

I. — Meat, Poultry, Etc.

To make Dutch-beef:— Take the lean part of a buttock of beef raw; rub it
well with brown sugar all over, and let it lie in a pan or tray two or three
hours, turning it three or four times; then salt it well with common salt
and salt-petre, and let it lie a fortnight, turning it every day; then roll it
very strait in a coarse cloth, and put it in a cheese-press a day and a
night, and hang it to dry in a chimney. When you boil it, you must put it
in a cloth: when ’tis cold, it will cut out into shivers as Dutch-beef.

To dry Mutton to cut out in Shivers as Dutch-Beef:— Take a middling leg

of mutton, then take half a pound of brown sugar, and rub it hard all
over your mutton, and let it lie twenty-four hours; then take an ounce
and half of saltpetre, and mix it with a pound of common salt, and rub
that all over the mutton every other day, till ’tis all on, and let it lie nine
days longer; keep the place free from brine, then hang it up to dry three
days, then smoke it in a chimney where wood is burnt; the fire must not
 47

be too hot; a fortnight will dry it. Boil it like other hams, and when ’tis
cold, cut it out in shivers like Dutch-beef.

To stuff a Shoulder or Leg of Mutton with Oysters:— Take a little grated

bread, some beef-suet, yolks of hard eggs, three anchovies, a bit of an
onion, salt and pepper, thyme and winter-savoury, twelve oysters, some
nutmeg grated; mix all these together, and shred them very fine, and
work them up with raw eggs like a paste, and stuff your mutton under
the skin in the thickest place, or where you please, and roast it; and for
sauce take some of the oyster-liquor, some claret, two or three anchovies,
a little nutmeg, a bit of an onion, the rest of the oysters: stew all these
together, then take out the onion, and put it under the mutton.

To marinade a Leg of Lamb:— Take a leg of lamb, cut it in pieces the

bigness of a half-crown; hack them with the back of a knife; then take an
eschalot, three or four anchovies, some cloves, mace, nutmeg, all beaten;
put your meat in a dish, and strew the seasoning over it, and put it in a
stew-pan, with as much white-wine as will cover it, and let it be two
hours; then put it all together in a frying-pan, and let it be half enough;
then take it out and drain it through a colander, saving the liquor, and
put to your liquor a little pepper and salt, and half a pint of gravy; dip
your meat in yolks of eggs, and fry it brown in butter; thicken up your
sauce with yolks of eggs and butter, and pour it in the dish with your
meat: lay sweet-breads and forc’d-meat balls over your meat; dip them in
eggs, and fry them. Garnish with lemon.

A Leg of Mutton à-la-Daube:— Lard your meat with bacon through, but
slant-way; half roast it; take it off the spit, and put it in a small pot as will
boil it; two quarts of strong broth, a pint of white-wine, some vinegar,
whole spice, bay-leaves, green onions, savoury, sweet-marjoram; when
’tis stew’d enough, make sauce of some of the liquor, mushrooms, lemon
cut like dice, two or three anchovies: thicken it with browned butter.
Garnish with lemon.

To fry Cucumbers for Mutton Sauce:— You must brown some butter in a
pan, and cut the cucumbers in thin slices; drain them from the water,
then fling them into the pan, and when they are fried brown, put in a
little pepper and salt, a bit of an onion and gravy, and let them stew
together, and squeeze in some juice of lemon; shake them well, and put
them under your mutton.
 48

To make Pockets:— Cut three slices out of a leg of veal, the length of a
finger, the breadth of three fingers, the thickness of a thumb, with a
sharp penknife; give it a slit through the middle, leaving the bottom and
each side whole, the thickness of a straw; then lard the top with small
fine lards of bacon; then make a forc’d-meat of marrow, sweet-breads,
and lamb-stones just boiled, and make it up after ’tis seasoned and
beaten together with the yolks of two eggs, and put it into your pockets
as if you were filling a pincushion; then sew up the top with fine thread,
flour them, and put melted butter on them, and bake them; roast three
sweet-breads to put between, and serve them with gravy-sauce.

To make a Florendine of Veal:— Take the kidney of a loin of veal, fat and
all, and mince it very fine; then chop a few herbs, and put to it, and add a
few currants; season it with cloves, mace, nutmeg, and a little salt; and
put in some yolks of eggs, and a handful of grated bread, a pippin or two
chopt, some candied lemon-peel minced small, some sack, sugar, and
orange-flower-water. Put a sheet of puff-paste at the bottom of your
dish; put this in, and cover it with another; close it up, and when ’tis
baked, scrape sugar on it; and serve it hot.

To make a Tureiner:— Take a china pot or bowl, and fill it as follows: at

the bottom lay some fresh butter; then put in three or four beef-steaks
larded with bacon; then cut some veal-steaks from the leg; hack them,
and wash them over with the yolk of an egg, and afterwards lay it over
with forc’d-meat, and roll it up, and lay it in with young chickens,
pigeons and rabbets, some in quarters, some in halves; sweet-breads,
lamb-stones, cocks-combs, palates after they are boiled, peeled, and cut
in slices: tongues, either hogs or calves, sliced, and some larded with
bacon: whole yolks of hard eggs, pistachia-nuts peeled, forced balls,
some round, some like an olive, lemon sliced, some with the rind on,
barberries and oysters: season all these with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and
sweet-herbs, mix’d together after they are cut very small, and strew it on
every thing as you put it in your pot: then put in a quart of gravy, and
some butter on the top, and cover it close with a lid of puff-paste, pretty
thick. Eight hours will bake it.

To make Hams of Pork like Westphalia:— To two large hams, or three

small ones, take three pounds of common salt, and two pounds and half
of brown coarse sugar; mix both together, and rub it well into the hams,
 49

and let them lie seven days, turning them every day, and rub the salt in
them, when you turn them; then take four ounces of salt-petre beat
small, and mix with two handfuls of common salt, and rub that well in
your hams, and let them lie a fortnight longer: then hang them up high
in a chimney to smoke.

To make a Ragoo of Pigs-Ears:— Take a quantity of pigs-ears, and boil

them in one half wine and the other water; cut them in small pieces, then
brown a little butter, and put them in, and a pretty deal of gravy, two
anchovies, an eschalot or two, a little mustard, and some slices of lemon,
some salt, and nutmeg; stew all these together, and shake it up thick.
Garnish the dish with barberries.

To collar a Pig:— Cut off the head of your pig; then cut the body
asunder; bone it, and cut two collars off each side; then lay it in water to
take out the blood; then take sage and parsley, and shred them very
small, and mix them with pepper, salt, and nutmeg, and strew some on
every side, or collar, and roll it up, and tye it with coarse tape; so boil
them in fair water and salt, till they are very tender: put two or three
blades of mace in the kettle, and when they are enough, take them up,
and lay them in something to cool; strain out some of the liquor, and add
to it some vinegar and salt, a little white-wine, and three or four bay-
leaves; give it a boil up, and when ’tis cold put it to the collars, and keep
them for use.

A Fricasy of Double Tripe:— Cut your tripe in slices, two inches long,
and put it into a stew-pan; put to it a quarter of a pound of capers, as
much samphire shred, half a pint of strong broth, as much white-wine, a
bunch of sweet-herbs, a lemon shred small; stew all these together till ’tis
tender; then take it off the fire, and thicken up the liquor with the yolks
of three or four eggs, a little parsley boiled green and chopp’d, some
grated nutmeg and salt; shake it well together. Serve it on sippets.
Garnish with lemon.

To pot a Swan:— Bone and skin your swan, and beat the flesh in a
mortar, taking out the strings as you beat it; then take some clear fat
bacon, and beat with the swan, and when ’tis of a light flesh colour, there
is bacon enough in it; and when ’tis beaten till ’tis like dough, ’tis enough;
then season it with pepper, salt, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, all beaten
fine; mix it well with your flesh, and give it a beat or two all together;
 50

then put it in an earthen pot, with a little claret and fair water, and at the
top two pounds of fresh butter spread over it; cover it with coarse paste,
and bake it with bread; then turn it out into a dish, and squeeze it gently
to get out the moisture; then put it in a pot fit for it; and when ’tis cold,
cover it over with clarified butter, and next day paper it up. In this
manner you may do goose, duck, or beef, or hare’s flesh.

To make a Poloe:— Take a pint of rice, boil it in as much water as will

cover it; when your rice is half boiled, put in your fowl, with a small
onion, a blade or two of mace, some whole pepper, and some salt; when
’tis enough, put the fowl in the dish, and pour the rice over it.

To make a Pulpatoon of Pigeons:— Take mushrooms, palates, oysters,

sweet-breads, and fry them in butter; then put all these into a strong
gravy; give them a heat over the fire, and thicken up with an egg and a bit
of butter; then half roast six or eight pigeons, and lay them in a crust of
forc’d-meat as follows: scrape a pound of veal, and two pounds of
marrow, and beat it together in a stone mortar, after ’tis shred very fine;
then season it with salt, pepper, spice, and put in hard eggs, anchovies
and oysters; beat all together, and make the lid and sides of your pye of
it; first lay a thin crust into your pattipan, then put on your forc’d-meat;
then lay an exceeding thin crust over them; then put in your pigeons and
other ingredients, with a little butter on the top. Bake it two hours.

To keep Green Peas till Christmas:— Shell what quantity you please of
young peas; put them in the pot when the water boils; let them have four
or five warms; then first pour them into a colander, and then spread a
cloth on a table, and put them on that, and dry them well in it: have
bottles ready dry’d, and fill them to the necks, and pour over them
melted mutton-fat, and cork them down very close, that no air come to
them: set them in your cellar, and when you use them, put them into
boiling water, with a spoonful of fine sugar, and a good piece of butter:
and when they are enough, drain and butter them.

II. — Meat Pies and Puddings.

A Battalia Pye:— Take four small chickens, four squab pigeons, four
sucking rabbets; cut them in pieces, season them with savoury spice, and
lay ’em in the pye, with four sweet-breads sliced, and as many sheep’s-
tongues, two shiver’d palates, two pair of lamb-stones, twenty or thirty
 51

coxcombs, with savoury-balls and oysters. Lay on butter, and close the
pye. A lear.

To make an Olio Pye:— Make your pye ready; then take the thin collops
of the but-end of a leg of veal; as many as you think will fill your pye;
hack them with the back of a knife, and season them with pepper, salt,
cloves, and mace; wash over your collops with a bunch of feathers dipped
in eggs, and have in readiness a good hand-full of sweet-herbs shred
small; the herbs must be thyme, parsley, and spinage; and the yolks of
eight hard eggs, minced, and a few oysters parboiled and chopt; some
beef-suet shred very fine. Mix these together, and strew them over your
collops, and sprinkle a little orange-flower-water on them, and roll the
collops up very close, and lay them in your pye, strewing the seasoning
that is left over them; put butter on the top, and close up your pye; when
’tis drawn, put in gravy, and one anchovy dissolved in it, and pour it in
very hot: and you may put in artichoke-bottoms and chesnuts, if you
please, or sliced lemon, or grapes scalded, or what else is in season; but if
you will make it a right savoury pye leave them out.

To make a Lumber Pye:— Take a pound and a half of veal, parboil it, and
when ’tis cold chop it very small, with two pound of beef-suet, and some
candied orange-peel; some sweet-herbs, as thyme, sweet-marjoram, and
an handful of spinage; mince the herbs small before you put them to the
other; so chop all together, and a pippin or two; then add a handful or
two of grated bread, a pound and a half of currants, washed and dried;
some cloves, mace, nutmeg, a little salt, sugar and sack, and put to all
these as many yolks of raw eggs, and whites of two, as will make it a
moist forc’d-meat; work it with your hands into a body, and make it into
balls as big as a turkey’s egg; then having your coffin made put in your
balls. Take the marrow out of three or four bones as whole as you can: let
your marrow lie a little in water, to take out the blood and splinters; then
dry it, and dip it in yolk of eggs; season it with a little salt, nutmeg
grated, and grated bread; lay it on and between your forc’d-meat balls,
and over that sliced citron, candied orange and lemon, eryngo-roots,
preserved barberries; then lay on sliced lemon, and thin slices of butter
over all; then lid your pye, and bake it; and when ’tis drawn, have in
readiness a caudle made of white-wine and sugar, and thicken’d with
butter and eggs, and pour it hot into your pye.
 52

Very fine Hogs Puddings:— Shred four pounds of beef-suet very fine,
mix with it two pounds of fine sugar powder’d, two grated nutmegs,
some mace beat, and a little salt, and three pounds of currants wash’d
and pick’d; beat twenty-four yolks, twelve whites of eggs, with a little
sack; mix all well together, and fill your guts, being clean and steep’d in
orange-flower-water; cut your guts quarter and half long, fill them half
full; tye at each end, and again thus oooo. Boil them as others, and cut
them in balls when sent to the table.

To make Plumb-Porridge:— Take a leg and shin of beef to ten gallons of

water, boil it very tender, and when the broth is strong, strain it out,
wipe the pot, and put in the broth again; slice six penny-loaves thin,
cutting off the top and bottom; put some of the liquor to it, cover it up,
and let it stand a quarter of an hour, and then put it in your pot, let it boil
a quarter of an hour, then put in five pounds of currants, let them boil a
little, and put in five pounds of raisins, and two pounds of prunes, and
let them boil till they swell; then put in three quarters of an ounce of
mace, half an ounce of cloves, two nutmegs, all of them beat fine, and
mix it with a little liquor cold, and put them in a very little while, and
take off the pot, and put in three pounds of sugar, a little salt, a quart of
sack, and a quart of claret, the juice of two or three lemons; you may
thicken with sagoe instead of bread, if you please; pour them into
earthen pans, and keep them for use.

III. — Sweet-Puddings, Pies, Etc.

To make New-College Puddings:— Grate a penny stale loaf, and put to it

a like quantity of beef-suet finely shred, and a nutmeg grated, a little salt,
some currants, and then beat some eggs in a little sack, and some sugar,
and mix all together, and knead it as stiff as for manchet, and make it up
in the form and size of a turkey-egg, but a little flatter; then take a pound
of butter, and put it in a dish, and set the dish over a clear fire in a
chafing-dish, and rub your butter about the dish till ’tis melted; put your
puddings in, and cover the dish, but often turn your puddings, until they
are all brown alike, and when they are enough, scrape sugar over them,
and serve them up hot for a side dish.

You must let the paste lie a quarter of an hour before you make up your
puddings.
 53

To make a Spread-Eagle pudding:— Cut off the crust of three half-

penny rolls, then slice them into your pan; then set three pints of milk
over the fire, make it scalding hot, but not boil; so pour it over your
bread, and cover it close, and let it stand an hour; then put in a good
spoonful of sugar, a very little salt, a nutmeg grated, a pound of suet after
’tis shred, half a pound of currants washed and picked, four spoonfuls of
cold milk, ten eggs, but five of the whites; and when all is in, stir it, but
not till all is in; then mix it well, butter a dish; less than an hour will bake
it.

To make a Cabbage Pudding:— Take two pounds of the lean part of a leg
of veal; take of beef-suet the like quantity; chop them together, then beat
them together in a stone mortar, adding to it half a little cabbage,
scalded, and beat that with your meat; then season it with mace and
nutmeg, a little pepper and salt, some green gooseberries, grapes, or
barberries in the time of year. In the winter put in a little verjuice; then
mix all well together, with the yolks of four or five eggs well beaten; then
wrap it up in green cabbage leaves; tye a cloth over it, boil it an hour:
melt butter for sauce.

To make a Calf’s Foot Pudding:— Take two calf’s feet finely shred; then
of biskets grated, and stale mackaroons broken small, the quantity of a
penny loaf; then add a pound of beef-suet, very finely shred, half a pound
of currants, a quarter of a pound of sugar; some cloves, mace and
nutmeg, beat fine; a very little salt, some sack and orange-flower-water,
some citron and candied orange-peel; work all these well together, with
yolks of eggs; if you boil it, put it in the caul of a breast of veal, and tie it
over with a cloth; it must boil four hours. For sauce, melt butter, with a
little sack and sugar; if you bake it, put some paste in the bottom of the
dish, but none on the brim; then melt half a pound of butter, and mix
with your stuff, and put it in your dish, and stick lumps of marrow in it;
bake it three or four hours; scrape sugar over it, and serve it hot.

To make a Chestnut Pudding:— Take a dozen and half of chestnuts, put

them in a skillet of water, and set them on the fire till they will blanch;
then blanch them, and when cold, put them in cold water, then stamp
them in a mortar, with orange-flower-water and sack, till they are very
small; mix them in two quarts of cream, and eighteen yolks of eggs, the
whites of three or four; beat the eggs with sack, rose-water and sugar;
 54

put it in a dish with puff-paste; stick in some lumps of marrow or fresh

butter, and bake it.

To make a Brown-bread Pudding:— Take half a pound of brown bread,

and double the weight of it in beef-suet; a quarter of a pint of cream, the
blood of a fowl, a whole nutmeg, some cinnamon, a spoonful of sugar, six
yolks of eggs, three whites: mix it all well together, and boil it in a
wooden dish two hours. Serve it with sack and sugar, and butter melted.

To make a baked Sack Pudding:— Take a pint of cream, and turn it to a

curd with a sack; then bruise the curd very small with a spoon; then
grate in two Naples-biskets, or the inside of a stale penny-loaf, and mix it
well with the curd, and half a nutmeg grated; some fine sugar, and the
yolks of four eggs, the whites of two, beaten with two spoonfuls of sack;
then melt half a pound of fresh butter, and stir all together till the oven is
hot. Butter a dish, and put it in, and sift some sugar over it, just as ’tis
going into the oven half an hour will bake it.

