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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6. The School of Virtue, the Second Part. By Richard West. 12mo, 1619.
7. The School of Grace; or, A Book of Nurture. By John Hart. 12mo.
(About 1680.)
8. England's Newest Way in all Sorts of Cookery. By Henry Howard, Free
Cook of London. 8vo, London, 1703.
9. A Collection of above three hundred Receipts in Cookery, Physick
and Surgery, for the use of all Good Wives, Tender Mothers, and
Careful Nurses. By several Hands. The second edition, to which is
added a second part. 8vo, London, 1729. Fifth edition, 8vo, London,
1734.
10. The Compleat City and Country Cook. By Charles Carter. 8vo,
London, 1732.
11. The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplish'd Gentlewomans Companion:
Being a collection of upwards of Five Hundred of the most approved
Receipts in Cookery, Pastry, Confectionery, Preserving, Pickles,
Cakes, Creams, Jellies, Made Wines, Cordials. With Copper Plates....
And also Bills of Fare for every month in the year.... By E. Smith.
Seventh edition, with very large additions, near fifty Receipts
being communicated just before the author's death. 8vo, London, 1736.
Eleventh edition. 8vo, London, 1742.
12. The Complete Family Piece: A very Choice Collection of Receipts
in... Cookery. Seventh Edition. 8vo, London, 1737.
13. The Modern Cook. By Vincent La Chapelle, cook to the Prince of
Orange. Third edition. 8vo, London, 1744.
14. A Treatise of all Sorts of Foods, both Animal and Vegetable, and
also of Drinkables, written originally in French by the Learned M.L.
Lemery. Translated by D. Hay, M.D. 8vo, London, 1745.
15. The Housekeeper's Pocket-Book. By Sarah Harrison. Sixth edition, 2
vols. 12mo, London, 1755.
16. Professed Cookery. By Ann Cook. Third edition. 8vo, London (about
1760).
17. The Experienced English Housekeeper. By Elizabeth Raffald. Second
edition. 8vo, London, 1771. There were an eighth, tenth, and eleventh
editions, and two others, described as "New Editions," between this
date and 1806. The compiler dedicates her book to "The honourable Lady
Elizabeth Warburton," in whose service she had been. She mentions that
the volume was published by subscription, and that she had obtained
eight hundred names. In the preface Mrs. Raffald begins by observing:
"When I reflect upon the number of books already in print upon this
subject, and _with what contempt they are read_, I cannot but be
apprehensive that this may meet the same fate with some who will
censure before they either see it or try its value." She concludes by
saying that she had not meddled with physical receipts, "leaving them
to the physician's superior judgment, whose proper province they are."
The author of the "Experienced Housekeeper" tells us that she had not
only filled that post in noble families during fifteen years, but
had travelled with her employers, and so widened her sphere of
observation.
18. The Young Ladies' Guide in the Art of Cookery. By Elizabeth
Marshall. 8vo, Newcastle, 1777.
19. English Housewifery Exhibited in above 450 Receipts. By Elizabeth
Moxon. Fourth edition. 8vo, Leeds (about 1780).
20. The Practice of Modern Cookery. By George Dalrymple. 8vo,
Edinburgh, 1781.
21. The Ladies' Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table. By
Charlotte Mason. 8vo, London, 1786.
22. The Compleat Family Companion. 8vo, London, 1787 (?).
23. The Honours of the Table; or, Rules for Behaviour during Meals,
with the whole Art of Carving.... By the Author of "Principles of
Politeness," etc. (Trusler). Second edition. Woodcuts by Bewick. 12mo,
London, 1791.
24. The French Family Cook: being a complete system of French Cookery.
From the French. 8vo, London, 1793.
25. The British Housewife; or, The Cook's, Housekeeper's, and
Gardener's Companion. By Martha Bradley. 8vo.
26. Cookery and Pastry. By Mrs. Macivey. New edition, 12mo, Edinburgh,
1800.
27. The London Art of Cookery. By John Farley. Fourth edition. 8vo,
London, 1807.
28. The School of Good Living; or, A Literary and Historical Essay on
the European Kitchen, beginning with Cadmus, the Cook and King, and
concluding with the Union of Cookery and Chymistry. 12 mo, London,
1804.
29. _Culina Famulatur Medicina_. Receipts in Modern Cookery, with
a Medical Commentary by Ignotus, and revised by A. Hunter, M.D.,
F.A.S.L. and E. Fourth edition, 12mo, York, 1806.
30. The Universal Cook. By Francis Collingwood and T. Woollams. Fourth
edition. 8vo, London, 1806.
