Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

A pepper mill. A mustard quem. Boards. A salt-box An iron range. Iron racks. The Kitchen. A tin pot. Pot hooks. A galley bawk to suspend the kettle or pot over the fire. In the larders (wet and dry) were : — Moulding boards for pastry. A boulting tub for meal. A little table. Here follows the return other vessels belonging Spits, square and round, and various sizes. Bearers. Crooks. and dry) and pastry A spice cupboard. A chest for oatmeal. A trough. Hanging and other shelves. of pewter, brass, and to the kitchen : — Pewter dishes of nine sizes (from Newcastle). Long dishes for ' - rabbits. Saucers. Chargers Pie plates. Voider. A beef-prick. Fire shovels and tongs. A brig (a sort of brandreth). A cullender. ja A pewter bakingpan. Kettles of brass. A skillet. A brandreth. A shredding knife. A chopping knife. An apple cradle. A pair of irons to make wafers with. A brass pot-lid. ^ Beef-axes and \ .5 knives. f Slaughter ropes. ( £ Beef stangs. ) 55 In the beef-house was an assortment of tubs, Q 2 The Kitchen. casks, and hogsheads. Table knives, forks, spoons, and drinking-vessels presumably belonged to another department. The dripping-pan is noticed in Breton’s “ Fantasticks,” 1626 : “Dishes and trenchers are necessary servants, and they that have no meat may go scrape ; a Spit and a Drippingpan would do well, if well furnished.” Flecknoe, again, in his character of a “ Miserable old Gentlewoman,” inserted among his “ Enigmatical Characters,” 1658, speaks of her letting her prayer-book fall into the drippingpan, and the dog and the cat quarrelling over it, and at last agreeing to pray on it ! But this is a branch of the subject I cannot afford further to penetrate. Yet I must say a word about the polished maple-wood bowl, or maser , with its mottoes and quaint devices, which figured on the side-board of the yeoman and the franklin, and which Chaucer must have often seen in their homes. Like everything else which becomes popular, it was copied in the precious metals, with costly and elaborate goldsmith’s work ; but its interest for us is local, and does The Kitchen. not lend itself to change of material and neighbourhood. The habits of the poor and middle classes are apt to awaken a keener curiosity in our minds from the comparatively slender information which has come to us upon them ; and as in the case of the maser, the laverwhichwas employed in humble circles for washing the hands before and after a meal was, not of gold or silver, as in the houses of the nobility, but of brass or laten, nor was it in either instance a ceremonious form, but a necessary process. The modern finger-glass and rose-water dish, which are an incidence of every entertainment of pretension, and in higher society as much a parcel of the dinner-table as knives and forks, are, from a mediaeval standpoint, luxurious anachronisms. In Archbishop Alfric’s “ Colloquy,” originally written in the tenth century, and subsequently augmented and enriched with a Saxon gloss by one of his pupils, the cook is one of the persons introduced and interrogated. He is asked what his profession is worth to the community ; and he replies that without him people would have to eat their The Kitchen.