To make an Orange Pudding:— Take two large Sevil oranges, and grate
off the rind, as far as they are yellow; then put your oranges in fair water,
and let them boil till they are tender; shift the water three or four times
to take out the bitterness; when they are tender, cut them open, and take
away the seeds and strings, and beat the other part in a mortar, with half
a pound of sugar, till ’tis a paste; then put in the yolks of six eggs, three
or four spoonfuls of thick cream, half a Naples-biscuit grated; mix these
together, and melt a pound of very good fresh butter, and stir it well in;
when ’tis cold, put a bit of fine puff-paste about the brim and bottom of
your dish, and put it in and bake it about three quarters of an hour.

Another sort of Orange Pudding:— Take the outside rind of three Sevil
oranges, boil them in several waters till they are tender; then pound
them in a mortar with three quarters of a pound of sugar; then blanch
and beat half a pound of almonds very fine, with rose-water to keep them
from oiling; then beat sixteen eggs, but six whites, and a pound of fresh
butter; beat all these together very well till ’tis light and hollow; then put
it in a dish, with a sheet of puff-paste at the bottom, and bake it with
tarts; scrape sugar on it, and serve it up hot.

To make a French-Barley Pudding:— Take a quart of cream, and put to

it six eggs well beaten, but three of the whites; then season it with sugar,
 55

nutmeg, a little salt, orange-flower-water, and a pound of melted butter;

then put to it six handfuls of French-barley that has been boiled tender
in milk: butter a dish, and put it in, and bake it. It must stand as long as a
venison-pasty, and it will be good.

To make a Skirret Pye:— Boil your biggest skirrets, and blanch them,
and season them with cinamon, nutmeg, and a very little ginger and
sugar. Your pye being ready, lay in your skirrets; season also the marrow
of three or four bones with cinamon, sugar, a little salt and grated bread.
Lay the marrow in your pye, and the yolks of twelve hard eggs cut in
halves, a handful of chesnuts boiled and blanched, and some candied
orange-peel in slices. Lay butter on the top, and lid your pye. Let your
caudle be white-wine, verjuice, some sack and sugar; thicken it with the
yolks of eggs, and when the pye is baked, pour it in, and serve it hot.
Scrape sugar on it.

To make a Cabbage-Lettuce Pye:— Take some of the largest and hardest

cabbage-lettuce you can get; boil them in salt and water till they are
tender; then lay them in a colander to drain dry; then have your paste
laid in your pattipan ready, and lay butter on the bottom; then lay in
your lettuce and some artichoke-bottoms, and some large pieces of
marrow, and the yolks of eight hard eggs, and some scalded sorrel; bake
it, and when it comes out of the oven, cut open the lid; and pour in a
caudle made with white-wine and sugar, and thicken with eggs; so serve
it hot.

Potato, or Lemon Cheesecakes:— Take six ounces of potatoes, four

ounces of lemon-peel four ounces of sugar, four ounces of butter; boil the
lemon-peel til tender, pare and scrape the potatoes, and boil them tender
and bruise them; beat the lemon-peel with the sugar, then beat all
together very well, and melt all together very well, and let it lie till cold:
put crust in your pattipans, and fill them little more than half full: bake
them in a quick oven half an hour, sift some double-refined sugar on
them as they go into the oven; this quantity will make a dozen small
pattipans.

To make Almond Cheesecakes:— Take a good handful or more of

almonds, blanch them in warm water, and throw them in cold; pound
them fine, and in the pounding put a little sack or orange-flower-water to
keep them from oiling; then put to your almonds the yolks of two hard
 56

eggs, and beat them together: beat the yolks of six eggs, the whites of
three, and mix with your almonds, and half a pound of butter melted,
and sugar to your taste; mix all well together, and use it as other
cheesecake stuff.

To make the light Wigs:— Take a pound and half of flour, and half a pint
of milk made warm; mix these together, and cover it up, and let it lie by
the fire half an hour; then take half a pound of sugar, and half a pound of
butter; then work these in the paste, and make it into wigs, with as little
flour as possible. Let the oven be pretty quick, and they will rise very
much.

To make very good Wigs:— Take a quarter of a peck of the finest flour,
rub into it three quarters of a pound of fresh butter, till ’tis like grated
bread, something more than half a pound of sugar, half a nutmeg, and
half a race of ginger grated; three eggs, yolks and whites beaten very well,
and put to them half a pint of thick ale-yeast, three or four spoonfuls of
sack. Make a hole in your flour, and pour in your yeast and eggs, and as
much milk just warm, as will make it into a light paste. Let it stand
before the fire to rise half an hour; then make it into a dozen and half of
wigs; wash them over with eggs just as they go into the oven; a quick
oven, and half an hour will bake them.

To make Carrot or Parsnip Puffs:— Scrape and boil your carrots or

parsnips tender; then scrape or mash them very fine, add to a pint of
pulp the crumb of a penny-loaf grated, or some stale biscuit, if you have
it, some eggs, but four whites, a nutmeg grated, some orange-flower-
water, sugar to your taste, a little sack, and mix it up with thick cream.
They must be fry’d in rendered suet, the liquor very hot when you put
them in; put in a good spoonful in a place.

A Tansy:— Boil a quart of cream or milk with a stick of cinamon,

quarter’d nutmeg, and large mace; when half cold, mix it with twenty
yolks of eggs, and ten whites; strain it, then put to it four grated biskets,
half a pound of butter, a pint of spinage-juice, and a little tansy, sack,
and orange-flower-water, sugar, and a little salt; then gather it to a body
over the fire, and pour it into your dish, being well butter’d. When it is
baked, turn it on a pye-plate; squeeze on it an orange, grate on sugar,
and garnish it with slic’d orange and a little tansy. Made in a dish; cut as
you please.
 57

To make Sack Cream:— Take the yolks of two eggs, and three spoonfuls
of fine sugar, and a quarter of a pint of sack: mix them together, and stir
them into a pint of cream; then set them over the fire till ’tis scalding hot,
but let it not boil. You may toast some thin slices of white bread, and dip
them in sack or orange-flower-water, and pour your cream over them.

To make Quince Cream:— Take quinces, scald them till they are soft;
pare them, and mash the clear part of them, and pulp it through a sieve;
take an equal weight of quince, and double-refin’d sugar beaten and
sifted, and the whites of eggs, and beat it till it is as white as snow, then
put it in dishes.

To make Pistachia Cream:— Peel your pistachias, and beat them very
fine, and boil them in cream; if ’tis not green enough, add a little juice of
spinage; thicken it with eggs, and sweeten to your taste; pour it in
basons, and set it by till ’tis cold.

To make white Jelly of Quinces:— Pare your quinces, and cut them in
halves; then core them and parboil your quinces; when they are soft, take
them up, and crush them through a strainer, but not too hard, only the
clear juice. Take the weight of the juice in fine sugar; boil the sugar
candy-height, and put in your juice, and let it scald awhile, but not boil;
and if any froth arise, scum it off, and when you take it up, have ready a
white preserved quince cut in small slices, and lay them in the bottom of
your glasses, and pour your jelly to them, it will candy on the top and
keep moist on the bottom a long time.

To make Hart’s-Horn Jelly:— Take a large gallipot, and fill it full of

hart’s-horn, and then fill it full with spring-water, and tie a double paper
over the gallipot, and set it in the baker’s oven with household bread; in
the morning take it out, and run it through a jelly-bag, and season it with
juice of lemons, and double-refin’d sugar, and the whites of eight eggs
well beaten; let it have a boil, and run it thro’ the jelly-bag again into
your jelly-glasses; put a bit of lemon-peel in the bag.

IV. — Cheeses.

The Queen’s Cheese:— Take six quarts of the best stroakings, and let
them stand till they are cold; then set two quarts of cream on the fire till
’tis ready to boil; then take it off, and boil a quart of fair water, and take
the yolks of two eggs, and one spoonful of sugar, and two spoonfuls of
 58

runnet; mingle all these together, and stir it till ’tis blood warm: when
the cheese is come, use it as other cheese; set it at night, and the third
day lay the leaves of nettles under and over it: it must be turned and
wiped, and the nettles shifted every day, and in three weeks it will be fit
to eat. This cheese is made between Michaelmas and Alhallontide.

To make a Slip-coat Cheese:— Take new milk and runnet, quite cold, and
when ’tis come, break it as little as you can in putting it into the cheese-
fat, and let it stand and whey itself for some time; then cover it, and set
about two pound weight on it, and when it will hold together, turn it out
of that cheese-fat, and keep it turning upon clean cheese-fats for two or
three days, till it has done wetting, and then lay it on sharp-pointed
dock-leaves till ’tis ripe: shift the leaves often.

To make a New-market Cheese to cut at two Years old:— Any morning

in September, take twenty quarts of new milk warm from the cow, and
colour it with marigolds: when this is done, and the milk not cold, get
ready a quart of cream, and a quart of fair water, which must be kept
stirring over the fire till ’tis scalding hot, then stir it well into the milk
and runnet, as you do other cheese; when ’tis come, lay cheese-cloths
over it, and settle it with your hands; the more hands the better; as the
whey rises, take it away, and when ’tis clean gone, put the curd into your
fat, breaking it as little as you can; then put it in the press, and press it
gently an hour; take it out again, and cut it in thin slices, and lay them
singly on a cloth, and wipe them dry; then put it in a tub, and break it
with your hands as small as you can, and mix with it a good handful of
salt, and a quart of cold cream; put it in the fat, and lay a pound weight
on it till next day; then press and order it as others.

V. — Cakes.

To make Shrewsbury Cakes:— Take to one pound of sugar, three pounds

of the finest flour, a nutmeg grated, some beaten cinamon; the sugar and
spice must be sifted into the flour, and wet it with three eggs, and as
much melted butter, as will make it of a good thickness to roll into a
paste; mould it well and roll it, and cut it into what shape you please.
Perfume them, and prick them before they go into the oven.

To make Whetstone Cakes:— Take half a pound of fine flour, and half a
pound of loaf sugar searced, a spoonful of carraway-seeds dried, the yolk
 59

of one egg, the whites of three, a little rose-water, with ambergrease

dissolved in it; mix it together, and roll it out as thin as a wafer; cut them
with a glass; lay them on flour’d paper, and bake them in a slow oven.

To make Portugal Cakes:— Take a pound and a quarter of fine flour well
dried, and break a pound of butter into the flour and rub it in, add a
pound of loaf-sugar beaten and sifted, a nutmeg grated, four perfumed
plums, or some ambergrease; mix these well together, and beat seven
eggs, but four whites, with three spoonfuls of orange-flower-water; mix
all these together, and beat them up an hour; butter your little pans, and
just as they are going into the oven, fill them half full, and searce some
fine sugar over them; little more than a quarter of an hour will bake
them. You may put a handful of currants into some of them; take them
out of the pans as soon as they are drawn, keep them dry, they will keep
good three months.

To make Jumbals:— Take the whites of three eggs, beat them well, and
take off the froth; then take a little milk, and a little flour, near a pound,
as much sugar sifted, a few carraway-seeds beaten very fine; work all
these in a very stiff paste, and make them into what form you please bake
them on white paper.

To make March-pane:— Take a pound of Jordan almonds, blanch and

beat them in a marble mortar very fine; then put to them three-quarters
of a pound of double-refin’d sugar, and beat with them a few drops of
orange-flower-water; beat all together till ’tis a very good paste, then roll
it into what shape you please; dust a little fine sugar under it as you roll
it to keep it from sticking. To ice it, searce double-refined sugar as fine as
flour, wet it with rose-water, and mix it well together, and with a brush
or bunch of feathers spread it over your march-pane: bake them in an
oven that is not too hot: put wafer-paper at the bottom, and white paper
under that, so keep them for use.

To make the Marlborough Cake:— Take eight eggs, yolks and whites,
beat and strain them, and put to them a pound of sugar beaten and
sifted; beat it three-quarters of an hour together; then put in three-
quarters of a pound of flour well dried, and two ounces of carraway-
seeds; beat it all well together, and bake it in a quick oven in broad tin-
pans.
 60

To make Wormwood Cakes:— Take one pound of double-refin’d sugar

sifted; mix it with the whites of three or four eggs well beat; into this
drop as much chymical oil of wormwood as you please. So drop them on
paper; you may have some white, and some marble, with specks of
colours, with the point of a pin; keep your colours severally in little
gallipots. For red, take a dram of cochineel, a little cream of tartar, as
much of allum; tye them up severally in little bits of fine cloth, and put
them to steep in one glass of water two or three hours. When you use the
colour, press the bags in the water, and mix some of it with a little of the
white of egg and sugar. Saffron colours yellow; and must be tyed in a
cloth, as the red, and put in water. Powder-blue, mix’d with the saffron-
water, makes a green; for blue, mix some dry powder-blue with some
water.

A French Cake to eat hot:— Take a dozen of eggs, and a quart of cream,
and as much flour as will make it into a thick batter; put to it a pound of
melted butter, half a pint of sack, one nutmeg grated, mix it well, and let
it stand three or four hours; then bake it in a quick oven, and when you
take it out, split it in two, and pour a pound of butter on it melted with
rose-water; cover it with the other half, and serve it up hot.

To make the thin Dutch Bisket:— Take five pounds of flour, and two
ounces of carraway-seeds, half a pound of sugar, and something more
than a pint of milk. Warm the milk, and put into it three-quarters of a
pound of butter; then make a hole in the middle of your flour, and put in
a full pint of good ale-yeast; then pour in the butter and milk, and make
these into a paste, and let it stand a quarter of an hour by the fire to rise;
then mould it, and roll it into cakes pretty thin; prick them all over pretty
much or they will blister; so bake them a quarter of an hour.

To make Dutch Ginger-bread:— Take four pounds of flour, and mix with
it two ounces and a half of beaten ginger; then rub in a quarter of a
pound of butter, and add to it two ounces of carraway-seeds, two ounces
of orange-peel dried and rubb’d to powder, a few coriander-seeds
bruised, two eggs: then mix all up in a stiff paste, with two pounds and a
quarter of treacle; beat it very well with a rolling-pin, and make it up into
thirty cakes; put in a candied citron; prick them with a fork: butter
papers three double, one white, and two brown; wash them over with the
 61

white of an egg; put them into an oven not too hot, for three-quarters of
an hour.

To make Cakes of Flowers:— Boil double-refin’d sugar candy-high, and

then strew in your flowers, and let them boil once up; then with your
hand lightly strew in a little double-refin’d sugar sifted; and then as
quick as may be, put it into your little pans, made of card, and pricked
full of holes at bottom. You must set the pans on a pillow, or cushion;
when they are cold, take them out.

VI. — Caudles and Possets.

To make a Posset with Ale: King-William’s Posset:— Take a quart of

cream, and mix with it a pint of ale, then beat the yolks of ten eggs, and
the whites of four; when they are well beaten, put them to the cream and
ale, sweeten it to your taste, and slice some nutmeg in it; set it over the
fire, and keep it stirring all the while, and when ’tis thick, and before it
boils, take it off, and pour it into the bason you serve it in to the table.

To make the Pope’s Posset:— Blanch and beat three-quarters of a pound

of almonds so fine, that they will spread between your fingers like butter,
put in water as you beat them to keep them from oiling; then take a pint
of sack or sherry, and sweeten it very well with double-refin’d sugar,
make it boiling hot, and at the same time put half a pint of water to your
almonds, and make them boil; then take both off the fire, and mix them
very well together with a spoon; serve it in a china dish.

To make Flummery Caudle:— Take a pint of fine oatmeal, and put to it

two quarts of fair water: let it stand all night, in the morning stir it, and
strain it into a skillet, with three or four blades of mace, and a nutmeg
quartered; set it on the fire, and keep it stirring, and let it boil a quarter
of an hour; if it is too thick, put in more water, and let it boil longer; then
add a pint of Rhenish or white-wine; three spoonfuls of orange-flower-
water, the juice of two lemons and one orange, a bit of butter, and as
much fine sugar as will sweeten it; let all these have a warm, and thicken
it with the yolks of two or three eggs. Drink it hot for a breakfast.

To make Tea Caudle:— Make a quart of strong green tea, and pour it out
into a skillet, and set it over the fire; then beat the yolks of four eggs and
mix with them a pint of white-wine, a grated nutmeg, sugar to your taste,
 62

and put all together; stir it over the fire till ’tis very hot, then drink it in
china dishes as caudle.

VII. — Conserves, Dried and Can-Died Fruits, Marmalades, Etc.

To dry Apricocks like Prunella’s:— Take a pound of Apricocks; being cut

in halves or quarters, let them boil till they be very tender in a thin syrup;
let them stand a day or two in the stove, then take them out of the syrup,
and lay them drying till they be as dry as prunello’s, then box them: you
may make your syrup red with the juice of red plums; if you please you
may pare them.

To candy Angelica:— Take angelica that is young, and cut it in fit

lengths, and boil it till it is pretty tender, keeping it close covered; then
take it up and peel off all the strings; then put it in again, and let it
simmer and scald till ’tis very green; then take it up and dry it in a cloth,
and weigh it, and to every pound of angelica take a pound of double-
refin’d sugar beaten and sifted; put your angelica in an earthen pan, and
strew the sugar over it, and let it stand two days; then boil it till it looks
very clear, put it in a colander to drain the syrup from it, and take a little
double-refin’d sugar and boil it to sugar again; then throw in your
angelica, and take it out in a little time, and put it on glass plates. It will
dry in your stove, or in an oven after pyes are drawn.

To candy Orange-Flowers:— Take half a pound of double-refin’d sugar

finely beaten, wet it with orange-flower-water, then boil it candy-high,
then put in a handful of orange-flowers, keeping it stirring, but let it not
boil, and when the sugar candies about them, take it off the fire, drop it
on a plate, and set it by till ’tis cold.

To make Conserve of Red-Roses, or any other Flowers:— Take rose-

buds, and pick them, and cut off the white part from the red, and put the
red flowers, and sift them through a sieve to take out the seeds; then
weigh them, and to every pound of flowers take two pounds and a half of
loaf-sugar, beat the flowers pretty fine in a stone mortar; then by degrees
put the sugar to them, and beat it very well till ’tis well incorporated
together; then put it into gallipots, and tye it over with paper, and over
that leather, and it will keep seven years.