31. A Complete System of Cookery. By John Simpson, Cook. 8vo, London,
1806. Again, 8vo, London, 1816.
32. Simpson's Cookery Improved and Modernised. By H.W. Brand. 8vo,
London, 1834.
33. The Imperial and Royal Cook. By Frederick Nutt, Esquire, Author of
the "Complete Confectioner." 8vo, London, 1809.
34. The Housekeeper's Domestic Library. By Charles Millington. 8vo,
London, 1810.
35. The Housekeeper's Instructor; or, Universal Family Book. By W.A.
Henderson. Seventeenth edition. By S.C. Schrubbelie, Cook to the
Albany, London. 8vo, London, 1811.
36. The Art of Preserving all kinds of animal and vegetable Substances
for several years. By M. Appert. Translated from the French. Second
edition. 8vo, London, 1812. With a folding Plate.
37. Domestic Economy and Cookery, for Rich and Poor. By a Lady.
8vo, London, 1827. In the preface the author apprises us that a long
residence abroad had enabled her to become a mistress of the details
of foreign European cookery; but she adds: "The mulakatanies and
curries of India; the sweet pillaus, yahourt, and cold soups of
Persia; the cubbubs, sweet yaughs and sherbets of Egypt; the cold
soups and mixed meats of Russia, the cuscussous and honeyed paste
of Africa, have been inserted with the view of introducing a less
expensive and more wholesome and a more delicate mode of cookery."
38. Apician Morsels; or, Tales of the Table, Kitchen, and Larder. By
Dick Humelbergius Secundus. 8vo, London, 1834.
39. Cottage Economy and Cookery. 8vo, London, 1844.[Footnote:
Reprinted from the Journal of the Agricultural Society, 1843, vol.
iii, part I].
DIET OF THE YEOMAN AND THE POOR.
The staple food among the lower orders in Anglo-Saxon and the
immediately succeeding times was doubtless bread, butter, and
cheese, the aliment which goes so far even yet to support our rural
population, with vegetables and fruit, and occasional allowances of
salted bacon and pancakes, beef, or fish. The meat was usually boiled
in a kettle suspended on a tripod [Footnote: The tripod is still
employed in many parts of the country for a similar purpose] over a
wood-fire, such as is used only now, in an improved shape, for fish
and soup.
The kettle which is mentioned, as we observe, in the tale of "Tom
Thumb," was the universal vessel for boiling purposes [Footnote: An
inverted kettle was the earliest type of the diving-bell], and the
bacon-house (or larder), so called from the preponderance of that
sort of store over the rest, was the warehouse for the winter stock of
provisions [Footnote: What is called in some places the keeping-room
also accommodated flitches on the walls, and hams ranged along the
beams overhead; and it served at the same time for a best parlour].
The fondness for condiments, especially garlic and pepper, among the
higher orders, possibly served to render the coarser nourishment of
the poor more savoury and flavorous. "It is interesting to remark,"
says Mr. Wright [Footnote: "Domestic Manners and Sentiments," 1862,
p. 91], "that the articles just mentioned (bread, butter, and cheese)
have preserved their Anglo-Saxon names to the present time, while all
kinds of meat--beef, veal, mutton, pork, even bacon--have retained
only the names given to them by the Normans; which seems to imply that
flesh-meat was not in general use for food among the lower classes of
society."
In Malory's compilation on the adventures of King Arthur and his
knights, contemporary with the "Book of St. Alban's," we are expressly
informed in the sixth chapter, how the King made a great feast at
Caerleon in Wales; but we are left in ignorance of its character. The
chief importance of details in this case would have been the excessive
probability that Malory would have described an entertainment
consonant with the usage of his own day, although at no period of
early history was there ever so large an assemblage of guests at one
time as met, according to the fable, to do honour to Arthur.
In the tenth century Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric, the boy is made to
say that he is too young to eat meat, but subsists on cabbages,
eggs, fish, cheese, butter, beans, and other things, according to
circumstances; so that a vegetable diet was perhaps commoner in those
days even among the middle classes than at present. This youth, when
he is asked what he drinks, replies, water, or ale if he can get it.
The dish so deftly constructed by King Arthur, according to one of
his numerous biographers, exhibited that wedlock of fruit with animal
matter--fat and plums--which we post-Arthurians eye with a certain
fastidious repugnance, but which, notwithstanding, lingered on to
the Elizabethan or Jacobaean era--nay, did not make the gorge of our
grandsires turn rebellious. It survives among ourselves only in the
modified shape of such accessories as currant jelly and apple sauce.
