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 £1
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 _goût_.

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."