To preserve white Pear Plumbs:— Take pear plumbs when they are
yellow, before they are too ripe; give them a slit in the seam, and prick
 63

them behind; make your water almost scalding hot, and put a little sugar
to it to sweeten it, and put in your plumbs and cover them close; set
them on the fire to coddle, and take them off sometimes a little, and set
them on again: take care they do not break; have in readiness as much
double-refin’d sugar boiled to a height as will cover them, and when they
are coddled pretty tender, take them out of that liquor, and put them into
your preserving-pan to your syrup, which must be but blood-warm when
your plumbs go in. Let them boil till they are clear, scum them and take
them off, and let them stand two hours; then set them on again and boil
them, and when they are thoroughly preserved, take them up and lay
them in glasses; boil your syrup till ’tis thick; and when ’tis cold, put in
your plumbs; and a month after, if your syrup grows thin, you must boil
it again, or make a fine jelly of pippins, and put on them. This way you
may do the pimordian plumb, or any white plumb, and when they are
cold, paper them up.

To preserve Mulberries whole:— Set some mulberries over the fire in a

skillet, and draw from them a pint of juice, when ’tis strained. Then take
three pounds of sugar, beaten very fine; wet the sugar with the pint of
juice; boil up your sugar, and scum it, and put in two pounds of ripe
mulberries, and let them stand in the syrup till they are thoroughly
warm; then set them on the fire, and let them boil very gently; do them
but half enough, so put them by in the syrup till next day; then boil them
gently again, and when the syrup is pretty thick, and will stand in a
round drop when ’tis cold, they are enough; so put all together in a
gallipot for use.

To preserve whole Quinces white:— Take the largest quinces of the

greenest colour, and scald them till they are pretty soft; then pare them
and core them with a scoop; then weigh your quinces against so much
double-refin’d sugar, and make a syrup of one half, and put in your
quinces, and boil them as fast as you can; then you must have in
readiness pippin liquor; let it be very strong of the pippins, and when ’tis
strained out, put in the other half of your sugar, and make it a jelly, and
when your quinces are clear, put them into the jelly, and let them
simmer a little; they will be very white; so glass them up, and when they
are cold, paper them and keep them in a stove.
 64

To make white Quince Marmalade:— Scald your quinces tender, take off
the skin and pulp them from the core very fine, and to every pound of
quince have a pound and half of double-refin’d sugar in lumps, and half
a pint of water; dip your sugar in the water and boil and scum it till ’tis a
thick syrup: then put in your quince, boil and scum it on a quick fire a
quarter of an hour, so put it in your pots.

To make red Quince Marmalade:— Pare and core a pound of quince,

beat the parings and cores and some of your worst quinces, and strain
out the juice; and to every pound of quince take ten or twelve spoonfuls
of that juice, and three-quarters of a pound of loaf-sugar; put all into
your preserving-pan, cover it close, and let it stew over a gentle fire two
hours; when ’tis of an orange-red, uncover and boil it up as fast as you
can: when of a good colour, break it as you like it, give it a boil, and pot it
up.

To make Melon Mangoes:— Take small melons, not quite ripe, cut a slip
down the side, and take out the inside very clean; beat mustard-seeds,
and shred garlick, and mix with the seeds, and put in your mangoes; put
the pieces you cut out into their places again, and tye them up, and put
them into your pot, and boil some vinegar (as much as you think will
cover them) with whole pepper, and some salt, and Jamaica pepper, and
pour in scalding hot over your mangoes, and cover them close to keep in
the steam; and so do every day for nine times together, and when they
are cold cover them with leather.

To make Conserve of Hips:— Gather the hips before they grow soft, cut
off the heads and stalks, slit them in halves, and take out all the seed and
white that is in them very clean; then put them in an earthen pan, and
stir them every day, else they will grow mouldy; let them stand till they
are soft enough to rub through a coarse hair-sieve; as the pulp comes,
take it off the sieve; they are a dry berry, and will require pains to rub it
through; then add its weight in sugar, and mix it well together without
boiling; keeping it in deep gallipots for use.

To make clear Cakes of Gooseberries:— Take your white Dutch

gooseberries when they are thorough ripe, break them with your fingers
and squeeze out all the pulp into a fine piece of cambrick or thick muslin
to run thro’ clear; then weigh the juice and sugar one against the other;
 65

then boil the juice a little while, then put in your sugar and let it dissolve,
but not boil; scum it and put it into glasses, and stove it in a warm stove.

To make white Quince Paste:— Scald the quinces tender to the core, and
pare them, and scrape the pulp clean from the core, beat it in a mortar,
and pulp it through a colander; take to a pound of pulp a pound and two
ounces of sugar, boil the sugar till ’tis candy-high; then put in your pulp,
stir it about constantly till you see it come clear from the bottom of the
preserving-pan; then take it off, and lay it on plates pretty thin: you may
cut it in what shape you please, or make quince chips of it; you must dust
it with sugar when you put it into the stove, and turn it on papers in a
sieve, and dust the other side; when they are dry, put them in boxes with
papers between. You may make red quince paste the same way as this,
only colour the quince with cochineel.

To make Syrup of any flower:— Clip your flowers, and take their weight
in sugar; then take a high gallipot, and a row of flowers, and a strewing of
sugar, till the pot is full; then put in two or three spoonfuls of the same
syrup or still’d water; tye a cloth on the top of the pot, and put a tile on
that, and set your gallipot in a kettle of water over a gentle fire, and let it
infuse till the strength is out of the flowers, which will be in four or five
hours; then strain it thro’ a flannel, and when ’tis cold bottle it up.

VIII. — Pickles.

To pickle Nasturtium-Buds:— Gather your little knobs quickly after your

blossoms are off; put them in cold water and salt for three days, shifting
them once a day; then make a pickle (but do not boil it at all) of some
white-wine, some white-wine vinegar, eschalot, horse-radish, pepper,
salt, cloves, and mace whole, and nutmeg quartered; then put in your
seeds and stop them close; they are to be eaten as capers.

To keep Quinces in Pickle:— Cut five or six quinces all to pieces, and put
them in an earthen pot or pan, with a gallon of water and two pounds of
honey; mix all these together well, and then put them in a kettle to boil
leisurely half an hour, and then strain your liquor into that earthen pot,
and when ’tis cold, wipe your quinces clean, and put them into it: they
must be covered very close, and they will keep all the year.

To pickle Ashen-keys:— Take ashen-keys as young as you can get them,

and put them in a pot with salt and water; then take green whey, when
 66

’tis hot, and pour over them; let them stand till they are cold before you
cover them, so let them stand; when you use them, boil them in fair
water; when they are tender take them out, and put them in salt and
water.

To pickle Pods of Radishes:— Gather the youngest pods, and put them in
water and salt twenty-four hours; then make a pickle for them of vinegar,
cloves, mace, whole pepper: boil this, and drain the pods from the salt
and water, and pour the liquor on them boiling hot: put to them a clove
of garlick a little bruised.

To pickle Broom-Buds:— Put your broom-buds into little linnen-bags, tie

them up, and make a pickle of bay-salt and water boiled, and strong
enough to bear an egg; put your bags in a pot, and when your pickle is
cold, put it to them; keep them close, and let them lie till they turn black;
then shift them two or three times, till they change green; then take them
out, and boil them as you have occasion for them: when they are boiled,
put them out of the bag: in vinegar they will keep a month after they are
boiled.

To pickle Purslain Stalks:— Wash your stalks, and cut them in pieces six
inches long; boil them in water and salt a dozen walms; take them up,
drain them, and when they cool, make a pickle of stale beer, white-wine
vinegar, and salt, put them in, and cover them close.

IX. — Wines.

To make strong Mead:— Take of spring-water what quantity you please,

and make it more than blood-warm, and dissolve honey in it till ’tis
strong enough to bear an egg, the breadth of a shilling; then boil it gently
near an hour, taking off the scum as it rises; then put to about nine or ten
gallons, seven or eight large blades of mace, three nutmegs quarter’d,
twenty cloves, three or four sticks of cinamon, two or three roots of
ginger, and a quarter of an ounce of Jamaica pepper; put these spices
into the kettle to the honey and water, a whole lemon, with a sprig of
sweet-briar, and a sprig of rosemary; tie the briar and rosemary together,
and when they have boiled a little while, take them out and throw them
away; but let your liquor stand on the spice in a clean earthen pot till the
next day; then strain it into a vessel that is fit for it; put the spice in a
bag, and hang it in the vessel, stop it, and at three months draw it into
 67

bottles. Be sure that ’tis fine when ’tis bottled; after ’tis bottled six weeks
’tis fit to drink.

To make small White Mead:— Take three gallons of spring-water and

make it hot, and dissolve in it three quarts of honey and a pound of loaf
sugar; and let it boil about half an hour, and scum it as long as any rises,
then pour it out into a tub, and squeeze in the juice of four lemons; put in
the rinds of but two; twenty cloves, two races of ginger, a top of sweet-
briar, and a top of rosemary. Let it stand in a tub till ’tis but blood warm;
then make a brown toast and spread it with two or three spoonfuls of ale-
yeast, put it into a vessel fit for it; let it stand four or five days, then
bottle it out.

To make Frontiniac Wine:— Take six gallons of water and twelve pounds
of white sugar, and six pounds of raisins of the sun cut small; boil these
together an hour; then take of the flowers of elder, when they are falling
and will shake off, the quantity of half a peck; put them in the liquor
when ’tis almost cold, the next day put in six spoonfuls of syrup of
lemons, and four spoonfuls of ale-yeast, and two days after put it in a
vessel that is fit for it, and when it has stood two months bottle it off.

To make English Champagne, or the fine Currant Wine:— Take to three

gallons of water nine pounds of Lisbon sugar; boil the water and sugar
half an hour, scum it clean, then have one gallon of currants pick’d, but
not bruised, pour the liquor boiling-hot over them, and when cold, work
it with half a pint of balm two days; then pour it through a flannel or
sieve, then put it into a barrel fit for it with half an ounce of ising-glass
well bruised; when it has done working, stop it close for a month, then
bottle it, and in every bottle put a very small lump of double-refin’d
sugar. This is excellent wine, and has a beautiful colour.

To make Saragossa Wine, or English Sack:— To every quart of water,

put a sprig of rue, and to every gallon a handful of fennel-roots, boil
these half an hour, then strain it out, and to every gallon of this liquor
put three pounds of honey; boil it two hours, and scum it well, and when
’tis cold pour it off and turn it into a vessel, or such cask that is fit for it;
keep it a year in the vessel, and then bottle it; ’tis a very good sack.

Mountain Wine:— Pick out the big stalks of your Malaga raisins, then
chop them very small, five gallons to every gallon of cold spring-water,
 68

let them steep a fortnight or more, squeeze out the liquor and barrel it in
a vessel fit for it; first fume the vessel with brimstone; don’t stop it up till
the hissing is over.

To make Quince Wine; — Take your quinces when they are thorough
ripe, wipe off the fur very clean; then take out the cores and bruise them
as you do apples for cyder, and press them, and to every gallon of juice
put two pounds and a half of fine sugar, stir it together till ’tis dissolved;
then put it in your cask, and when it has done working stop it close; let it
stand till March before you bottle it. You may keep it two or three years,
it will be better.

To make Plumb Wine:— Take twenty pounds of Malaga raisins, pick,

rub, and shred them, and put them into a tub; then take four gallons of
fair water and boil it an hour, and let it stand till ’tis blood-warm; then
put it to your raisins; let it stand nine or ten days, stirring it once or twice
a day, strain out your liquor, and mix with it two quarts of damson juice,
put it in a vessel, and when it has done working, stop it close; at four or
five months bottle it.

To make Birch Wine:— In March bore a hole in a tree, and put in a

faucet, and it will run two or three days together without hurting the
tree; then put in a pin to stop it, and the next year you may draw as much
from the same hole; put to every gallon of the liquor a quart of good
honey, and stir it well together, boil it an hour, scum it well, and put in a
few cloves, and a piece of lemon-peel; when ’tis almost cold, put to it so
much ale-yeast as will make it work like new ale, and when the yeast
begins to settle, put it in a runlet that will just hold it: so let it stand six
weeks or longer if you please; then bottle it, and in a month you may
drink it. It will keep a year or two. You may make it with sugar, two
pounds to a gallon, or something more, if you keep it long. This is
admirably wholesome as well as pleasant, an opener of obstructions,
good against the phthisick, and good against the spleen and scurvy, a
remedy for the stone, it will abate heat in a fever or thrush, and has been
given with good success.

To make Sage Wine:— Boil twenty-six quarts of spring-water a quarter

of an hour, and when ’tis blood-warm, put twenty-five pounds of Malaga
raisins pick’d, rubb’d and shred into it, with almost half a bushel of red
sage shred, and a porringer of ale-yeast; stir all well together, and let it
 69

stand m a tub cover’d warm six or seven days, stirring it once a day; then
strain it out, and put it in a runlet. Let it work three or four days, stop it
up; when it has stood six or seven days put in a quart or two of Malaga
sack, and when ’tis fine bottle it.

Sage Wine another way:— Take thirty pounds of Malaga raisins pick’d
clean, and shred small, and one bushel of green sage shred small, then
boil five gallons of water, let the water stand till ’tis luke-warm; then put
it in a tub to your sage and raisins; let it stand five or six days, stirring it
twice or thrice a day; then strain and press the liquor from the
ingredients, put it in a cask, and let it stand six months: then draw it
clean off into another vessel; bottle it in two days; in a month or six
weeks it will be fit to drink, but best when ’tis a year old.

To make Ebulum:— To a hogshead of strong ale, take a heap’d bushel of

elder-berries, and half a pound of juniper-berries beaten; put in all the
berries when you put in the hops, and let them boil together till the
berries brake in pieces, then work it up as you do ale; when it has done
working, add to it half a pound of ginger, half an ounce of cloves, as
much mace, an ounce of nutmegs, and as much cinamon grosly beaten,
half a pound of citron, as much eringo-root, and likewise of candied
orange-peel; let the sweetmeats be cut in pieces very thin, and put with
the spice into a bag and hang it in the vessel when you stop it up. So let it
stand till ’tis fine, then bottle it up and drink it with lumps of double-
refined sugar in the glass.

To make Cock Ale:— Take ten gallons of ale, and a large cock, the older
the better, parboil the cock, flea him, and stamp him in a stone mortar
till his bones are broken, (you must craw and gut him when you flea him)
put the cock into two quarts of sack, and put to it three pounds of raisins
of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves; put all these
into a canvas bag, and a little before you find the ale has done working,
put the ale and bag together into a vessel; in a week or nine days’ time
bottle it up, fill the bottles but just above the necks, and leave the same
time to ripen as other ale.

To make it Elder Ale:— Take ten bushels of malt to a hogshead, then put
two bushels of elder-berries pickt from the stalks into a pot or earthen
pan, and set it in a pot of boiling water till the berries swell, then strain it
 70

out and put the juice into the guile-fat, and beat it often in, and so order
it as the common way of brewing.

To clear Wine:— Take half a pound of hartshorn, and dissolve it in cyder,

if it be for cyder, or Rhenish-wine for any liquor: this is enough for a
hogshead.

To fine Wine the Lisbon way:— To every twenty gallons of wine take the
whites of ten eggs, and a small handful of salt, beat it together to a froth,
and mix it well with a quart or more of the wine, then pour it in the
vessel, and in a few days it will be fine.
 71

PART III

In 1747 appeared a thin folio volume, of which I will transcribe the title:
“The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, which far Exceeds Every
Thing of the Kind Ever yet Published . . . By a Lady. London: Printed for
the Author; and sold at Mrs. Ashburn’s, a China Shop, the Corner of
Fleet Ditch. MDCCXLVII.” The lady was no other than Mrs. Glasse, wife
of an attorney residing in Carey Street; and a very sensible lady she was,
and a very sensible and interesting book hers is, with a preface showing
that her aim was to put matters as plainly as she could, her intention
being to instruct the lower sort. “For example,” says she, “when I bid
them lard a fowl, if I should bid them lard with large lardoons they would
not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces
of Bacon, they know what I mean.” I have been greatly charmed with
Hannah Glasse’s “Art of Cookery,” 1747, and with her “Complete
Confectioner” likewise in a modified degree. The latter was partly
derived, she tells you, from the manuscript of “a very old experienced
housekeeper to a family of the first distinction.” But, nevertheless, both
are very admirable performances; and yet the compiler survives scarcely
more than in an anecdote for which I can see no authority. For she does
not say, “First catch your hare” [Footnote: Mrs. Glasse’s cookery book
was reprinted at least as late as 1824].

Mrs. Glasse represents that, before she undertook the preparation of the
volume on confectionery, there was nothing of the kind for reference and
consultation. But we had already a curious work by E. Kidder, who was,
according to his title-page, a teacher of the art which he expounded
eventually in print. The title is sufficiently descriptive: “E. Kidder’s
Receipts of Pastry and Cookery, for the use of his Scholars, who teaches
at his School in Queen Street, near St. Thomas Apostle’s, [Footnote: In
another edition his school is in St. Martin’s Le Grand] on Mondays,
Tuesdays and Wednesdays, in the afternoon. Also on Thursdays, Fridays
and Saturdays, in the afternoon, at his School next to Furnivalls Inn in
Holborn. Ladies may be taught at their own Houses.” It is a large octavo,
consisting of fifty pages of engraved text, and is embellished with a
likeness of Mr. Kidder. For all that Mrs. Glasse ignores him.
 72

I have shown how Mrs. Glasse might have almost failed to keep a place
in the public recollection, had it not been for a remark which that lady
did not make. But there is a still more singular circumstance connected
with her and her book, and it is this — that in Dr. Johnson’s day, and
possibly in her own lifetime, a story was current that the book was really
written by Dr. Hill the physician. That gentleman’s claim to the
authorship has not, of course, been established, but at a dinner at Dilly’s
the publisher’s in 1778, when Johnson, Miss Seward, and others were
present, a curious little discussion arose on the subject. Boswell thus
relates the incident and the conversation:—
“The subject of cookery having been very naturally introduced at a table, where
Johnson, who boasted of the niceness of his palate, avowed that ‘he always found a
good dinner,’ he said, ‘I could write a better book about cookery than has ever yet
been written; it should be a book upon philosophical principles. Pharmacy is now
made much more simple. Cookery may be so too. A prescription, which is now
compounded of five ingredients, had formerly fifty in it. So in Cookery. If the nature
of the ingredients is well known, much fewer will do. Then, as you cannot make bad
meat good, I would tell what is the best butcher’s meat, the best beef, the best pieces;
how to choose young fowls; the proper seasons of different vegetables; and then how
to roast, and boil, and compound.”

