Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

erence from the rest of creation — not even in the prehensile faculty resident in his hand — as in the objection to raw food, meat, and

improved by temporary commitment to a subterranean larder; yet, to be sure, he

s as the present, that the student is compelled to draw his own inferences from indirect or unwitting allusion; but so long as conjecture an

en more valuable art — that of Printing — was discovered, we shall find ourselves face to face with a rich and long chronolo

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

can easily gratify themselves in the pages of “The Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household,” 1790; “The Northumberland Household

concerned himself about the kitchens or gardens of the nation which he undertook to describe. Yet, wha

ss, 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 th

skill by M.J.A. St. John in his “Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece,” 1842; and in the Biblia or

d 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 comp

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 th

nglish 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 thei

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 t

ainst 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 p

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 w

“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

as 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

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

nsincerity also, that neither really wrote the books which carry their names. Miller could not make a joke or understand one when anybody else mad

asures 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

ume, dated 1825. 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-propr

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