and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
The Book-Lover's Library
Edited by
Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A.
OLD COOKERY BOOKS
AND
ANCIENT CUISINE
BY
W. CAREW HAZLITT
POPULAR EDITION
LONDON
1902
THE BOOK-LOVERS LIBRARY was first published in thefollowing styles:
No. 1.—Printed on antique paper, in cloth bevelled withrough edges, price 4s. 6d.
No. 2.—Printed on hand-made paper, in Roxburgh, halfmorocco, with gilt top: 250 only are printed, for sale in England,price 7s. 6d.
No. 3.—Large paper edition, on hand-made paper; ofwhich 50 copies only are printed, and bound in Roxburgh, for salein England, price £1 1s.
There are a few sets left, and can be had on application to thePublisher.
Table of Contents
The Early Englishman and HisFood
Cookery Books, part 2, Select Extractsfrom an Early Recipt-Book
Diet of the Yeoman and the Poor
INTRODUCTORY
Man has been distinguished from other animals in various ways;but perhaps there is no particular in which he exhibits so marked adifference from the rest of creation—not even in theprehensile faculty resident in his hand—as in the objectionto raw food, meat, and vegetables. He approximates to his inferiorcontemporaries only in the matter of fruit, salads, and oysters,not to mention wild-duck. He entertains no sympathy with thecannibal, who judges the flavour of his enemy improved by temporarycommitment to a subterranean larder; yet, to be sure, he keeps hisgrouse and his venison till it approaches the condition ofspoon-meat.
It naturally ensues, from the absence or scantiness of explicitor systematic information connected with the opening stages of suchinquiries as the present, that the student is compelled to draw hisown inferences from indirect or unwitting allusion; but so long asconjecture and hypothesis are not too freely indulged, this classof 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 asregarded Cookery in very early times among us, before an even morevaluable art—that of Printing—was discovered, we shallfind ourselves face to face with a rich and long chronologicalseries of books