Dilly: —“Mrs. Glasse’s ‘Cookery,’ which is the best, was written by Dr. Hill. Half the
trade know this.”

Johnson: —“Well, Sir, that shews how much better the subject of cookery may be
treated by a philosopher. I doubt if the book be written by Dr Hill; for in Mrs.
Glasse’s Cookery, which I have looked into, saltpetre and salt-prunella are spoken of
as different substances, whereas salt-prunella is only saltpetre burnt on charcoal; and
Hill could not be ignorant of this. However, as the greatest part of such a book is
made by transcription, this mistake may have been carelessly adopted. But you shall
see what a book of cookery I could make. I shall agree with Mr. Dilly for the
copyright.”

Miss Seward: —“That would be Hercules with the distaff indeed!”

Johnson: —“No, Madam. Women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good
book of cookery.”

But the Doctor’s philosophical cookery book belongs to the voluminous

calendar of works which never passed beyond the stage of proposal; he
did not, so far as we know, ever draw out a title-page, as Coleridge was
fond of doing; and perhaps the loss is to be borne with. The Doctor
would have pitched his discourse in too high a key.
 73

Among the gastronomical enlargements of our literature in the latter half

of the last century, one of the best books in point of classification and
range is that by B. Clermont, of which the third edition made its
appearance in 1776, the first having been anonymous. Clermont states
that he had been clerk of the kitchen in some of the first families of the
kingdom, and lately to the Earl of Abingdon. But elsewhere we find that
he had lived very recently in the establishment of the Earl of
Ashburnham, for he observes in the preface: “I beg the candour of the
Public will excuse the incorrectness of the Language and Diction. My
situation in life as an actual servant to the Earl of Ashburnham at the
time of the first publication of this Book will I trust plead my Apology.”
He informs his readers on the title-page, and repeats in the preface, that
a material part of the work consists of a translation of “Les Soupers de la
Cour,” and he proceeds to say, that he does not pretend to make any
further apology for the title of supper, than that the French were, in
general, more elegant in their suppers than their dinners. In other
words, the late dinner was still called supper.

The writer had procured the French treatise from Paris for his own use,
and had found it of much service to him in his capacity as clerk of the
kitchen, and he had consequently translated it, under the persuasion that
it would prove an assistance to gentlemen, ladies, and others interested
in such matters. He specifies three antecedent publications in France, of
which his pages might be considered the essence, viz., “La Cuisine
Royale,” “Le Maître d’Hôtel Cuisinier,” and “Les Dons de Comus”; and
he expresses to some of his contemporaries, who had helped him in his
researches, his obligations in the following terms:—“As every country
produces many Articles peculiar to itself, and considering the Difference
of Climates, which either forward or retard them, I would not rely on my
own Knowledge, in regard to such Articles; I applied therefore to three
Tradesmen, all eminent in their Profession, one for Fish, one for Poultry,
and one for the productions of the Garden, viz., Mr. Humphrey Turner,
the Manager in St. James’s Market; Mr. Andrews, Poulterer in ditto; and
Mr. Adam Lawson, many years chief gardener to the Earl of
Ashburnham; in this article I was also assisted by Mr. Rice, Green-
Grocer, in St. Albans Street.” Clermont dates his remarks from Princes
Street, Cavendish Square.
 74

While Mrs. Glasse was still in the middle firmament of public favour, a
little book without the writer’s name was published as by “A Lady.” I
have not seen the first or second editions; but the third appeared in
1808. It is called “A New System of Domestic Cookery, Formed upon
Principles of Economy, and Adapted to the use of Private Families.” The
author was Helene Rundell, of whom I am unable to supply any further
particulars at present. Mrs. Rundell’s cookery book, according to the
preface, was originally intended for the private instruction of the
daughters of the authoress in their married homes, and specially
prepared with an eye to housekeepers of moderate incomes. Mrs.
Rundell did not write for professed cooks, or with any idea of
emolument; and she declared that had such a work existed when she first
set out in life it would have been a great treasure to her. The public
shared the writer’s estimate of her labours, and called for a succession of
impressions of the “New System,” till its run was checked by Miss
Acton’s still more practical collection. Mrs. Rundell is little consulted
nowadays; but time was when Mrs. Glasse and herself were the twin
stars of the culinary empyrean.

Coming down to our own times, the names most familiar to our ears are
Ude, Francatelli, and Soyer, and they are the names of foreigners
[Footnote: A fourth work before me has no clue to the author, but it is
like the others, of an alien complexion. It is called “French Domestic
Cookery, Combining Elegance and Economy. In twelve Hundred
Receipts, 12mo, 1846.” Soyer’s book appeared in the same year. In 1820,
an anonymous writer printed a Latin poem of his own composition,
called “Tabella Cibaria, a Bill of Fare, etc., etc., with Copious Notes,”
which seem more important than the text]. No English school of cookery
can be said ever to have existed in England. We have, and have always
had, ample material for making excellent dishes; but if we desire to turn
it to proper account, we have to summon men from a distance to our aid,
or to accept the probable alternative — failure. The adage, “God sends
meat, and the devil sends cooks,” must surely be of native parentage, for
of no country is it so true as of our own. Perhaps, had it not been for the
influx among us of French and Italian experts, commencing with our
Anglo-Gallic relations under the Plantagenets, and the palmy days of the
monastic orders, culinary science would not have arrived at the height of
development which it has attained in the face of great obstacles.
 75

Perchance we should not have progressed much beyond the pancake and
oatmeal period. But foreign chefs limit their efforts to those who can
afford to pay them for their services. The middle classes do not fall
within the pale of their beneficence. The poor know them not. So it
happens that even as I write, the greater part of the community not only
cannot afford professional assistance in the preparation of their meals,
which goes without saying, but from ignorance expend on their larder
twice as much as a Parisian or an Italian in the same rank of life, with a
very indifferent result. There are handbooks of instruction, it is true,
both for the middle and for the lower classes. These books are at
everybody’s command. But they are either left unread, or if read, they are
not understood. I have before me the eleventh edition of Esther Copley’s
“Cottage Comforts,” 1834; it embraces all the points which demand
attention from such as desire to render a humble home comfortable and
happy. The leaves have never been opened. I will not say, ex hoc disce
omnes; but it really appears to be the case, that these works are not
studied by those for whom they are written — not studied, at all events,
to advantage.

Dr. Kitchener augmented this department of our literary stores in 1821

with his “Cook’s Oracle,” which was very successful, and passed through
a series of editions.

In the preface to that of 1831, the editor describes the book as greatly
enlarged and improved, and claims the “rapid and steady sale which has
invariably attended each following edition” as a proof of the excellence of
the work. I merely mention this, because in Kitchener’s own preface to
the seventh issue, l2mo, 1823, he says: “This last time I have found little
to add, and little to alter.” Such is human fallibility!

The “Cook’s Oracle” was heralded by an introduction which very few

men could have written, and which represents the Doctor’s method of
letting us know that, if we fancy him an impostor, we are much mistaken.
“The following Recipes,” says he, “are not a mere marrowless collection
of shreds and patches, of cuttings and pastings — but a bonâ-fide register
of practical facts — accumulated by a perseverance, not to be subdued or
evaporated by the igniferous Terrors of a Roasting Fire in the Dog-
days:— in defiance of the odoriferous and calefaceous repellents of
Roasting, Boiling — Frying, and Broiling; — moreover, the author has
 76

submitted to a labour no preceding Cookery-Book-maker, perhaps, ever

attempted to encounter — having eaten each Receipt before he set it
down in his Book.”

What could critics say, after this? One or two large editions must have
been exhausted before they recovered their breath, and could discover
how the learned Kitchener set down the receipts which he had previously
devoured. But the language of the Preface helps to console us for the loss
of Johnson’s threatened undertaking in this direction.

Dr. Kitchener proceeded on different lines from an artist who closely

followed him in the order of publication; and the two did not probably
clash in the slightest degree. The cooking world was large enough to hold
Kitchener and the ci-devant chef to the most Christian King Louis XVI.
and the Right Honourable the Earl of Sefton, Louis Eustache Ude. Ude
was steward to the United Service Club, when he printed his “French
Cook” in 1822. A very satisfactory and amusing account of this volume
occurs in the “London Magazine” for January 1825. But whatever may be
thought of Ude nowadays, he not only exerted considerable influence on
the higher cookery of his day, but may almost be said to have been the
founder of the modern French school in England.

Ude became chef at Crockford’s Club, which was built in 1827, the year in
which his former employer, the Duke of York, died. There is a story that,
on hearing of the Duke’s illness, Ude exclaimed, “Ah, mon pauvre Duc,
how much you shall miss me where you are gone!”

About 1827, Mrs. Johnstone brought out her well-known contribution to

this section of literature under the title of “The Cook and Housewife’s
Manual,” veiling her authorship under the pseudonym of Mistress
Margaret Dods, the landlady in Scott’s tale of “St. Ronan’s Well,” which
appeared three years before (8vo, 1824).

Mrs. Johnstone imparted a novel feature to her book by investing it with

a fictitious history and origin, which, like most inventions of the kind, is
scarcely consistent with the circumstances, however it may tend to
enliven the monotony of a professional publication.

After three prefaces in the fourth edition before me (8vo, 1829) we arrive
at a heading, “Institution of the Cleikum Club,” which narrates how
Peregrine Touchwood, Esquire, sought to cure his ennui and
 77

hypochondria by studying Apician mysteries; and it concludes with the

syllabus of a series of thirteen lectures on cookery, which were to be
delivered by the said Esquire. One then enters on the undertaking itself,
which can be readily distinguished from an ordinary manual by a certain
literary tone, which certainly betrays a little the hand or influence of
Scott.

But though the present is a Scottish production, there is no narrow

specialism in its scheme. The title-page gives a London publisher as well
as an Anglo-Athenian one, and Mrs. Johnstone benevolently adapted her
labours to her countrywomen and the unworthier Southrons alike.

I imagine, however, that of all the latter-day master-cooks, Alexis Soyer

is most remembered. His “Gastronomic Regenerator,” a large and
handsome octavo volume of between 700 and 800 pages, published in
1846, lies before me. It has portraits of the compiler and his wife, and
many other illustrations, and is dedicated to a Royal Duke. It was
produced under the most influential patronage and pressure, for Soyer
was overwhelmed with engagements, and had scruples against
appearance in print. He tells us that in some library, to which he gained
access, he once found among the works of Shakespeare and
other chefs in a different department, a volume with the words
“Nineteenth Edition” upon it, and when he opened it, he saw to his great
horror “A receipt for Ox-tail Soup!” Why this revelation exercised such a
terrifying effect he proceeds to explain. It was the incongruity of a
cookery book in the temple of the Muses. But nevertheless, such is the
frailty of our nature, that he gradually, on regaining his composure, and
at such leisure intervals as he could command, prepared the
“Gastronomic Regenerator,” in which he eschewed all superfluous
ornaments of diction, and studied a simplicity of style germane to the
subject; perchance he had looked into Kitchener’s Preface. He lets us
know that he had made collections of the same kind at an earlier period
of his career, but had destroyed them, partly owing to his arduous duties
at the Reform Club, and partly to the depressing influence of the
nineteenth edition of somebody else’s cookery book — probably, by the
way, Ude’s. The present work occupied some ten months, and was
prepared amid the most stupendous interruptions from fair visitors to
the Club (15,000), dinners for the members and their friends (25,000),
dinner parties of importance (38), and the meals for the staff (60). He
 78

gives a total of 70,000 dishes; but it is not entirely clear whether these
refer to the 38 dinner parties of importance, or to the 25,000 of inferior
note, or to both. The feeling of dismay at the nineteenth edition of
somebody must have been sincere, for he winds up his preface with an
adjuration to his readers (whom, in the “Directions for Carving,” he does
not style Gentle, or Learned, or Worshipful, but HONOURABLE) not to
place his labours on the same shelf with “Paradise Lost.”

Soyer had also perhaps certain misgivings touching too close an

approximation to other chefs besides Milton and Shakespeare, for he
refers to the “profound ideas” of Locke, to which he was introduced, to
his vast discomfort, “in a most superb library in the midst of a splendid
baronial hall.” But the library of the Reform Club probably contained all
this heterogeneous learning. Does the “Gastronomic Regenerator,” out of
respect to the fastidious sentiments of its author, occupy a separate
apartment in that institution with a separate curator?

It seems only the other day to me, that Soyer took Gore Lodge, and
seemed in a fair way to make his removal from the Reform Club a
prosperous venture. But he lost his wife, and was unfortunate in other
ways, and the end was very sad indeed. “Soyez tranquille,” was the
epitaph proposed at the time by some unsentimental wagforpoor
Madame Soyer; it soon served for them both.

But nearly concurrent with Soyer’s book appeared one of humble

pretensions, yet remarkable for its lucidity and precision, Eliza Acton’s
“Modern Cookery in all its Branches reduced to an easy practice,” 16mo,
1845. I have heard this little volume highly commended by competent
judges as exactly what it professes to be; and the quantities in the
receipts are particularly reliable.

The first essay to bring into favourable notice the produce of Colonial
cattle was, so far as I can collect, a volume published in 1872, and called
“Receipts for Cooking Australian Meat, with Directions for preparing
Sauces suitable for the same.” This still remains a vexed question; but
the consumption of the meat is undoubtedly on the increase, and will
continue to be, till the population of Australasia equalises supply and
demand.
 79

PART IV

Besides the authorities for this branch of the inquiry already cited, there
are a few others, which it may assist the student to set down herewith:—

1. A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the

Royal Household (Edward III. to William and Mary). 4to, 1790.

2. The book of Nurture. By Hugh Rhodes, of the King’s Chapel. Printed

in the time of Henry VIII. by John Redman. 4to.

3. A Breviate touching the Order and Government of the House of a

Nobleman. 1605. Archaeologia, xiii.

4. Orders made by Henry, Prince of Wales, respecting his Household.

1610. Archaeologia, xiv.

5. The School of Good Manners. By William Phiston or Fiston. 8vo, 1609.

6. The School of Virtue, the Second Part. By Richard West. 12mo, 1619.

7. The School of Grace; or, A Book of Nurture. By John Hart. 12mo.

(About 1680.)

8. England’s Newest Way in all Sorts of Cookery. By Henry Howard, Free

Cook of London. 8vo, London, 1703.

9. A Collection of above three hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick and

Surgery, for the use of all Good Wives, Tender Mothers, and Careful
Nurses. By several Hands. The second edition, to which is added a
second part. 8vo, London, 1729. Fifth edition, 8vo, London, 1734.

10. The Compleat City and Country Cook. By Charles Carter. 8vo,
London, 1732.

11. The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplish’d Gentlewomans

Companion: Being a collection of upwards of Five Hundred of the most
approved Receipts in Cookery, Pastry, Confectionery, Preserving,
Pickles, Cakes, Creams, Jellies, Made Wines, Cordials. With Copper
Plates. . . . And also Bills of Fare for every month in the year. . . . By E.
Smith. Seventh edition, with very large additions, near fifty Receipts
 80

being communicated just before the author’s death. 8vo, London, 1736.
Eleventh edition. 8vo, London, 1742.

12. The Complete Family Piece: A very Choice Collection of Receipts in

. . . Cookery. Seventh Edition. 8vo, London, 1737.

13. The Modern Cook. By Vincent La Chapelle, cook to the Prince of

Orange. Third edition. 8vo, London, 1744.

14. A Treatise of all Sorts of Foods, both Animal and Vegetable, and also
of Drinkables, written originally in French by the Learned M.L. Lemery.
Translated by D. Hay, M.D. 8vo, London, 1745.

15. The Housekeeper’s Pocket-Book. By Sarah Harrison. Sixth edition, 2

vols. 12mo, London, 1755.

16. Professed Cookery. By Ann Cook. Third edition. 8vo, London (about
1760).

17. The Experienced English Housekeeper. By Elizabeth Raffald. Second

edition. 8vo, London, 1771. There were an eighth, tenth, and eleventh
editions, and two others, described as “New Editions,” between this date
and 1806. The compiler dedicates her book to “The honourable Lady
Elizabeth Warburton,” in whose service she had been. She mentions that
the volume was published by subscription, and that she had obtained
eight hundred names. In the preface Mrs. Raffald begins by observing:
“When I reflect upon the number of books already in print upon this
subject, and with what contempt they are read, I cannot but be
apprehensive that this may meet the same fate with some who will
censure before they either see it or try its value.” She concludes by saying
that she had not meddled with physical receipts, “leaving them to the
physician’s superior judgment, whose proper province they are.” The
author of the “Experienced Housekeeper” tells us that she had not only
filled that post in noble families during fifteen years, but had travelled
with her employers, and so widened her sphere of observation.

18. The Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery. By Elizabeth

Marshall. 8vo, Newcastle, 1777.

19. English Housewifery Exhibited in above 450 Receipts. By Elizabeth

Moxon. Fourth edition. 8vo, Leeds (about 1780).
 81

20. The Practice of Modern Cookery. By George Dalrymple. 8vo,

Edinburgh, 1781.