But the nursery rhyme about Arthur and the bag-pudding of barley
meal with raisins and meat has a documentary worth for us beyond the
shadowy recital of the banquet at Caerleon, for, _mutato nomine_,
it is the description of a favourite article of popular diet in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The narrative of Mrs. Thumb and
her pudding is more circumstantial than that of King Alfred and the
housewife; and if the tradition is worthless, it serves us so far,
that it faithfully portrays a favourite item of rustic consumption in
old times. We are told that the pudding was made in a bowl, and that
it was chiefly composed of the flesh and blood of a newly-killed hog,
laid in batter; and then, when all was ready, the bag with all its
savoury burden was put into a kettle.
As we are already on the threshold of legend and myth, we may linger
there a moment to recall to memory the resemblance between the
description of this piece of handiwork and that ascribed to good King
Arthur, who lived in days when monarchs were their own _chefs_,
for the Arthurian dish was also prepared in a bag, and consisted,
according to the ditty, of barley-meal and fat. Soberly speaking, the
two accounts belong, maybe, to something like the same epoch in the
annals of gastronomy; and a large pudding was, for a vast length
of time, no doubt, a prevailing _piece de resistance_ in all
frugal British households. It was the culinary forefather of
toad-in-the-hole, hot-pot, Irish stew, and of that devil-dreaded
Cornish pasty. The Elizabethan transmitters of these two Apician
nuggets possibly antedated the popular institution of the bag-pudding;
but the ancientest gastronomical records testify to the happy
introduction of the frying-pan about the era when we were under
Alfred's fatherly sway. It may have even preceded the grill, just
as the fork lagged behind the spoon, from which it is a seeming
evolution. That no reader may doubt the fact, that Tom's mother made
the pudding, and that Tom held the candle, we refer to the old edition
of this choice piece of chapman's ware, where an accurate drawing of
Mrs. Thumb, and the board, and the bowl, and Tom with the candle, may
be inspected. The _prima stamina_ of the modern fruit-pudding really
appear to be found in the ancient bag-pudding, of which Tom Thumb had
such excellent reason to be acquainted with the contents. The mode
of construction was similar, and both were boiled in a cloth. The
material and subsidiary treatment of course differed; but it is
curious that no other country possesses either the tart or the
pudding, as we understand them, and as the latter has perhaps been
developed from the dish, of the making of which Tom Thumb was
an eye-witness to his sorrow, so the covered fruit tart may not
improbably be an outgrowth from the old coffin pasty of venison or
game, with the superaddition of a dish for the safe custody of the
juice.
Another rather prominent factor in the diet of the poor classes, not
only in Scotland but in the North of England, was oatmeal variously
prepared. One very favourable and palatable way was by grinding the
meal a second time as fine as flour, boiling it, and then serving it
with hot milk or treacle. There is something in the nature of this
food so peculiarly satisfying and supporting, that it seems to have
been destined to become the staple nourishment of a poor population
in a cold and bracing climate. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
unquestionably saw a great advance in the mystery of cookery and
in the diversity of dishes, and the author of "Piers of Fulham"
complains, that men were no longer satisfied with brawn and powdered
beef, which he terms "store of house," but would have venison, wild
fowl, and heronshaw; and men of simple estate, says he, will have
partridges and plovers, when lords lack. He adds quaintly:
"A mallard of the dunghill is good enough for me,
With pleasant pickle, or it is else poison. pardy."
We have for our purpose a very serviceable relic of the old time,
called "A Merry Jest, how the Ploughman learned his Paternoster." The
scene purports to be laid in France, and the general outline may have
been taken from the French; but it is substantially English, with
allusions to Kent, Robin Hood, and so forth, and it certainly
illustrates the theme upon which we are. This ploughman was in fact a
farmer or husbandman, and the account of his dwelling and garden-stuff
is very interesting. We are told that his hall-roof was full of
bacon-flitches, and his store-room of eggs, butter, and cheese. He had
plenty of malt to make good ale--
"And Martlemas beef to him was not dainty;
Onions and Garlic had he enough,
And good cream, and milk of the cow."
But in "Vox Populi Vox Dei," written about 1547, and therefore
apparently not from the pen of Skelton, who died in 1529, it is said
that the price of an ox had risen to four pounds, and a sheep without
the wool to twelve shillings and upwards, so that the poor man could
seldom afford to have meat at his table. This evil the writer ascribes
to the exactions of the landlord and the lawyer. The former charged
too highly for his pastures, and the latter probably advanced money on
terms. The old poem depicts in sad colours the condition of the
yeoman at the same period, that had had once plenty of cows and cream,
butter, eggs, cheese, and honey; all which had gone to enrich upstarts
who throve by casting-counters and their pens. The story of the "King
and a poor Northern Man," 1640, also turns upon the tyranny of the
lawyers over ignorant clients.
