Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine by William Carew Hazlitt
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William Carew Hazlitt >> Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine
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The Book-Lover's Library
Edited by Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A.
OLD COOKERY BOOKS AND ANCIENT CUISINE
BY
W. CAREW HAZLITT
London
1902
_THE BOOK-LOVERS LIBRARY_ was first published in the following styles:
No. 1.--Printed on antique paper, in cloth bevelled with rough edges,
price 4s. 6d.
No. 2.--Printed on hand-made paper, in Roxburgh, half morocco, with
gilt top: 250 only are printed, for sale in England, price 7s. 6d.
No. 3.--Large paper edition, on hand-made paper; of which 50 copies
only are printed, and bound in Roxburgh, for sale in England, price L1
1s.
There are a few sets left, and can be had on application to the
Publisher.
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 _gout_.
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 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 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 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 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 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 L30, 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 L80,000 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 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 1805. 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."
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 causa_, 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 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, 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 _piece de resistance_ 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
L49 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.
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, had it not been so, would never have been unveiled
respecting themselves and their time.
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