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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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

COOKERY BOOKS

PART 1.

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 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 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 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.

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 cooked theirs.

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 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, 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 ; 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 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 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 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:--

The three last are rather in the class of miscellanies.

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 D?lices 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" . 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.

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 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.

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 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 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:--

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.

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:--

"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 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 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.

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