The "Serving-man's Comfort," 1598, draws a somewhat gloomy picture
of the times. The prices of all provisions, among other points, had
trebled since the good old days, when his father and grandfather kept
house. Then people could buy an ox for 20s., a sheep for 3s., a calf
for 2s., a goose for 6d., a capon for 4d., a hen for 2d., a pig for
the same, and all other household provisions at a like rate. The
reason given by the farmer was that the landlords had raised their
rent. Let them have the land on the old terms, and the former prices
would pay. This plea and demand have come back home to us in 1886.
The tradition is, that when Queen Elizabeth received the intelligence
of the defeat of the Armada, she was dining off a goose--doubtless
about eleven o'clock in the morning. It was an anxious moment, and
perhaps her majesty for the moment had thrown ceremony somewhat aside,
and was "keeping secret house."
The author of the "Serving-man's Comfort," 1598, also laments the
decay of hospitality. "Where," he inquires "are the great chines
of stalled beef, the great, black jacks of double beer, the long
hall-tables fully furnished with good victuals?" But he seems to have
been a stickler for the solid fare most in vogue, according to his
complaint, formerly; and he represents to us that in lieu of it one
had to put up with goose-giblets, pigs' pettitoes, and so many other
boiled meats, forced meats, and made dishes. Things were hardly so
very bad, however, if, as he states previously, the curtailment of the
expenditure on the table still left, as a medium repast, two or three
dishes, with fruit and cheese after. The black jack here mentioned was
not discarded till comparatively modern days. Nares, who published his
Glossary in 1822, states that he recollects them in use.
"A meal's meat twice a week, worth a groat," is mentioned as the farm
servant's portion in "Civil and Uncivil Life," 1579. In "A Piece of
Friar Bacon's Brasen-heads Prophesie," a unique poem, 1604, we read
that at that time a cheesecake and a pie were held "good country
meat." The author adds:
"Ale and Spice, and Curdes and Creame,
Would make a Scholler make a Theame."
Breton, in his "Fantasticks," 1626, observes: "Milk, Butter and Cheese
are the labourers dyet; and a pot of good Beer quickens his spirits."
Norfolk dumplings were celebrated in John Day the playwright's time.
He has put into the mouth of his east-country yeoman's son, Tom
Strowd, in "The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green," written long before
it was printed in 1659, the following:--"As God mend me, and ere
thou com'st into Norfolk, I'll give thee as good a dish of Norfolk
dumplings as ere thou laydst thy lips to;" and in another passage of
the same drama, where Swash's shirt has been stolen, while he is in
bed, he describes himself "as naked as your Norfolk dumplin." In
the play just quoted, Old Strowd, a Norfolk yeoman, speaks of his
contentment with good beef, Norfolk bread, and country home-brewed
drink; and in the "City Madam," 1658, Holdfast tells us that before
his master got an estate, "his family fed on roots and livers, and
necks of beef on Sundays." I cite these as traits of the kind of
table kept by the lower grades of English society in the seventeenth
century.
MEATS AND DRINKS.
Slender: You are afraid, if you see the bear loose, are you not?
Anne: Aye, indeed, Sir
Slender: That's meat and drink to me, now.
MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, i, 1.
The manufacture of wine and of fruit preserves, and many of the
processes of cookery, could have scarcely been accomplished without a
large and constant supply of sugar.
The exact date of the first introduction of the latter into England
continues to be a matter of uncertainty. It was clearly very scarce,
and doubtless equally dear, when, in 1226, Henry III. asked the Mayor
of Winchester to procure him three pounds of Alexandria sugar, if so
much could be got, and also some rose and violet-coloured sugar;
nor had it apparently grown much more plentiful when the same prince
ordered the sheriffs of London to send him four loaves of sugar to
Woodstock. But it soon made its way into the English homes, and before
the end of the thirteenth century it could be procured even in remote
provincial towns. It was sold either by the loaf or the pound. It was
still exorbitantly high in price, varying from eighteen pence to
three shillings a pound of coeval currency; and it was retailed by the
spice-dealers.
In Russell's "Book of Nurture," composed about 1450, it occurs as an
ingredient in hippocras; and one collects from a letter sent by Sir
Edward Wotton to Lord Cobham from Calais in 1546, that at that time
the quantities imported were larger, and the price reduced; for Wotton
advises his correspondent of a consignment of five-and-twenty loaves
at six shillings the loaf. One loaf was equal to ten pounds; this
brought the commodity down to eight pence a pound of fifteenth century
money.
