Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

In an eleventh century vocabulary we meet with a tolerably rich variety of fish, of which the consumption was relatively larger in former times. The Saxons fished both with the basket and the net. Among the fish here enumerated are the whale (which was largely used for food), the dolphin, porpoise, crab, oyster, herring, cockle, smelt, and eel. But in the supplement to Alfric’s vocabulary, and in another belonging to the same epoch, there are important additions to this list : the salmon, the trout, the lobster, the bleak, with the whelk and other shell-fish. But we do not notice the turbot, sole, and many other varieties, which became familiar in the next generation or so. The turbot and sole are indeed included in the “Treatise on Utensils” of Neckam, as are likewise the lamprey (of which King John is said to have been very fond), bleak, gudgeon, conger, plaice, limpet, ray, and mackerel. The Early Englishman The fifteenth century, if I may judge from a vocabulary of that date in Wright’s collection, acquired a much larger choice of fish, and some of the names approximate more nearly to those in modern use. We meet with the sturgeon, the whiting, the roach, the miller’s thumb, the thornback, the codling, the perch, the gudgeon, the turbot, the pike, the tench, and the haddock. It is worth noticing also that a distinction was now drawn between the fisherman and the fishmonger — the man who caught the fish and he who sold it — piscatorial, piscarius; and in the vocabulary itself the leonine line is cited : “ Piscator prendit, quod piscarius bene vendit.” The whale was considerably brought into requisition for gastronomic purposes. It was found on the royal table, as weli as on that of the Lord Mayor of London. The cook either roasted it, and served it up on the spit, or boiled it and sent it in with peas ; the tongue and the tail were favourite parts. The porpoise, however, was brought into the hall whole, and was carved or under - and his Food. tranched by the officer in attendance. It was eaten with mustard. The piece de resistance at a banquet which Wolsey gave to some of his official acquaintances in 1509, was a young porpoise, which had cost eight shillings ; it was on the same occasion that His Eminence partook of strawberries and cream, perhaps ; he is reported to have been the person who made that pleasant combination fashionable. The grampus, or sea-wolf, was another article of food which bears testimony to the coarse palate of the early Englishman, and at the same time may afford a clue to the partiality for disguising condiments and spices. But it appears from an entry in his Privy Purse Expenses, under September 8, 1498, that Henry the Seventh thought a porpoise a valuable commodity and a fit dish for an ambassador, for on that date twenty-one shillings were paid to Cardinal Morton’s servant, who had procured one for some envoy then in London, perhaps the French representative, who is the recipient of a complimentary gratuity of ^49 10s. on April 12, 1499, at his departure from England. 22 The Early Englishman In the fifteenth century the existing stock of fish for culinary purposes received, if we may trust the vocabularies, a few accessions ; as, for instance, the bream, the skate, the flounder, and the hake.