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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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.
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. }
Saucers. }
Chargers. } Silver fashioned.
Pie plates. }
Voider. }
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. }
Slaughter ropes. } For Slaughtering.
Beef stangs. }
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 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 the _assitabulum_, 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
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!
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 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.
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 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 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 dejeuner_ 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.
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[1] 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."
[Footnote 1: A sole]
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 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,
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."
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 L12 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.
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