21. The Ladies’ Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table. By
Charlotte Mason. 8vo, London, 1786.

22. The Compleat Family Companion. 8vo, London, 1787 (?).

23. The Honours of the Table; or, Rules for Behaviour during Meals, with
the whole Art of Carving. . . . By the Author of “Principles of Politeness,”
etc. (Trusler). Second edition. Woodcuts by Bewick. 12mo, London, 1791.

24. The French Family Cook: being a complete system of French

Cookery. From the French. 8vo, London, 1793.

25. The British Housewife; or, The Cook’s, Housekeeper’s, and

Gardener’s Companion. By Martha Bradley. 8vo.

26. Cookery and Pastry. By Mrs. Macivey. New edition, 12mo,

Edinburgh, 1800.

27. The London Art of Cookery. By John Farley. Fourth edition. 8vo,
London, 1807.

28. The School of Good Living; or, A Literary and Historical Essay on the
European Kitchen, beginning with Cadmus, the Cook and King, and
concluding with the Union of Cookery and Chymistry. 12 mo, London,
1804.

29. Culina Famulatur Medicina. Receipts in Modern Cookery, with a

Medical Commentary by Ignotus, and revised by A. Hunter, M.D.,
F.A.S.L. and E. Fourth edition, 12mo, York, 1806.

30. The Universal Cook. By Francis Collingwood and T. Woollams.

Fourth edition. 8vo, London, 1806.

31. A Complete System of Cookery. By John Simpson, Cook. 8vo,

London, 1806. Again, 8vo, London, 1816.

32. Simpson’s Cookery Improved and Modernised. By H.W. Brand. 8vo,

London, 1834.

33. The Imperial and Royal Cook. By Frederick Nutt, Esquire, Author of
the “Complete Confectioner.” 8vo, London, 1809.
 82

34. The Housekeeper’s Domestic Library. By Charles Millington. 8vo,

London, 1810.

35. The Housekeeper’s Instructor; or, Universal Family Book. By W.A.

Henderson. Seventeenth edition. By S.C. Schrubbelie, Cook to the
Albany, London. 8vo, London, 1811.

36. The Art of Preserving all kinds of animal and vegetable Substances
for several years. By M. Appert. Translated from the French. Second
edition. 8vo, London, 1812. With a folding Plate.

37. Domestic Economy and Cookery, for Rich and Poor. By a Lady. 8vo,
London, 1827. In the preface the author apprises us that a long residence
abroad had enabled her to become a mistress of the details of foreign
European cookery; but she adds: “The mulakatanies and curries of India;
the sweet pillaus, yahourt, and cold soups of Persia; the cubbubs, sweet
yaughs and sherbets of Egypt; the cold soups and mixed meats of Russia,
the cuscussous and honeyed paste of Africa, have been inserted with the
view of introducing a less expensive and more wholesome and a more
delicate mode of cookery.”

38. Apician Morsels; or, Tales of the Table, Kitchen, and Larder. By Dick
Humelbergius Secundus. 8vo, London, 1834.

39. Cottage Economy and Cookery. 8vo, London, 1844.[Footnote:

Reprinted from the Journal of the Agricultural Society, 1843, vol. iii, part
I].
 83

DIET OF THE YEOMAN AND THE POOR

The staple food among the lower orders in Anglo-Saxon and the
immediately succeeding times was doubtless bread, butter, and cheese,
the aliment which goes so far even yet to support our rural population,
with vegetables and fruit, and occasional allowances of salted bacon and
pancakes, beef, or fish. The meat was usually boiled in a kettle
suspended on a tripod [Footnote: The tripod is still employed in many
parts of the country for a similar purpose] over a wood-fire, such as is
used only now, in an improved shape, for fish and soup.

The kettle which is mentioned, as we observe, in the tale of “Tom

Thumb,” was the universal vessel for boiling purposes [Footnote: An
inverted kettle was the earliest type of the diving-bell], and the bacon-
house (or larder), so called from the preponderance of that sort of store
over the rest, was the warehouse for the winter stock of provisions
[Footnote: What is called in some places the keeping-room also
accommodated flitches on the walls, and hams ranged along the beams
overhead; and it served at the same time for a best parlour]. The
fondness for condiments, especially garlic and pepper, among the higher
orders, possibly served to render the coarser nourishment of the poor
more savoury and flavorous. “It is interesting to remark,” says Mr.
Wright [Footnote: “Domestic Manners and Sentiments,” 1862, p. 91],
“that the articles just mentioned (bread, butter, and cheese) have
preserved their Anglo-Saxon names to the present time, while all kinds
of meat — beef, veal, mutton, pork, even bacon — have retained only the
names given to them by the Normans; which seems to imply that flesh-
meat was not in general use for food among the lower classes of society.”

In Malory’s compilation on the adventures of King Arthur and his

knights, contemporary with the “Book of St. Alban’s,” we are expressly
informed in the sixth chapter, how the King made a great feast at
Caerleon in Wales; but we are left in ignorance of its character. The chief
importance of details in this case would have been the excessive
probability that Malory would have described an entertainment
consonant with the usage of his own day, although at no period of early
 84

history was there ever so large an assemblage of guests at one time as

met, according to the fable, to do honour to Arthur.

In the tenth century Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric, the boy is made to

say that he is too young to eat meat, but subsists on cabbages, eggs, fish,
cheese, butter, beans, and other things, according to circumstances; so
that a vegetable diet was perhaps commoner in those days even among
the middle classes than at present. This youth, when he is asked what he
drinks, replies, water, or ale if he can get it. The dish so deftly
constructed by King Arthur, according to one of his numerous
biographers, exhibited that wedlock of fruit with animal matter — fat and
plums — which we post-Arthurians eye with a certain fastidious
repugnance, but which, notwithstanding, lingered on to the Elizabethan
or Jacobaean era — nay, did not make the gorge of our grandsires turn
rebellious. It survives among ourselves only in the modified shape of
such accessories as currant jelly and apple sauce.

But the nursery rhyme about Arthur and the bag-pudding of barley meal
with raisins and meat has a documentary worth for us beyond the
shadowy recital of the banquet at Caerleon, for, mutato nomine, it is the
description of a favourite article of popular diet in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. The narrative of Mrs. Thumb and her pudding is
more circumstantial than that of King Alfred and the housewife; and if
the tradition is worthless, it serves us so far, that it faithfully portrays a
favourite item of rustic consumption in old times. We are told that the
pudding was made in a bowl, and that it was chiefly composed of the
flesh and blood of a newly-killed hog, laid in batter; and then, when all
was ready, the bag with all its savoury burden was put into a kettle.

As we are already on the threshold of legend and myth, we may linger

there a moment to recall to memory the resemblance between the
description of this piece of handiwork and that ascribed to good King
Arthur, who lived in days when monarchs were their own chefs, for the
Arthurian dish was also prepared in a bag, and consisted, according to
the ditty, of barley-meal and fat. Soberly speaking, the two accounts
belong, maybe, to something like the same epoch in the annals of
gastronomy; and a large pudding was, for a vast length of time, no doubt,
a prevailing piece de résistance in all frugal British households. It was
the culinary forefather of toad-in-the-hole, hot-pot, Irish stew, and of
 85

that devil-dreaded Cornish pasty. The Elizabethan transmitters of these

two Apician nuggets possibly antedated the popular institution of the
bag-pudding; but the ancientest gastronomical records testify to the
happy introduction of the frying-pan about the era when we were under
Alfred’s fatherly sway. It may have even preceded the grill, just as the
fork lagged behind the spoon, from which it is a seeming evolution. That
no reader may doubt the fact, that Tom’s mother made the pudding, and
that Tom held the candle, we refer to the old edition of this choice piece
of chapman’s ware, where an accurate drawing of Mrs. Thumb, and the
board, and the bowl, and Tom with the candle, may be inspected.
The prima stamina of the modern fruit-pudding really appear to be
found in the ancient bag-pudding, of which Tom Thumb had such
excellent reason to be acquainted with the contents. The mode of
construction was similar, and both were boiled in a cloth. The material
and subsidiary treatment of course differed; but it is curious that no
other country possesses either the tart or the pudding, as we understand
them, and as the latter has perhaps been developed from the dish, of the
making of which Tom Thumb was an eye-witness to his sorrow, so the
covered fruit tart may not improbably be an outgrowth from the old
coffin pasty of venison or game, with the superaddition of a dish for the
safe custody of the juice.

Another rather prominent factor in the diet of the poor classes, not only
in Scotland but in the North of England, was oatmeal variously prepared.
One very favourable and palatable way was by grinding the meal a
second time as fine as flour, boiling it, and then serving it with hot milk
or treacle. There is something in the nature of this food so peculiarly
satisfying and supporting, that it seems to have been destined to become
the staple nourishment of a poor population in a cold and bracing
climate. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries unquestionably saw a
great advance in the mystery of cookery and in the diversity of dishes,
and the author of “Piers of Fulham” complains, that men were no longer
satisfied with brawn and powdered beef, which he terms “store of
house,” but would have venison, wild fowl, and heronshaw; and men of
simple estate, says he, will have partridges and plovers, when lords lack.
He adds quaintly:

“A mallard of the dunghill is good enough for me,

 86

With pleasant pickle, or it is else poison. pardy.”

We have for our purpose a very serviceable relic of the old time, called “A
Merry Jest, how the Ploughman learned his Paternoster.” The scene
purports to be laid in France, and the general outline may have been
taken from the French; but it is substantially English, with allusions to
Kent, Robin Hood, and so forth, and it certainly illustrates the theme
upon which we are. This ploughman was in fact a farmer or
husbandman, and the account of his dwelling and garden-stuff is very
interesting. We are told that his hall-roof was full of bacon-flitches, and
his store-room of eggs, butter, and cheese. He had plenty of malt to make
good ale —

“And Martlemas beef to him was not dainty;

Onions and Garlic had he enough,

And good cream, and milk of the cow.”

But in “Vox Populi Vox Dei,” written about 1547, and therefore
apparently not from the pen of Skelton, who died in 1529, it is said that
the price of an ox had risen to four pounds, and a sheep without the wool
to twelve shillings and upwards, so that the poor man could seldom
afford to have meat at his table. This evil the writer ascribes to the
exactions of the landlord and the lawyer. The former charged too highly
for his pastures, and the latter probably advanced money on terms. The
old poem depicts in sad colours the condition of the yeoman at the same
period, that had had once plenty of cows and cream, butter, eggs, cheese,
and honey; all which had gone to enrich upstarts who throve by casting-
counters and their pens. The story of the “King and a poor Northern
Man,” 1640, also turns upon the tyranny of the lawyers over ignorant
clients.

The “Serving-man’s Comfort,” 1598, draws a somewhat gloomy picture

of the times. The prices of all provisions, among other points, had trebled
since the good old days, when his father and grandfather kept house.
Then people could buy an ox for 20s., a sheep for 3s., a calf for 2s., a
goose for 6d., a capon for 4d., a hen for 2d., a pig for the same, and all
other household provisions at a like rate. The reason given by the farmer
was that the landlords had raised their rent. Let them have the land on
 87

the old terms, and the former prices would pay. This plea and demand
have come back home to us in 1886.

The tradition is, that when Queen Elizabeth received the intelligence of
the defeat of the Armada, she was dining off a goose — doubtless about
eleven o’clock in the morning. It was an anxious moment, and perhaps
her majesty for the moment had thrown ceremony somewhat aside, and
was “keeping secret house.”

The author of the “Serving-man’s Comfort,” 1598, also laments the decay
of hospitality. “Where,” he inquires “are the great chines of stalled beef,
the great, black jacks of double beer, the long hall-tables fully furnished
with good victuals?” But he seems to have been a stickler for the solid
fare most in vogue, according to his complaint, formerly; and he
represents to us that in lieu of it one had to put up with goose-giblets,
pigs’ pettitoes, and so many other boiled meats, forced meats, and made
dishes. Things were hardly so very bad, however, if, as he states
previously, the curtailment of the expenditure on the table still left, as a
medium repast, two or three dishes, with fruit and cheese after. The
black jack here mentioned was not discarded till comparatively modern
days. Nares, who published his Glossary in 1822, states that he recollects
them in use.

“A meal’s meat twice a week, worth a groat,” is mentioned as the farm

servant’s portion in “Civil and Uncivil Life,” 1579. In “A Piece of Friar
Bacon’s Brasen-heads Prophesie,” a unique poem, 1604, we read that at
that time a cheesecake and a pie were held “good country meat.” The
author adds:

“Ale and Spice, and Curdes and Creame,

Would make a Scholler make a Theame.”

Breton, in his “Fantasticks,” 1626, observes: “Milk, Butter and Cheese

are the labourers dyet; and a pot of good Beer quickens his spirits.”

Norfolk dumplings were celebrated in John Day the playwright’s time.

He has put into the mouth of his east-country yeoman’s son, Tom
Strowd, in “The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green,” written long before it
was printed in 1659, the following:—“As God mend me, and ere thou
com’st into Norfolk, I’ll give thee as good a dish of Norfolk dumplings as
 88

ere thou laydst thy lips to;” and in another passage of the same drama,
where Swash’s shirt has been stolen, while he is in bed, he describes
himself “as naked as your Norfolk dumplin.” In the play just quoted, Old
Strowd, a Norfolk yeoman, speaks of his contentment with good beef,
Norfolk bread, and country home-brewed drink; and in the “City
Madam,” 1658, Holdfast tells us that before his master got an estate, “his
family fed on roots and livers, and necks of beef on Sundays.” I cite these
as traits of the kind of table kept by the lower grades of English society in
the seventeenth century.
 89

MEATS AND DRINKS

Slender: You are afraid, if you see the bear loose, are you not?

Anne: Aye, indeed, Sir

Slender: That's meat and drink to me, now.

— Merry Wives of Windsor, i, 1.

The manufacture of wine and of fruit preserves, and many of the

processes of cookery, could have scarcely been accomplished without a
large and constant supply of sugar.

The exact date of the first introduction of the latter into England
continues to be a matter of uncertainty. It was clearly very scarce, and
doubtless equally dear, when, in 1226, Henry III. asked the Mayor of
Winchester to procure him three pounds of Alexandria sugar, if so much
could be got, and also some rose and violet-coloured sugar; nor had it
apparently grown much more plentiful when the same prince ordered
the sheriffs of London to send him four loaves of sugar to Woodstock.
But it soon made its way into the English homes, and before the end of
the thirteenth century it could be procured even in remote provincial
towns. It was sold either by the loaf or the pound. It was still exorbitantly
high in price, varying from eighteen pence to three shillings a pound of
coeval currency; and it was retailed by the spice-dealers.

In Russell’s “Book of Nurture,” composed about 1450, it occurs as an

ingredient in hippocras; and one collects from a letter sent by Sir Edward
Wotton to Lord Cobham from Calais in 1546, that at that time the
quantities imported were larger, and the price reduced; for Wotton
advises his correspondent of a consignment of five-and-twenty loaves at
six shillings the loaf. One loaf was equal to ten pounds; this brought the
commodity down to eight pence a pound of fifteenth century money.

The sugar of Cyprus was also highly esteemed; that of Bezi, in the Straits
of Sunda, was the most plentiful; but the West Indian produce, as well as
that of Mauritius, Madeira, and other cane-growing countries, was
unknown.
 90

Of bread, the fifteenth century had several descriptions in use: pain-

main or bread of very fine flour, wheat-bread, barley-meal bread, bran-
bread, bean-bread, pease-bread, oat-bread or oat-cakes, hard-bread, and
unleavened bread. The poor often used a mixture of rye, lentils, and
oatmeal, varied according to the season and district.

The author of “The Serving-man’s Comfort,” 1598, however, seems to say

that it was counted by the poorer sort at that time a hardship only to be
tolerated in a dear year to mix beans and peas with their corn, and he
adds: “So must I yield you a loaf of coarse cockle, having no acquaintance
with coin to buy corn.”

In a Nominale of this period mention is made of “oblys,” or small round

loaves, perhaps like the old-fashioned “turnover”; and we come across
the explicit phrase, a loaf of bread, for the first time, a pictorial
vocabulary of the period even furnishing us with a representation of its
usual form.

Nor were the good folks of those days without their simnels, cracknels,
and other sorts of cakes for the table, among which in the wastel we
recognise the equivalent of the modern French gâteau.

Besides march-pain or pain-main, and pain-puff, two sorts baked on

special occasions, and rather entering into the class of confectionery, our
better-to-do ancestors usually employed three descriptions of bread:
manchete for the master’s table, made of fine boulted flour; chete, of
unboulted flour, but not mixed with any coarser ingredient; and brown-
bread, composed of flour and rye meal, and known as maslin (mystelon).

A bushel of wheat, in a romance of the thirteenth century, is estimated to

produce twenty loaves; but the statement is obviously to be taken with
allowance. The manchet was sometimes thought to be sufficient without
butter, as we now eat a scone. In the “Conceits of Old Hobson,” 1607, the
worthy haberdasher of the Poultry gives some friends what is facetiously
described as a “light” banquet — a cup of wine and a manchet of bread
on a trencher for each guest, in an apartment illuminated with five
hundred candles.

There is no pictorial record of the mode in which the early baker worked
here, analogous to that which Lacroix supplies of his sixteenth
century confrère. The latter is brought vividly enough before us in a copy
 91

of one of Jost Amman’s engravings, and we perceive the bakery and its
tenants: one (apparently a female) kneading the dough in a trough at the
farther end, a second by a roasting fire, with a long ladle or peel in his
hand, putting the loaf on the oven, and a third, who is a woman, leaving
the place with two baskets of bread, one on her head and one on her arm;
the baker himself is almost naked, like the operatives in a modern iron
furnace. The artist has skilfully realised the oppressive and enervating
atmosphere; and it was till lately quite usual to see in the side streets of
Paris in the early morning the boulanger at work precisely in the same
informal costume. So tenacious is usage, and so unchanging many of the
conditions of life.

