Practical gastronomy and culinary dictionary

Table-cloths were used at Norman feasts, and the long ends were used as napkins ; hence their condition would scarcely allow of a second use. Later on these were discarded. Forks were not known at that time, but bills of fare showed some variety and taste as well as * From phasiamis, a biid coming from the river Phasis, in Colchid, south of Caucasus. THE ABT OF COOKERY 15 a great deal of costliness. Their cookery was such an improvement on that of their predecessors in the island that the French and Norman dishes drove the Saxon tongue and table into an almost vulgar position. The art was so much esteemed that monarchs even granted estates on condition that the holder thereof should, through his cook, prepare a certain dish at stated periods, and set it before the king. The Norman conqueror William bestowed several portions of land on these highly favoured domestics "the cooks." This shows us how sensible our fore- fathers were, as at that time the talent of knowing how to cook was so rare that it was considered a high dis- tinction, so much so that the king's first and second cooks were titled *' Esquires " by their office. Under the Normans the celebrated boar's head be- came a royal dish, and its progress from the kitchen to the banqueting hall was under the escort of a guard, and heralded by trumpeters. There is no doubt that our forefathers had firm faith in good cooking, that is, of course, as good as it could be at the time. It would, however, be unjust to draw any comparison be- tween the cooking of the days of yore and to-day. But it was the best they could get, and that perhaps might compare favourably with sojne of the cookery with which many of us moderns are familiar. The saying, "God sent meat, and the devil sent cooks," is a maxim which up to the present has not been success- fully disputed ; and if, at occasional exceptions, this may have been true, there is, owing to the intelligence 16 PRACTICAL GASTRONOMY of the present age, no longer any need for the old sneer of this dyspeptic cynic. The ancient Britons have more than once been com- pared with the New Zealanders. They were, perhaps, more unci\ilised and quite as ignorant, and their absti- nence from the flesh of hares and poultry and, in the northern parts of the island, from fish, bespeaks a race which lacked at once industry and knowledge. Indeed, it is by no means certain that we do not wrong the New Zealanders by suggesting their possible inferiority to the Britons, seeing that the latter are strongly suspected of being guilty of the most revolting canni- balism. They were clever enough to brew mead and ale, but T\dne and civilisation were brought to them by their enemies, the Roman invaders, who, for some reasons, they might have welcomed as " our friends the enemy." Their seats were skins or bundles of hay flung on the ground, their table was a low stool, around which British chiefs sat. They ate but twice a day, their last meal being the more important one. They used to tear their food with teeth and nails, or hacked at it with a wretched knife, as bad as anything of the sort now in common use in gaol. The Anglo-Saxons introduced four meals a day : they ate good solid joints of flesh meat, boiled, baked, or broiled. It would seem that in those days cooks were not of such an illustrious guild as that which they subse-