The sugar of Cyprus was also highly esteemed; that of Bezi, in the
Straits of Sunda, was the most plentiful; but the West Indian
produce, as well as that of Mauritius, Madeira, and other cane-growing
countries, was unknown.
Of bread, the fifteenth century had several descriptions in use:
pain-main or bread of very fine flour, wheat-bread, barley-meal
bread, bran-bread, bean-bread, pease-bread, oat-bread or oat-cakes,
hard-bread, and unleavened bread. The poor often used a mixture
of rye, lentils, and oatmeal, varied according to the season and
district.
The author of "The Serving-man's Comfort," 1598, however, seems to say
that it was counted by the poorer sort at that time a hardship only to
be tolerated in a dear year to mix beans and peas with their corn,
and he adds: "So must I yield you a loaf of coarse cockle, having no
acquaintance with coin to buy corn."
In a _Nominale_ of this period mention is made of "oblys," or small
round loaves, perhaps like the old-fashioned "turnover"; and we come
across the explicit phrase, _a loaf of bread_, for the first time,
a pictorial vocabulary of the period even furnishing us with a
representation of its usual form.
Nor were the good folks of those days without their simnels,
cracknels, and other sorts of cakes for the table, among which in the
_wastel_ we recognise the equivalent of the modern French _gateau_.
Besides march-pain or pain-main, and pain-puff, two sorts baked
on special occasions, and rather entering into the class of
confectionery, our better-to-do ancestors usually employed three
descriptions of bread: manchete for the master's table, made of fine
boulted flour; chete, of unboulted flour, but not mixed with any
coarser ingredient; and brown-bread, composed of flour and rye meal,
and known as _maslin_ (mystelon).
A bushel of wheat, in a romance of the thirteenth century, is
estimated to produce twenty loaves; but the statement is obviously
to be taken with allowance. The manchet was sometimes thought to be
sufficient without butter, as we now eat a scone. In the "Conceits of
Old Hobson," 1607, the worthy haberdasher of the Poultry gives some
friends what is facetiously described as a "light" banquet--a cup
of wine and a manchet of bread on a trencher for each guest, in an
apartment illuminated with five hundred candles.
There is no pictorial record of the mode in which the early baker
worked here, analogous to that which Lacroix supplies of his sixteenth
century _confrere_. The latter is brought vividly enough before us in
a copy of one of Jost Amman's engravings, and we perceive the bakery
and its tenants: one (apparently a female) kneading the dough in a
trough at the farther end, a second by a roasting fire, with a long
ladle or peel in his hand, putting the loaf on the oven, and a third,
who is a woman, leaving the place with two baskets of bread, one on
her head and one on her arm; the baker himself is almost naked, like
the operatives in a modern iron furnace. The artist has skilfully
realised the oppressive and enervating atmosphere; and it was till
lately quite usual to see in the side streets of Paris in the early
morning the _boulanger_ at work precisely in the same informal
costume. So tenacious is usage, and so unchanging many of the
conditions of life.
The Anglo-Norman used butter where his Italian contemporary used oil.
But it is doubtful whether before the Conquest our ancestors were
commonly acquainted with butter.
The early cook understood the art of glazing with yolk of egg, and
termed it endoring, and not less well that of presenting dishes under
names calculated to mislead the intended partaker, as where we find
a receipt given for _pome de oringe_, which turns out to be a
preparation of liver of pork with herbs and condiments, served up in
the form of glazed force-meat balls.
Venison was salted in troughs. In the tale of "The King and the
Hermit," the latter exhibits to his unknown visitor his stock of
preserved venison from the deer, which he had shot in the forest.
The mushroom, of which so many varieties are at present recognised
by botanists, seems, from the testimony of an Italian, Giacomo
Castelvetri, who was in London in 1614, and to whom I have already
referred, to have been scarcely known here at that time. I cannot
say, of course, how far Castelvetri may have prosecuted his inquiries,
though he certainly leaves the impression of having been intelligently
observant; or whether he includes in this observation the edible
toadstools; but even now much unreasonable prejudice exists as to the
latter, and very limited use is made of any but two or three familiar
sorts of the mushroom itself. It is a pity that this misconception
should not be dissipated.
Caviary had been brought into England, probably from Russia, at the
commencement of the seventeenth century, perhaps sooner. In 1618, "The
Court and Country," by Breton, seems to represent it as an article of
diet which was little known, and not much relished; for a great lady
had sent the writer's father a little barrel of it, and it was no
sooner opened than it was fastened down again, to be returned to the
donor with a respectful message that her servant had black soap enough
already.
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