The Anglo-Norman used butter where his Italian contemporary used oil.
But it is doubtful whether before the Conquest our ancestors were
commonly acquainted with butter.

The early cook understood the art of glazing with yolk of egg, and termed
it endoring, and not less well that of presenting dishes under names
calculated to mislead the intended partaker, as where we find a receipt
given for pome de oringe, which turns out to be a preparation of liver of
pork with herbs and condiments, served up in the form of glazed force-
meat balls.

Venison was salted in troughs. In the tale of “The King and the Hermit,”
the latter exhibits to his unknown visitor his stock of preserved venison
from the deer, which he had shot in the forest.

The mushroom, of which so many varieties are at present recognised by

botanists, seems, from the testimony of an Italian, Giacomo Castelvetri,
who was in London in 1614, and to whom I have already referred, to have
been scarcely known here at that time. I cannot say, of course, how far
Castelvetri may have prosecuted his inquiries, though he certainly leaves
the impression of having been intelligently observant; or whether he
includes in this observation the edible toadstools; but even now much
unreasonable prejudice exists as to the latter, and very limited use is
made of any but two or three familiar sorts of the mushroom itself. It is a
pity that this misconception should not be dissipated.

Caviary had been brought into England, probably from Russia, at the
commencement of the seventeenth century, perhaps sooner. In 1618,
 92

“The Court and Country,” by Breton, seems to represent it as an article of

diet which was little known, and not much relished; for a great lady had
sent the writer’s father a little barrel of it, and it was no sooner opened
than it was fastened down again, to be returned to the donor with a
respectful message that her servant had black soap enough already.

In the time of James I. the ancient bill of fare had been shorn of many of
its coarser features, so far as fish was concerned; and the author of “The
Court and Country” tells a story to shew that porpoise-pie was a dish
which not even a dog would eat.

The times had indeed changed, since a King and a Cardinal-archbishop

judged this warm-blooded sea-dweller a fit dish for the most select
company.

It is not a despicable or very ascetic regimen which Stevenson lays before

us under April in his reproduction of Breton’s “Fantasticks,” 1626, under
the title of the “Twelve Months,” 1661:—“The wholesome dyet that
breeds good sanguine juyce, such as pullets, capons, sucking veal, beef
not above three years Old, a draught of morning milk fasting from the
cow; grapes, raysons, and figs be good before meat; Rice with Almond
Milk, birds of the Field, Peasants and Partridges, and fishes of stony
rivers, Hen eggs potcht, and such like.”

Under May he furnishes us with a second and not less

appetising menu:—

“Butter and sage are now the wholesome Breakfast, but fresh cheese and
cream are meat for a dainty mouth; the early Peascods and Strawberries
want no price with great Bellies; but the Chicken and the Duck are fatted
for the Market; the sucking Rabbet is frequently taken in the Nest, and
many a Gosling never lives to be a Goose.”

Even so late as the succeeding reign, Breton speaks of the good cheer at
Christmas, and of the cook, if he lacks not wit, sweetly licking his fingers.

The storage of liquids became a difficult problem where, as among our

ancestors, glazed pottery was long unknown; and more especially with
regard to the supply of water in dry seasons. But so far as milk was
concerned, the daily yield probably seldom exceeded the consumption;
and among the inhabitants further north and east, who, as Caesar says,
 93

partook also of flesh, and did not sow grain — in other words, were less
vegetarian in their habits from the more exhausting nature of the climate
— the consideration might be less urgent. It is open to doubt if, even in
those primitive times, the supply of a national want lagged far behind the
demand.

The list of wines which the King of Hungary proposed to have at the
wedding of his daughter, in “The Squire of Low Degree,” is worth
consulting. Harrison, in his “Description of England,” 1586, speaks of
thirty different kinds of superior vintages and fifty-six of commoner or
weaker kinds. But the same wine was perhaps known under more than
one name.

Romney or Rumney, a Hungarian growth, Malmsey from the

Peloponnesus, and Hippocras were favourites, and the last-named was
kept as late as the last century in the buttery of St. John’s College,
Cambridge, for use during the Christmas festivities. But France, Spain,
Greece, almost all countries, contributed to furnish the ancient wine-
cellar, and gratify the variety of taste among connoisseurs; and for such
as had not the means to purchase foreign productions, the juice of the
English grape, either alone or mingled with honey and spice, furnished a
not unpalatable and not very potent stimulant. As claret and hock with
us, so anciently Bastard and Piment were understood in a generic sense,
the former for any mixed wine, the latter for one seasoned with spice.

In “Colin Blobol’s Testament,” a whimsical production of the fifteenth

century, Tent and Valencia wines are mentioned, with wine of
Languedoc and Orleans. But perhaps it will be best to cite the passage:—

“I trow there shall be an honest fellowship, save first shall they of ale
have new backbones. With strong ale brewed in vats and in tuns; Ping,
Drangollie, and the Draget fine, Mead, Mattebru, and the Metheling. Red
wine, the claret and the white, with Tent and Alicant, in whom I delight.
Wine of Languedoc and of Orleans thereto: Single beer, and other that is
double: Spruce beer, and the beer of Hamburgh: Malmsey, Tires, and
Romany.”

But some of the varieties are hidden under obscure names. We recognise
Muscadel, Rhine wine, Bastard, Hippocras, however. On the 10th of
December, 1497, Piers Barber received six shillings and eight pence,
 94

according to the “Privy Purse Expences of Henry VII.,” “for spice for
ypocras.”

Metheglin and beer of some kind appear to be the most ancient liquors of
which there are any vestiges among the Britons. Ferguson, in his Essay
“On the Formation of the Palate,” states that they are described by a
Greek traveller, who visited the south of Britain in the fourth century
B.C. This informant describes metheglin as composed of wheat and
honey (of course mixed with water), and the beer as being of sufficient
strength to injure the nerves and cause head-ache.

Worlidge, in his “Vinetum Britannicum,” 1676, gives us receipts for

metheglin and birch wine. Breton, in his “Fantasticks,” 1626, under
January, recommends a draught of ale and wormwood wine mixed in a
morning to comfort the heart, scour the maw, and fulfil other beneficial
offices.

The English beer of by-gone times underwent many vicissitudes, and it

was long before our ancestors conquered their dislike to the bitter hop,
after having been accustomed to a thick, sweet liquor of which the
modern Kentish ale is in some measure a survival. Beer was made from a
variety of grain; oats were most commonly employed. In France, they
resorted even to vetches, lentils, rye, and darnel. But as a rule it was a
poor, thin drink which resulted from the operation, and the monks of
Glastonbury deemed themselves fortunate in being allowed by their
abbot to put a load of oats into the vat to improve the quality of the
beverage; which may account for Peter of Blois characterising the ale in
use at Court in his day (he died about the end of the twelfth century) as
potent — it was by contrast so. The first assize of ale seems not to have
been enacted till the reign of Henry III.

From a glossary of the fourteenth century, inserted in “Reliquse

Antique,” 1841, it appears that whey was then used as a drink; it occurs
there as “cerum, i, quidam liquor, whey.”
 95

THE KITCHEN

In direct connection with cookery as with horticulture, are the utensils

and appliances which were at the command of those who had to do with
these matters in days of yore; and in both cases an inquirer finds that he
has to turn from the vain search for actual specimens belonging to
remoter antiquity to casual representations or descriptions in Mss. and
printed books. Our own museums appear to be very weakly furnished
with examples of the vessels and implements in common use for culinary
purposes in ancient times, and, judging from the comparatively limited
information which we get upon this subject from the pages of Lacroix,
the paucity of material is not confined to ourselves. The destruction and
disappearance of such humble monuments of the civilisation of the past
are easily explained; and the survival of a slender salvage is to be treated
as a circumstance not less remarkable than fortunate.

It seems that the practice was to cut up, if not to slaughter, the animals
used for food in the kitchen, and to prepare the whole carcase, some
parts in one way and some in another. We incidentally collect from an
ancient tale that the hearts of swine were much prized as dainties.

Besides a general notion of the appointments of the cooking department,

we are enabled to form some conception of the aspect of the early
kitchen itself from extant representations in the “Archaeological Album,”
the “Penny Magazine” for 1836, and Lacroix [Footnote: “Moeurs, Usages
et Costumes au Moyen Age,” 1872, pp 166, 170, 177]. The last-named
authority furnishes us with two interesting sixteenth century interiors
from Jost Amman, and (from the same source) a portraiture of the cook
of that period.

The costume of the subject is not only exhibited, doubtless with the
fidelity characteristic of the artist, but is quite equally applicable to
France, if not to our own country, and likewise to a much earlier date.
The evidences of the same class supplied by the “Archaeological Album,”
1845, are drawn from the Ms. in the British Museum, formerly belonging
to the Abbey of St. Albans. They consist of two illustrations — one of
Master Robert, cook to the abbey, as elsewhere noticed, accompanied by
 96

his wife — unique relic of its kind; the other a view of a small apartment
with dressers and shelves, and with plates and accessories hung round,
in which a cook, perhaps the identical Master Robert aforesaid, is
plucking a bird. The fireplace is in the background, and the iron vessel
which is to receive the fowl, or whatever it may really be, is suspended
over the flame by a long chain. The perspective is rather faulty, and the
details are not very copious; but for so early a period as the thirteenth or
early part of the following century its value is undeniable.

Master Robert plucking a bird

 97

The “Penny Magazine” presents us with a remarkable exterior, that of

the venerable kitchen of Stanton-Harcourt, near Oxford, twenty-nine
feet square and sixty feet in height. There are two large fireplaces, facing
each other, but no chimney, the smoke issuing atthe holes, each about
seven inches in diameter, which run round the roof. As Lamb said of his
Essays, that they were all Preface, so this kitchen is all chimney. It is
stated that the kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey was constructed on the
same model; and both are probably older than the reign of Henry IV. The
one to which I am more immediately referring, though, at the time
(1835) the drawing was taken, in an excellent state of preservation, had
evidently undergone repairs and structural changes.

It was at Stanton-Harcourt that Pope wrote a portion of his translation of

Homer, about 1718.

A manufactory of brass cooking utensils was established at Wandsworth

in or before Aubrey’s time by Dutchmen, who kept the art secret. Lysons
states that the place where the industry was carried on bore the name of
the “Frying Pan Houses” [Footnote: A “Environs of London,” 1st ed.,
Surrey, pp. 502-3].

In the North of England, the bake-stone, originally of the material to

which it owed its name, but at a very early date constructed of iron, with
the old appellations retained as usual, was the universal machinery for
baking, and was placed on the Branderi, an iron frame which was fixed
on the top of the fireplace, and consisted of iron bars, with a sliding or
slott bar, to shift according to the circumstances.

The tripod which held the cooking-vessel over the wood flame, among
the former inhabitants of Britain, has not been entirely effaced. It is yet
to be seen here and there in out-of-the-way corners and places; and in
India they use one constructed of clay, and differently contrived. The
most primitive pots for setting over the fire on the tripod were probably
of bronze.

The tripod seems to be substantially identical with what was known in

Nidderdale as the kail-pot. “This was formerly in common use,” says Mr.
Lucas; “a round iron pan, about ten inches deep and eighteen inches
across, with a tight-fitting, convex lid. It was provided with three legs.
 98

The kail-pot, as it was called, was used for cooking pies, and was buried
bodily in burning peat. As the lower peats became red-hot, they drew
them from underneath, and placed them on the top. The kail-pot may
still be seen on a few farms.” This was about 1870.

The writer is doubtless correct in supposing that this utensil was

originally employed for cooking kail or cabbage and other green stuff.

Three rods of iron or hard wood lashed together, with a hook for taking
the handle of the kettle, formed, no doubt, the original tripod. But
among some of the tribes of the North of Europe, and in certain Tartar,
Indian, and other communities, we see no such rudimentary substitute
for a grate, but merely two uprights and a horizontal rest, supporting a
chain; and in the illustration to the thirteenth or fourteenth century Ms.,
once part of the abbatial library at St. Albans, a nearer approach to the
modern jack is apparent in the suspension of the vessel over the flame by
a chain attached to the centre of a fireplace.

Not the tripod, therefore, but the other type must be thought to have
been the germ of the later-day apparatus, which yielded in its turn to the
Range.

The fireplace with a ring in the middle, from which is suspended the pot,
is represented in a French sculpture of the end of the fourteenth century,
where two women are seated on either side, engaged in conversation.
One holds a ladle, and the other an implement which may be meant for a
pair of bellows.

In his treatise on Kitchen Utensils, Neckam commences with naming a

table, on which the cook may cut up green stuff of various sorts, as
onions, peas, beans, lentils, and pulse; and he proceeds to enumerate the
tools and implements which are required to carry on the work: pots,
tripods for the kettle, trenchers, pestles, mortars, hatchets, hooks,
saucepans, cauldrons, pails, gridirons, knives, and so on. The head-cook
was to have a little apartment, where he could prepare condiments and
dressings; and a sink was to be provided for the viscera and other offal of
poultry. Fish was cooked in salt water or diluted wine.

Pepper and salt were freely used, and the former must have been ground
as it was wanted, for a pepper-mill is named as a requisite. Mustard we
do not encounter till the time of Johannes de Garlandia (early thirteenth
 99

century), who states that it grew in his own garden at Paris. Garlic, or
gar-leac (in the same way as the onion is called yn-leac), had established
itself as a flavouring medium. The nasturtium was also taken into service
in the tenth or eleventh century for the same purpose, and is classed with
herbs.

When the dish was ready, it was served up with green sauce, in which the
chief ingredients were sage, parsley, pepper, and oil, with a little salt.
Green geese were eaten with raisin or crab-apple sauce. Poultry was to be
well larded or basted while it was before the fire.

I may be allowed to refer the reader, for some interesting jottings

respecting the first introduction of coal into London, to “Our English
Home,” 1861. “The middle classes,” says the anonymous writer, “were
the first to appreciate its value; but the nobility, whose mansions were in
the pleasant suburbs of Holborn and the Strand, regarded it as a
nuisance.” This was about the middle of the thirteenth century. It may be
a mite contributed to our knowledge of early household economy to
mention, by the way, that in the supernatural tale of the “Smith and his
Dame” (sixteenth century) “a quarter of coal” occurs. The smith lays it on
the fire all at once; but then it was for his forge. He also poured water on
the flames, to make them, by means of his bellows, blaze more fiercely.
But the proportion of coal to wood was long probably very small. One of
the tenants of the Abbey of Peterborough, in 852, was obliged to furnish
forty loads of wood, but of coal two only.

In the time of Charles I., however, coals seem to have been usual in the
kitchen, for Breton, in this “Fantasticks,” 1626, says, under January:—
“The Maid is stirring betimes, and slipping on her Shooes and her
Petticoat, groaps for the tinder box, where after a conflict between the
steele and the stone, she begets a spark, at last the Candle lights on his
Match; then upon an old rotten foundation of broaken boards she erects
an artificiall fabrick of the black Bowels of New-Castle soyle, to which
she sets fire with as much confidence as the Romans to their Funerall
Pyles.”

Under July, in the same work, we hear of “a chafing dish of coals;” and
under September, wood and coals are mentioned together. But doubtless
the employment of the latter was far less general.
 100

In a paper read before the Royal Society, June 9, 1796, there is an

account of a saucepan discovered in the bed of the river Withain, near
Tattersall Ferry, in Lincolnshire, in 1788. It was of base metal, and was
grooved at the bottom, to allow the contents more readily to come within
reach of the fire. The writer of this narrative, which is printed in the
“Philosophical Transactions,” considered that the vessel might be of
Roman workman-ship; as he states that on the handle was stamped a
name, C. ARAT., which he interprets Caius Aratus. “It appears,” he adds,
“to have been tinned; but almost all the coating had been worn off. . . .
The art of tinning copper was understood and practised by the Romans,
although it is commonly supposed to be a modern invention.”

Neckam mentions the roasting-spit, elsewhere called the roasting-iron;

but I fail to detect skewers, though they can hardly have been wanting.
Ladles for basting and stirring were familiar. As to the spit itself, it
became a showy article of plate, when the fashion arose of serving up the
meat upon it in the hall; and the tenure by which Finchingfield in Essex
was held in capite in the reign of Edward III. — that of turning the spit at
the coronation — demonstrates that the instrument was of sufficient
standing to be taken into service as a memorial formality.

The fifteenth century vocabulary notices the salt-cellar, the spoon, the
trencher, and the table-cloth. The catalogue comprises morsus, a bit,
which shows that bit and bite are synonymous, or rather, that the latter
is the true word as still used in Scotland, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire,
from the last of which the Pilgrims carried it across the Atlantic, where it
is a current Americanism, not for one bite, but as many as you please,
which is, in fact, the modern provincial interpretation of the phrase, but
not the antique English one. The word towel was indifferently applied,
perhaps, for a cloth for use at the table or in the lavatory. Yet there was
also the manuturgium, or hand-cloth, a speciality rendered imperative
by the mediaeval fashion of eating.

In the inventory of the linen at Gilling, in Yorkshire, one of the seats of

the Fairfax family, made in 1590, occur:—“Item, napkins vj. dozen. Item,
new napkins vj. dozen.” This entry may or may not warrant a conclusion
that the family bought that quantity at a time — not a very excessive
store, considering the untidy habits of eating and the difficulty of making
new purchases at short notice.
 101

Another mark of refinement is the resort to the napron, corruptly apron,

to protect the dress during the performance of kitchen work. But the
fifteenth century was evidently growing wealthier in its articles of use
and luxury; the garden and the kitchen only kept pace with the bed-
chamber and the dining-hall, the dairy and the laundry, the stable and
the out-buildings. An extensive nomenclature was steadily growing up,
and the Latin, old French, and Saxon terms were giving way on all sides
to the English. It has been now for some time an allowed and understood
thing that in these domestic backgrounds the growth of our country and
the minuter traits of private life are to be studied with most clear and
usurious profit.

