Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

Neckam mentions the roasting-spit, elsewhere called the roasting-iron ; but I fail to detect skewers, though they can hardly have been wanting. Ladles for basting and stirring were familiar. As to the spit itself, it became a showy article of plate, when the fashion arose of serving up the meat upon it in the hall ; and the tenure by which Finchingfield in Essex was held in capite in the reign of Edward III. — that of turning the spit at the [illustration: The Kitchen.] coronation — demonstrates that the instrument was of sufficient standing to be taken into service as a memorial formality. The fifteenth century vocabulary notices the salt-cellar, the spoon, the trencher, and the table-cloth. The catalogue comprises morsus , a bit , which shows that bit and bite are synonymous, or rather, that the latter is the true word as still used in Scotland, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire, from the last of which the Pilgrims carried it across the Atlantic, where it is a current Americanism, not for one bite, but as many as you please, which is, in fact, the modern provincial interpretation of the phrase, but not the antique English one. The word towel was indifferently applied, perhaps, for a cloth for use at the table or in the lavatory. Yet there was also the manuturgium , or hand-cloth, a speciality rendered imperative by the mediaeval fashion of eating. In the inventory of the linen at Gilling, in Yorkshire, one of the seats of the Fairfax family, made in 1590, occur: — “Item, napkins vj. dozen. Item, new napkins vj. dozen.” This entry may or may not warrant a conclu- [illustration: The Kitchen.] sion that the family bought that quantity at a time — not a very excessive store, considering the untidy habits of eating and the difficulty of making new purchases at short notice. Another mark of refinement is the resort to th znapron, corruptly apron , to protect the dress during the performance of kitchen work. But the fifteenth century was evidently growing wealthier in its articles of use and luxury ; the garden and the kitchen only kept pace with the bed-chamber and the dining-hall, the dairy and the laundry, the stable and the outbuildings. An extensive nomenclature was steadily growing up, and the Latin, old French, and Saxon terms were giving way on all sides to the English. It has been now for some time an allowed and understood thing that in these domestic backgrounds the growth of our country and the minuter traits of private life are to be studied with most clear and usurious profit. The trencher, at first of bread, then of wood, after a while of pewter, and eventually of pottery, porcelain or china-earth, as it was called, and the precious metals, afforded [illustration: The Kitchen.] abundant scope for the fancy of the artist, even in the remote days when the material for it came from the timber-dealer, and sets of twelve were sometimes decorated on the face with subjects taken from real life, and on the back with emblems of the purpose to which they were destined. Puttenham, whose “ Art of English Poetry” lay in MS. some years before it was published in 1589, speaks of the posies on trenchers and banqueting dishes. The author of “ Our English Home” alludes to a very curious set, painted in subjects and belonging to the reign of James I., which was exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries’ rooms by Colonel Sykes.