Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine by William Carew Hazlitt

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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 (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 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 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 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
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, 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 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.

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
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 Delices 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"
[Footnote: I have not seen this book, nor is it under that title
in the catalogue of the British Museum]. 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 (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.

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 L1,000 over the banquet, of which the Lady Protectress managed
to save L200. 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.

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