The trencher, at first of bread, then of wood, after a while of pewter, and
eventually of pottery, porcelain or china-earth, as it was called, and the
precious metals, afforded abundant scope for the fancy of the artist, even
in the remote days when the material for it came from the timber-dealer,
and sets of twelve were sometimes decorated on the face with subjects
taken from real life, and on the back with emblems of the purpose to
which they were destined.

Puttenham, whose “Art of English Poetry” lay in Ms. some years before it
was published in 1589, speaks of the posies on trenchers and banqueting
dishes. The author of “Our English Home” alludes to a very curious set,
painted in subjects and belonging to the reign of James I., which was
exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries’ rooms by Colonel Sykes.

It is to be augured that, with the progress of refinement, the meats were

served upon the table on dishes instead of trenchers, and that the latter
were reserved for use by the guests of the family. For in the “Serving-
man’s Comfort,” 1598, one reads:—“Even so the gentlemanly serving-
man, whose life and manners doth equal his birth and bringing up,
scorneth the society of these sots, or to place a dish where they give a
trencher”; and speaking of the passion of people for raising themselves
above their extraction, the writer, a little farther on, observes: “For the
yeoman’s son, as I said before, leaving gee haigh! for, Butler, some more
fair trenchers to the table! bringeth these ensuing ulcers amongst the
members of the common body.”

The employment of trenchers, which originated in the manner which I

have shown, introduced the custom of the distribution at table of the two
 102

sexes, and the fashion of placing a lady and gentleman alternately. In

former days it was frequently usual for a couple thus seated together to
eat from one trencher, more particularly if the relations between them
were of an intimate nature, or, again, if it were the master and mistress
of the establishment. Walpole relates that so late as the middle of the last
century the old Duke and Duchess of Hamilton occupied the dais at the
head of the room, and preserved the traditional manner by sharing the
same plate. It was a token of attachment and a tender recollection of
unreturnable youth.

The prejudice against the fork in England remained very steadfast actual
centuries after its first introduction; forks are particularised among the
treasures of kings, as if they had been crown jewels, in the same manner
as the iron spits, pots, and frying-pans of his Majesty Edward III.; and
even so late as the seventeeth century, Coryat, who employed one after
his visit to Italy, was nicknamed “Furcifer.” The two-pronged implement
long outlived Coryat; and it is to be seen in cutlers’ signs even down to
our day. The old dessert set, curiously enough, instead of consisting of
knives and forks in equal proportions, contained eleven knives and one
fork for ginger. Both the fork and spoon were frequently made with
handles of glass or crystal, like those of mother-of-pearl at present in
vogue.

In a tract coeval with Coryat the Fork-bearer, Breton’s “Court and

Country,” 1618, there is a passage very relevant to this part of the
theme:—“For us in the country,” says he, “when we have washed our
hands after no foul work, nor handling any unwholesome thing, we need
no little forks to make hay with our mouths, to throw our meat into
them.”

Forks, though not employed by the community, became part of the

effects of royal and great personages, and in the inventory of Charles V.
of France appear the spoon, knife, and fork. In another of the Duke of
Burgundy, sixty years later (1420), knives and other implements occur,
but no fork. The cutlery is described here as of German make.
Brathwaite, in his “Rules for the Government of the House of an Earl,”
probably written about 1617, mentions knives and spoons, but not forks.

As the fork grew out of the chopstick, the spoon was probably suggested
by the ladle, a form of implement employed alike by the baker and the
 103

cook; for the early tool which we see in the hands of the operative in the
oven more nearly resembles in the bowl a spoon than a shovel. In India
nowadays they have ladles, but not spoons. The universality of broths
and semi-liquid substances, as well as the commencement of a taste for
learned gravies, prompted a recourse to new expedients for
communicating between the platter and the mouth; and some person of
genius saw how the difficulty might be solved by adapting the ladle to
individual service. But every religion has its quota of dissent, and there
were, nay, are still, many who professed adherence to the sturdy
simplicity of their progenitors, and saw in this daring reform and the
fallow blade of the knife a certain effeminate prodigality.

It is significant of the drift of recent years toward the monograph, that,

in 1846, Mr. Westman published “The Spoon: Primitive, Egyptian,
Roman, Mediaeval and Modern,” with one hundred illustrations, in an
octavo volume.

The luxury of carving-knives was, even in the closing years of the

fifteenth century, reserved for royalty and nobility; for in the “Privy
Purse Expenses of Henry VII.,” under 1497, a pair is said to have cost £1
6s. 8d.of money of that day. Nothing is said of forks. But in the same
account, under February 1st, 1500-1, one Mistress Brent receives
12s. (and a book, which cost the king 5s. more) for a silver fork weighing
three ounces. In Newbery’s “Dives Pragmaticus,” 1563, a unique poetical
volume in the library at Althorpe, there is a catalogue of cooking utensils
which, considering its completeness, is worth quotation; the author
speaks in the character of a chapman — one forestalling Autolycus:—

“I have basins, ewers, of tin, pewter and glass.

Great vessels of copper, fine latten and brass:

Both pots, pans and kettles, such as never was.

I have platters, dishes, saucers and candle-sticks,

Chafers, lavers, towels and fine tricks:

Posnets, frying-pans, and fine puddingpricks . . .

Fine pans for milk, and trim tubs for sowse.

 104

I have ladles, scummers, andirons and spits,

Dripping-pans, pot-hooks. . . .

I have fire-pans, fire-forks, tongs, trivets, and trammels,

Roast-irons, trays, flaskets, mortars and pestles. . . . ”

And among other items he adds rollers for paste, moulds for cooks, fine
cutting knives, fine wine glasses, soap, fine salt, and candles. The list is
the next best thing to an auctioneer’s inventory of an Elizabethan
kitchen, to the fittings of Shakespeare’s, or rather of his father’s. A good
idea of the character and resources of a nobleman’s or wealthy
gentleman’s kitchen at the end of the sixteenth and commencement of
the seventeenth century may be formed from the Fairfax inventories
(1594-1624), lately edited by Mr. Peacock. I propose to annex a catalogue
of the utensils which there present themselves:—

The furnace pan for beef.

The beef kettle.
Great and small kettles.
Brass kettles, holding from sixteen to twenty gallons each.
Little kettles with bowed or carved handles.
Copper pans with ears.
Great brass pots.
Dripping-pans.
An iron peel or baking shovel.
A brazen mortar and a pestle.
Gridirons.
Iron ladles.
A laten scummer.
A grater.
A pepper mill.
A mustard-quern.
Boards.
A salt-box.
An iron range.
Iron racks.
A tin pot.
Pot hooks.
 105

A galley bawk to suspend the kettle or pot over the fire.

Spits, square and round, and various sizes.
Bearers.
Crooks.

In the larders (wet and dry) and pastry were:—

Moulding boards for pastry.

A boulting tub for meal.
A little table.
A spice cupboard.
A chest for oatmeal.
A trough.

Hanging and other shelves.

Here follows the return of pewter, brass, and other vessels belonging to
the kitchen:—

Pewter dishes of nine sizes (from Newcastle).

Long dishes for rabbits. — Silver fashioned.
Saucers. — Silver fashioned.
Chargers. — Silver fashioned.
Pie plates. — Silver fashioned.
Voider. — Silver fashioned.
A beef-prick.
Fire shoves and tongs.
A brig (a sort of brandreth).
A cullender.
A pewter baking-pan.
Kettles of brass.
A skillet.
A brandeth.
A shredding knife.
A chopping knife.
An apple cradle.
A pair of irons to make wafers with.
A brass pot-lid.
Beef-axes and knives. — For Slaughtering.
 106

Slaughter ropes. — For Slaughtering.

Beef stangs. — For Slaughtering.

In the beef-house was an assortment of tubs, casks, and hogsheads.

Table knives, forks, spoons, and drinking-vessels presumably belonged
to another department.

The dripping-pan is noticed in Breton’s “Fantasticks,” 1626: “Dishes and

trenchers are necessary servants, and they that have no meat may go
scrape; a Spit and a Dripping-pan would do well, if well furnished.”
Flecknoe, again, in his character of a “Miserable old Gentlewoman,”
inserted among his “Enigmatical Characters,” 1658, speaks of her letting
her prayer-book fall into the dripping-pan, and the dog and the cat
quarrelling over it, and at last agreeing to pray on it!

But this is a branch of the subject I cannot afford further to penetrate.

Yet I must say a word about the polished maple-wood bowl, or maser,
with its mottoes and quaint devices, which figured on the side-board of
the yeoman and the franklin, and which Chaucer must have often seen in
their homes. Like everything else which becomes popular, it was copied
in the precious metals, with costly and elaborate goldsmith’s work; but
its interest for us is local, and does not lend itself to change of material
and neighbourhood. The habits of the poor and middle classes are apt to
awaken a keener curiosity in our minds from the comparatively slender
information which has come to us upon them; and as in the case of the
maser, the laver which was employed in humble circles for washing the
hands before and after a meal was, not of gold or silver, as in the houses
of the nobility, but of brass or laten, nor was it in either instance a
ceremonious form, but a necessary process. The modern finger-glass and
rose-water dish, which are an incidence of every entertainment of
pretension, and in higher society as much a parcel of the dinner-table as
knives and forks, are, from a mediaeval standpoint, luxurious
anachronisms.

In Archbishop Alfric’s “Colloquy,” originally written in the tenth century,

and subsequently augmented and enriched with a Saxon gloss by one of
his pupils, the cook is one of the persons introduced and interrogated.
He is asked what his profession is worth to the community; and he
replies that without him people would have to eat their greens and flesh
raw; whereupon it is rejoined that they might readily dress them
 107

themselves; to which the cook can only answer, that in such case all men
would be reduced to the position of servants.

The kitchen had its chef or master-cook (archimacherus), under-cooks, a

waferer or maker of sweets, a scullion or swiller (who is otherwise
described as a quistron), and knaves, or boys for preparing the meat; and
all these had their special functions and implements.

Even in the fifteenth century the appliances for cookery were evidently
far more numerous than they had been. An illustrated vocabulary
portrays, among other items, the dressing-board, the dressing-knife, the
roasting-iron, the frying-pan, the spit-turner (in lieu of the old turn-
broach), the andiron, the ladle, the slice, the skummer; and
theassitabulum, or saucer, first presents itself. It seems as if the butler
and the pantler had their own separate quarters; and the different
species of wine, and the vessels for holding it, are not forgotten. The
archaic pantry was dedicated, not to its later objects, but to that which
the name strictly signifies; but at the same time the writer warrants us in
concluding, that the pantry accommodated certain miscellaneous
utensils, as he comprises in its contents a candlestick, a table or board-
cloth, a hand-cloth or napkin, a drinking bowl, a saucer, and a spoon.
The kitchen, in short, comprised within its boundaries a far larger variety
of domestic requisites of all kinds than its modern representative, which
deals with an external machinery so totally changed. The ancient Court
of England was so differently constituted from the present, and so many
offices which sprang out of the feudal system have fallen into desuetude,
that it requires a considerable effort to imagine a condition of things,
where the master-cook of our lord the king was a personage of high rank
and extended possessions. How early the functions of cook and the
property attached to the position were separated, and the tenure of the
land made dependent on a nominal ceremony, is not quite clear. Warner
thinks that it was in the Conqueror’s time; but at any rate, in that of
Henry II. the husband of the heiress of Bartholomew de Cheney held his
land in Addington, Surrey, by the serjeantry of finding a cook to dress
the victuals at the coronation; the custom was kept up at least so late as
the reign of George III., to whom at his coronation the lord of the manor
of Addington presented a dish of pottage. The tenure was varied in its
details from time to time. But for my purpose it is sufficient that
manorial rights were acquired by the magnus coquus or magister
 108

coquorum in the same way as by the grand butler and other officers of
state; and when so large a share of the splendour of royalty continued for
centuries to emanate from the kitchen, it was scarcely inappropriate or
unfair to confer on that department of state some titular distinction, and
endow the holder with substantial honours. To the Grand Chamberlain
and the Grand Butler the Grand Cook was a meet appendage.

The primary object of these feudal endowments was the establishment of

a cordon round the throne of powerful subjects under conditions and
titles which to ourselves may appear incongruous and obscure, but which
were in tolerable keeping with the financial and commercial organisation
of the period, with a restricted currency, a revenue chiefly payable in
kind, scanty facilities for transit, and an absence of trading centres.
These steward-ships, butler-ships, and cook-ships, in the hands of the
most trusted vassals of the Crown, constituted a rudimentary vehicle for
in-gathering the dues of all kinds renderable by the king’s tenants; and
as an administrative scheme gradually unfolded itself, they became
titular and honorary, like our own reduced menagerie of nondescripts.
But while they lasted in their substance and reality, they answered the
wants and notions of a primitive people; nor is it for this practical age to
lift up its hands or its voice too high; for mediaeval England is still
legible without much excavation in our Court, our Church, nay, in our
Laws. There lurk our cunning spoilers!

Mr. Fairholt, in the “Archaeological Album,” 1845, has depicted for our
benefit the chef of the Abbey of St. Albans in the fourteenth century, and
his wife Helena. The representations of these two notable personages
occur in a Ms. in the British Museum, which formerly belonged to the
Abbey, and contains a list of its benefactors, with their gifts. It does not
appear that Master Robert, cook to Abbot Thomas, was the donor of any
land or money; but, in consideration of his long and faithful services, his
soul was to be prayed for with that of his widow, who bestowed
3s. 4d. ad opus hujus libri, which Fairholt supposes to refer to the
insertion of her portrait and that of her spouse among the graphic
decorations of the volume. They are perhaps in their way unique. Behold
them opposite!
 109

Master Robert and wife

Another point in reference to the early economy of the table, which

should not be overlooked, is the character of the ancient buttery, and the
quick transition which its functionary, the butler, experienced from the
performance of special to that of general duties.

He at a very remote period acted not merely as the curator of the wine-
cellar, but as the domestic steward and storekeeper; and it was his
business to provide for the requirements of the kitchen and the pantry,
and to see that no opportunity was neglected of supplying, from the
nearest port, or market town, or fair, if his employer resided in the
country, all the necessaries for the departments under his control. We
are apt to regard the modern bearer of the same title as more catholic in
his employments than the appellation suggests; but he in fact wields, on
the contrary, a very circumscribed authority compared to that of his
feudal prototype.

One of the menial offices in the kitchen, when the spit came into use, was
the broach-turner, lately referred to. He was by no means invariably
maintained on the staff, but was hired for the occasion, which may augur
the general preference for boiled and fried meats. Sometimes it appears
 110

that any lad passing by, or in want of temporary employment, was

admitted for this purpose, and had a trifling gratuity, or perhaps only his
dinner and the privilege of dipping his fingers in the dripping, for his
pains.

Warner cites an entry in some accounts of the Hospital of St.

Bartholomew at Sandwich, under 1569:—“For tournynge the spytte,
iiijd.“ and this was when the mayor of the borough dined with the prior.
A royal personage gave, of course, more. The play of “Gammer Gurton’s
Needle,” written about 1560, opens with a speech of Diccon the Bedlam,
or poor Tom, where he says:—

“Many a gossip's cup in my time have I tasted,

And many a broach and spit have I both turned and basted.”

The spit, again, was supplanted by the jack.

The “History of Friar Rush,” 1620, opens with a scene in which the hero
introduces himself to a monastery, and is sent by the unsuspecting prior
to the master-cook, who finds him subordinate employment.
 111

MEALS

It has been noted that for a great length of time two meals were made to
suffice the requirements of all classes. Our own experience shows how
immaterial the names are which people from age to age choose to bestow
on their feeding intervals. Some call supper dinner, and others call
dinner luncheon. First comes the prevailing mode instituted by
fashionable society, and then a foolish subscription to it by a section of
the community who are too poor to follow it, and too proud not to seem
to do so. Formerly it was usual for the Great to dine and sup earlier than
the Little; but now the rule is reversed, and the later a man dines the
more distinguished he argues himself. We have multiplied our daily
seasons of refreshment, and eat and drink far oftener than our ancestors;
but the truly genteel Briton never sups; the word is scarcely in his
vocabulary — like Beau Brummel and the farthing —“Fellow, I do not
know the coin!”

In a glossary of the tenth-eleventh century only two meals are quoted:

undermeat = prandium, and even-meat = coena. That is to say, our
Saxon precursors were satisfied as a rule with two repasts daily, but to
this in more luxurious times were added the supper and even the rear-
supper, the latter being, so far as we know, a second course or dessert
and the bipartite collation corresponding to the modern late dinner. But
it is one of those strange survivals of ancient manners which people
practise without any consciousness of the fact, which is at the root of the
fashion, which still occasionally prevails, of dividing the chief meal of the
day by an interval of repose, and taking the wine and dessert an hour or
two after the other courses; and the usage in our colleges and inns of
court of retiring to another apartment to “wine” may claim the same
origin. It is obvious that the rear-supper was susceptible of becoming the
most important and costly part of an entertainment; and that it
frequently assumed extravagant proportions, many passages from our
early poets might be adduced to prove.

In the “Book of Cookery,” 1500, we have the menu at the installation of

Archbishop Nevill in York in 1467; but the bill of fare of a feast given by
him in 1452 at Oxford, where he is mentioned as Master Nevill, son of
 112

the Earl of Salisbury, is inserted from the Cotton Ms. Titus, in “Reliquiae
Antiquae,” 1841. It consisted of three courses, which seem to have been
the customary limit. Of course, however, the usage varied, as in the
“Song of the Boar’s Head,” of which there are two or three versions, two
courses only are specified in what has the air of having been a rather
sumptuous entertainment.

The old low-Latin term for the noonday meal was merenda, which
suggests the idea of food to be earned before it was enjoyed. So in “Friar
Bacon’s Prophesie,” 1604, a poem, it is declared that, in the good old
days, he that wrought not, till he sweated, was held unworthy of his
meat. This reminds one of Abernethy’s maxim for the preservation of
health — to live on sixpence a day, and earn it.

