Our viands

1 There is a bell rung, called the Pancake Bell, the sound whereof makes thousands of people distracted, and forgetful either of manners or humanity. Then there is a thing called wheaten flour, which the cooks do mingle with water, eggs, spice, and other tragical magical enchantments, and then they put it by little-and-little into a frying-pan of boiling suet, where it makes a confused dismal hissing (like the Lernian snakes in the reeds of Acheron) until at last, by the skill of the cook, it is transformed into the form of a flip-jack called a pancake, which ominous incantation the ignorant people do devour very greedily/ Eggs, as a great ingredient in the pancake, are much in request on Shrove Tuesday, which, in Cornwall, gave rise to a very barbarous sport, for the hens, which had not laid an egg before Shrove Tuesday, were placed on the barn floor and beaten to death, or sometimes a hen, with some bells hung round it, was tied to a man's back, and others blindfolded and armed with boughs, ran after him and struck at the bird, guided by the bells, and when the bird had been killed in this manner it was boiled with bacon, and eaten with the pancakes. The British pancake has been transformed in France CAKES AND PUDDINGS 63 into the omelette, the vol-au-vent, the souffld, supplemented by delicate tartlets of extreme lightness, very sweet and full of cream, iced and ornamented with dried cherries and pistachio nuts. All these things have been elaborately evolved from the inner consciousness of many generations of French chefs, but primitive puddings doubtless consisted simply of grain of different kinds boiled in water or milk, to which various ingredients were added, according to taste, after the fashion of the national dish of Barbary called cuscosco, which consists of a sort of paste or porridge made of crumbled bread and enriched with small pieces of meat, vegetables, and condiments. This is placed in a large wooden or earthen bowl set in the middle of the company, each one thrusting their fingers in the bowl, stirring its contents, and helping themselves to such tit-bits as they may fancy. This cuscosco reminds one of a famous dish of our ancestors known as furmity, furmante, or frumenty, formerly indispensable at Christmas, but now relegated to Mid-Lent or Mothering Sunday, when the lesson for the day read in the churches, is of Joseph and his brethren, for this dish is popularly supposed to be that wherewith Joseph regaled his brothers, giving a double portion to Benjamin. The name comes probably fromfroment (wheat), in French, which would point to its introduction by the Normans. In Bath the wheat is sold in basins, boiled ready for use. In Chambers's ' Book of Days ' the following recipe is given as the most ancient known : — ' Take clean wheat, and bray it in a mortar that the hulls be all gone off, and seethe it till it burst, and take it up and let it cool ; and take clean fresh broth and sweet milk of almonds, 64 OUR VIANDS or sweet milk of kine, and temper it all; and take the yolks of eggs. Boil it a little, and set it down, and mess it forth with fat venison or fresh mutton.' Venison was seldom served without this accompaniment; but furmity, sweetened with sugar, was a favourite dish of itself, the 'clean broth' being omitted when a lord was to be the partaker.*