Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

greens and flesh raw ; whereupon it is rejoined that they might readily dress them themselves ; to which the cook can only answer, that in such case all men would be reduced to the position of servants. The kitchen had its chef or master-cook (archimacherus), under-cooks, a waferer or maker of sweets, a scullion or swiller (who is otherwise described as a quistron ), and knaves, or boys for preparing the meat ; and all these had their special functions and implements. Even in the fifteenth century the appliances for cookery were evidently far more numerous than they had been. An illustrated vocabulary portrays, among other items, the dressingboard, the dressing-knife, the roasting-iron, the frying-pan, the spit-turner (in lieu of the old turn-broach), the andiron, the ladle, the slice, the skummer; and the assitabulum, or saucer, first presents itself. It seems as if the butler and the pantler had their own separate quarters; and the different species of wine, and the vessels for holding it, are not forgotten. The archaic pantry was dedicated, The Kitchen. not to its later objects, but to that which the name strictly signifies ; but at the same time the writer warrants us in concluding, that the pantry accommodated certain miscellaneous utensils, as he comprises in its contents a candlestick, a table or board-cloth, a handcloth or napkin, a drinking bowl, a saucer, and a spoon. The kitchen, in short, comprised within its boundaries a far larger variety of domestic requisites of all kinds than its modern representative, which deals with an external machinery so totally changed. The ancient Court of England was so differently constituted from the present, and so many offices which sprang out of the feudal system have fallen into desuetude, that it requires a considerable effort to imagine a condition of things, where the master-cook of our lord the king was a personage of high rank and extended possessions. How early the functions of cook and the property attached to the position were separated, and the tenure of the land made dependent on a nominal ceremony, is not quite clear. Warner thinks that it was in the Conqueror’s time ; but The Kitchen. at any rate, in that of Henry II. the husband of the heiress of Bartholomew de Cheney held his land in Addington, Surrey, by the serjeantry of finding a cook to dress the victuals at the coronation ; the custom was kept up at least so late as the reign of George III., to whom at his coronation the lord of the manor of Addington presented a dish of pottage. The tenure was varied in its details from time to time. But for my purpose it is sufficient that manorial rights were acquired by the magnus coquus or magister coquorum in the same way as by the grand butler and other officers of state ; and when so large a share of the splendour of royalty continued for centuries to emanate from the kitchen, it was scarcely inappropriate or unfair to confer on that department of state some titular distinction, and endow the holder with substantial honours. To the Grand Chamberlain and the Grand Butler the Grand Cook was a meet appendage. The primary object of these feudal endowments was the establishment of a cordon round the throne of powerful subjects under The Kitchen.