The “Song of the Boar’s Head,” just cited, and printed from the
Porkington Ms. in “Reliquiae Antiquae” (ii, 30), refers to larks for ladies
to pick as part of the second course in a banquet. On special occasions, in
the middle ages, after the dessert, hippocras was served, as they have
liqueurs to this day on the Continent both after dinner and after the mid-
day breakfast.

The writer of “Piers of Fulham” lived to see this fashion of introducing a

third meal, and that again split into two for luxury’s sake; for his metrical
biographer tells us, that he refused rear-suppers, from a fear of
surfeiting.

I collect that in the time of Henry VIII. the supper was a well-established
institution, and that the abuse of postponing it to a too advanced hour
had crept in; for the writer of a poem of this period especially counsels
his readers not to sup late.

Rear-suppers were not only held in private establishments, but in

taverns; and in the early interlude of the “Four Elements,” given in my
edition of Dodsley, and originally published about 1519, a very graphic
and edifying scene occurs of a party of roisterers ordering and enjoying
an entertainment of this kind. About seventy years later, Robert Greene,
the playwright, fell a victim to a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish
wine, at some merry gathering of his intimates falling under this
denomination. Who will venture to deny that the first person who kept
unreasonable hours was an author and a poet? Even Shakespeare is not
 113

exempt from the suspicion of having hastened his end by indulgence

with one or two friends in a gay carouse of this kind.

The author of the “Description of England” enlightens us somewhat on

the sort of kitchen which the middle class and yeomanry of his time
deemed fit and sufficient. The merchant or private gentleman had
usually from one to three dishes on the table when there were no visitors,
and from four to six when there was company. What the yeoman’s every-
day diet was Harrison does not express; but at Christmas he had brawn,
pudding and souse, with mustard; beef, mutton, and pork; shred pies,
goose, pig, capon, turkey, veal, cheese, apples, etc., with good drink, and
a blazing fire in the hall. The farmer’s bill of fare varied according to the
season: in Lent, red herrings and salt fish; at Easter, veal and bacon; at
Martinmas, salted beef; at Midsummer, fresh beef, peas, and salad; at
Michaelmas, fresh herrings and fat mutton; at All Saints’, pork and peas
and fish; and at Christmas, the same dainties as our yeoman, with good
cheer and pastime.

The modern luncheon or nuncheon was the archaic prandium, or under-

meat, displaced by the breakfast, and modified in its character by the
different distribution of the daily repasts, so that, instead of being the
earliest regular meal, like the grand déjeuner of the French, or coming,
like our luncheon, between breakfast and dinner, it interposed itself
between the noontide dinner and the evening supper. Now, with an
increasing proportion of the community, the universal luncheon,
postponed to a later hour, is the actual dinner; and our under-meal is the
afternoon tea.

In those not-wholly-to-be-discommended days, the residue of the meal

was consumed in the servants’ hall, and the scraps bestowed on the poor
at the gate; and the last part of the business was carried out, not as a
matter of chance or caprice, but on as methodical a principle as the
payment of a poor-rate. At the servants’ table, besides the waiters and
other attendants on the principal board, mentioned by Harrison, sat the
master-cook, the pantler, the steward or major-domo, the butler, the
cellarman, the waferer, and others. It was not till comparatively recent
times that the wafery, a special department of the royal kitchen, where
the confectionery and pastry were prepared, was discontinued.
 114

There was necessarily a very large section of the community in all the
large towns, especially in London, which was destitute of culinary
appliances, and at the same time of any charitable or eleemosynary
privileges. A multitude of persons, of both sexes and all ages, gradually
developed itself, having no feudal ties, but attached to an endless variety
of more or less humble employments.

How did all these men, women, boys, girls, get their daily food? The
answer is, in the public eating-houses. Fitzstephen tells us that in the
reign of Henry II. (1154-89), besides the wine-vaults and the shops which
sold liquors, there was on the banks of the river a public eating-house or
cook’s-shop, where, according to the time of year, you could get every
kind of victuals, roasted, boiled, baked, or fried; and even, says he, if a
friend should arrive at a citizen’s house, and not care to wait, they go to
the shop, where there were viands always kept ready to suit every purse
and palate, even including venison, sturgeon, and Guinea-fowls. For all
classes frequented the City; and before Bardolph’s day noblemen and
gentlemen came to Smithfield to buy their horses, as they did to the
waterside near the Tower to embark for a voyage.

One of the characters in the “Canterbury Tales”— the Cook of London —

was, in fact the keeper of a cook’s-shop; and in the Prologue to the Tale,
with which his name is associated, the charming story of “Gamelin,” the
poet makes the Reeve charge his companion with not very creditable
behaviour towards his customers. So our host trusts that his relation will
be entertaining and good:—

“For many a pasty hast thou let blood,

And many a Jack of Dover 2 hast thou sold,
That hath been twice hot and twice cold.
Of many a pilgrim hast thou Christ's curse —
For thy parsley fare they yet the worse:
That they have eaten with the stubble goose,
For in thy shop is many a fly loose.”

But these restaurants were not long confined to one locality. From a very
early date, owing perhaps to its proximity to the Tower and the Thames,
East Cheap was famed for its houses of entertainment. The Dagger in

2 A sole
 115

Cheap is mentioned in “A Hundred Merry Tales,” 1526. The Boar is

historical. It was naturally at the East-end, in London proper, that the
flood-tide, as it were, of tavern life set in, among the seafarers, in the
heart of industrial activity; and the anecdotes and glimpses which we
enjoy show, just what might have been guessed, that these houses often
became scenes of riotous excess and debauch. Lydgate’s ballad of
“London Lickpenny” helps one to imagine what such resorts must have
been in the first part of the fifteenth century. It is almost permissible to
infer that the street contained, in addition to the regular inns, an
assortment of open counters, where the commodities on sale were cried
aloud for the benefit of the passer-by; for he says:—

“When I hied me into East Cheap:

One cries ribs of beef, and many a pie:

Pewter pots they clattered on a heap;

There was harp, fife, and sautry.”

The mention of pewter is noteworthy, because the Earl of

Northumberland ate his dinner off wood in 1572. Pewter plates had not
long been given up when I joined the Inner Temple in 1861.

There is a still more interesting allusion in the interlude of the “World

and the Child,” 1522, where Folly is made to say:—

“Yea, and we shall be right welcome, I dare well say,

In East Cheap for to dine;

And then we will with Lombards at passage play,

And at the Pope's Head sweet wine assay.”

The places of resort in this rollicking locality could furnish, long before
The Boar made the acquaintance of Falstaff, every species of delicacy
and bonne bouche to their constituents, and the revelry was apt
sometimes to extend to an unseasonable hour. In an early naval song we
meet with the lines:

“He that will in East Cheap eat a goose so fat,

With harp, pipe, and song,

 116

Must lie in Newgate on a mat,

Be the night never so long.”

And these establishments infallibly contributed their quota or more to

the prisons in the vicinity.

Houses of refreshment seem, however, to have extended themselves

westward, and to have become tolerably numerous, in the earlier society
of the sixteenth century, for Sir Thomas More, in a letter to his friend
Dean Colet, speaking of a late walk in Westminster and of the various
temptations to expenditure and dissipation which the neighbourhood
then afforded, remarks: “Whithersoever we cast our eyes, what do we see
but victualling-houses, fishmongers, butchers, cooks, pudding-makers,
fishers, and fowlers, who minister matter to our bellies?” This was prior
to 1519, the date of Colet’s decease.

There were of course periods of scarcity and high prices then as now. It
was only a few years later (1524), that Robert Whittinton, in one of his
grammatical tracts (the “Vulgaria”), includes among his examples:—

“Befe and motton is so dere, that a peny worth of meet wyll scant suffyse
a boy at a meale.”

The term “cook’s-shop” occurs in the Orders and Ordinances devised by

the Steward, Dean, and Burgesses of Westminster in 1585, for the better
municipal government of that borough.

The tenth article runs thus:—“Item, that no person or persons that

keepeth or that hereafter shall keep any cook’s-shop, shall also keep a
common ale-house (except every such person shall be lawfully licensed
thereunto), upon pain to have and receive such punishment, and pay
such fine, as by the statute in that case is made and provided.”

But while the keepers of restaurants were, as a rule, precluded by law

from selling ale, the publicans on their side were not supposed to purvey
refreshment other than their own special commodities. For the fifteenth
proviso of these orders is:—

“Item, that no tavern-keeper or inn-keeper shall keep any cook shop

upon pain to forfeit and pay for every time offending therein 4d.“
 117

The London cooks became famous, and were not only in demand in the
City and its immediate outskirts, but were put into requisition when any
grand entertainment was given in the country. In the list of expenses
incurred at the reception of Queen Elizabeth in 1577 by Lord Keeper
Bacon at Gorhambury, is an item of £12 as wages to the cooks of London.
An accredited anecdote makes Bacon’s father inimical to too lavish an
outlay in the kitchen; but a far more profuse housekeeper might have
been puzzled to dispense with special help, where the consumption of
viands and the consequent culinary labour and skill required, were so
unusually great.

In the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” the Cook of London and his
qualifications are thus emblazoned:—

“A Cook thei hadde with hem for the nones,

To boylle chyknes, with the mary bones,

And poudre marchaunt tart, and galyngale;

Wel cowde he knowe a draugte of London ale.

He cowde roste, and sethe, and broille, and frie

Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pie.

But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me,

That on his schyne a mormal had he:

For blankmanger that made he with the beste.”

This description would be hardly worth quoting, if it were not for the
source whence it comes, and the names which it presents in common
with the “Form of Cury” and other ancient relics. Chaucer’s Cook was a
personage of unusually wide experience, having, in his capacity as the
keeper of an eating-house, to cater for so many customers of varying
tastes and resources.

In the time of Elizabeth, the price at an ordinary for a dinner seems to

have been sixpence. It subsequently rose to eightpence; and in the time
of George I. the “Vade Mecum for Malt Worms (1720)” speaks of the
landlord of The Bell, in Carter Lane, raising his tariff to tenpence. In
 118

comparison with the cost of a similar meal at present, all these

quotations strike one as high, when the different value of money is
considered. But in 1720, at all events, the customer ate at his own
discretion.

Their vicinity to East Cheap, the great centre of early taverns and cook’s-
shops, obtained for Pudding Lane and Pie Corner those savoury
designations.

Paris, like London, had its cook’s-shops, where you might eat your
dinner on the premises, or have it brought to your lodging in a covered
dish by a porte-chape. In the old prints of French kitchen interiors, the
cook’s inseparable companion is his ladle, which he used for stirring and
serving, and occasionally for dealing a refractory garçon de cuisine a rap
on the head.

The Dictionary of Johannes de Garlandia (early thirteenth century)

represents the cooks at Paris as imposing on the ignorant and
inexperienced badly cooked or even tainted meat, which injured their
health. These “coquinarii” stood, perhaps, in the same relation to those
times as our keepers of restaurants.

He mentions in another place that the cooks washed their utensils in hot
water, as well as the plates and dishes on which the victuals were served.

Mr. Wright has cited an instance from the romance of “Doon de

Mayence,” where the guards of a castle, on a warm summer evening,
partook of their meal in a field. Refreshment in the open air was also
usual in the hunting season, when a party were at a distance from home;
and the garden arbour was occasionally converted to this kind of
purpose, when it had assumed its more modern phase. But our picnic
was unknown.
 119

ETIQUETTE OF THE TABLE

Paul Hentzner, who was in England at the end of the reign of Elizabeth,
remarks of the people whom he saw that “they are more polite in eating
than the French, devouring less bread, but more meat, which they roast
in perfection. They put a good deal of sugar in their drink.”

In his “Court and Country,” 1618, Nicholas Breton gives an instructive

account of the strict rules which were drawn up for observance in great
households at that time, and says that the gentlemen who attended on
great lords and ladies had enough to do to carry these orders out. Not a
trencher must be laid or a napkin folded awry; not a dish misplaced; not
a capon carved or a rabbit unlaced contrary to the usual practice; not a
glass filled or a cup uncovered save at the appointed moment: everybody
must stand, speak, and look according to regulation.

The books of demeanour which have been collected by Mr. Furnivall for
the Early English Text Society have their incidental value as illustrating
the immediate theme, and are curious, from the growth in consecutive
compilations of the code of instructions for behaviour at table, as
evidences of an increasing cultivation both in manners and the variety of
appliances for domestic use, including relays of knives for the successive
courses. Distinctions were gradually drawn between genteel and vulgar
or coarse ways of eating, and facilities were provided for keeping the
food from direct contact with the fingers, and other primitive offences
against decorum. Many of the precepts in the late fifteenth century
“Babies’ Book,” while they demonstrate the necessity for admonition,
speak also to an advance in politeness and delicacy at table. There must
be a beginning somewhere; and the authors of these guides to
deportment had imbibed the feeling for something higher and better,
before they undertook to communicate their views to the young
generation.

There is no doubt that the “Babies’ Book” and its existing congeners are
the successors of anterior and still more imperfect attempts to introduce
at table some degree of cleanliness and decency. When the “Babies’
Book” made its appearance, the progress in this direction must have
 120

been immense. But the observance of such niceties was of course at first
exceptional; and the ideas which we see here embodied were very
sparingly carried into practice outside the verge of the Court itself and
the homes of a few of the aristocracy.

There may be an inclination to revolt against the barbarous doggerel in

which the instruction is, as a rule, conveyed, and against the tedious
process of perusing a series of productions which follow mainly the same
lines. But it is to be recollected that these manuals were necessarily
renewed in the manuscript form from age to age, with variations and
additions, and that the writers resorted to metre as a means of
impressing the rules of conduct more forcibly on their pupils.

Of all the works devoted to the management of the table and kitchen, the
“Book of Nurture,” by John Russell, usher of the chamber and marshal of
the ball to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is perhaps, on the whole, the
most elaborate, most trustworthy, and most important. It leaves little
connected with the cuisine of a noble establishment of the fifteenth
century untouched and unexplained; and although it assumes the
metrical form, and in a literary respect is a dreary performance, its value
as a guide to almost every branch of the subject is indubitable. It lays
bare to our eyes the entire machinery of the household, and we gain a
clearer insight from it than from the rest of the group of treatises, not
merely into what a great man of those days and his family and retainers
ate and drank, and how they used to behave themselves at table, but into
the process of making various drinks, the mystery of carving, and the
division of duties among the members of the staff. It is, in fact, the
earliest comprehensive book in our literature.

The functions of the squire at the table of a prince are, to a certain

extent, shown in the “Squire of Low Degree,” where the hero, having
arrayed himself in scarlet, with a chaplet on his head and a belt round his
waist, cast a horn about his neck, and went to perform his duty in the
hall. He approaches the king, dish in hand, and kneels. When he has
served his sovereign, he hands the meats to the others. We see a
handsome assortment of victuals on this occasion, chiefly venison and
birds, and some of the latter were baked in bread, probably a sort of
paste. The majority of the names on the list are familiar, but a few — the
teal, the curlew, the crane, the stork, and the snipe — appear to be new.
 121

It is, in all these cases, almost impossible to be sure how much we owe to
the poet’s imagination and how much to his rhythmical poverty. From
another passage it is to be inferred that baked venison was a favourite
mode of dressing the deer.

The precaution of coming to table with clean hands was inculcated

perhaps first as a necessity, when neither forks nor knives were used,
and subsequently as a mark of breeding. The knife preceded the spoon,
and the fork, which had been introduced into Italy in the eleventh
century, and which strikes one as a fortuitous development of the
Oriental chopstick, came last. It was not in general use even in the
seventeenth century here. Coryat the traveller saw it among the Italians,
and deemed it a luxury and a notable fact.

The precepts delivered by Lydgate and others for demeanour at table

were in advance of the age, and were probably as much honoured in the
breach as otherwise. But the common folk did then much as many of
them do now, and granted themselves a dispensation both from knife
and fork, and soap and water. The country boor still eats his bacon or his
herring with his fingers, just as Charles XII. of Sweden buttered his
bread with his royal thumb.

A certain cleanliness of person, which, at the outset, was not

considerably regarded, became customary, as manners softened and
female influence asserted itself; and even Lydgate, in his “Stans Puer ad
Mensam (an adaptation from Sulpitius),” enjoins on his page or serving-
boy a resort to the lavatory before he proceeds to discharge his functions
at the board —

“Pare clean thy nails; thy hands wash also

Before meat; and when thou dost arise.”

Other precepts follow. He was not to speak with his mouth full. He was
to wipe his lips after eating, and his spoon when he had finished, taking
care not to leave it in his dish. He was to keep his napkin as clean and
neat as possible, and he was not to pick his teeth with his knife. He was
not to put too much on his trencher at once. He was not to drop his sauce
or soup over his clothes, or to fill his spoon too full, or to bring dirty
knives to the table. All these points of conduct are graphic enough; and
their trite character is their virtue.
 122

Boiled, and perhaps fried meats were served on silver; but roasts might
be brought to table on the spit, which, after a while, was often of silver,
and handed round for each person to cut what he pleased; and this was
done not only with ordinary meat, but with game, and even with a
delicacy like a roast peacock. Of smaller birds, several were broached on
one spit. There is a mediaeval story of a husband being asked by his wife
to help her to the several parts of a fowl in succession, till nothing was
left but the implement on which it had come in, whereupon the man
determined she should have that too, and belaboured her soundly with
it. At more ceremonious banquets the servants were preceded by music,
or their approach from the kitchen to the hall was proclaimed by sound
of trumpets. Costly plate was gradually introduced, as well as linen and
utensils, for the table; but the plate may be conjectured to have been an
outcome from the primitive trencher, a large slice of bread on which
meat was laid for the occupants of the high table, and which was cast
aside after use.

Bread served at table was not to be bitten or broken off the loaf, but to be
cut; and the loaf was sometimes divided before the meal, and skilfully
pieced together again, so as to be ready for use.