Our viands

It is very white, and fashioned something like a door-knocker — thick in the centre, and tapering off so as to be fastened together with a kind of knob. In Italy the native bread is not good, although it looks tempting. Made in the shape of a ball, and covered with crusty knobs, it is as the apples of Sodom, so dry and sour that none but natives can eat it with relish. There is, however, a bread peculiar to North Italy which is palatable enough, but too BREAD 27 fanciful for everyday use. This bread is called grizzinf, and is made in long tubes a little larger than macaroni, and baked quite brown. When placed before you it resembles a bundle of sticks, and when fresh and crisp is very good, although not very satisfying. The best is made in Turin and Genoa. It is not known in South Italy, where macaroni may be said almost to take the place of bread, especially among the lower orders, who beg for money to eat macaroni instead of asking for bread. Macaroni is a stiff paste of flour and eggs, forced through holes so as to form long pipes; it is then hung across strings in the porches or windows of the houses to dry. In Naples it is eaten boiled in oil, and always with grated Parmesan cheese. In Germany the best white bread is everywhere made in small rolls of different shapes, very delicious when quite new, but the Germans have an almost superstitious belief in the medicinal virtues of aniseed, and all the ordinary house- hold bread is plentifully sprinkled with these seeds, the flavour of which is far from pleasant to an English palate. The Germans, also, eat rye bread, but of that anon. All through Europe at the present day the finest wheaten bread — chiefly in the form of rolls — is consumed by the upper classes, whilst the poorer people eat rye or barley bread. Probably little wheaten rolls were early in use in England when the ordinary household bread was of rye or barley. Shakespeare alludes to these delicate wheaten cakes when, in his song of the fairies, he says : — A grain o' the finest wheat Is manchet that we eat. But we must not enter into fairy lore, lest our subject should drift into something too ethereal for mortal appetite. 28 OUR VIANDS The bread of ancient Greece is said to have been of dazzling whiteness and exquisite taste, but they soon began to mix ingredients with the paste which altered its character, and seventy-two kinds of bread were introduced. Some of these, according to Soyer's ' History of Food,' were made with milk, honey, oil, cheese, and wine, mixed with best flour, and all were known as artos bread. Women sold this bread in an open market, as also azumos, a kind of biscuit made without leaven ; artologanos, in which wine, pepper, oil, and milk were introduced ; and escarites, made of light paste with raw sweet wine and honey. The poorer people had dolyres, made of rye and barley ; whilst ladies of fashion ate puff-cakes called placites or melitutes, and the workmen bought tyrontes, a bread mixed with cheese.