VEGETABLES.
Very few esculent plants are mentioned in the Accounts of the Middle Ages. Dried peas and beans, parsley, fennel, onions, green peas, and new beans, are the only species named. Pot-herbs, of which the names are not specified, but which served eleven days, cost 6d. There is much uncertainty upon the subject of the cultivation of vegetables, in this country, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Cresses, endive, lettuces, beets, parsnips, carrots, cabbages, leeks, radishes, and cardoons, were grown in France during the reign of Charlemagne; but it is doubtful whether many of these varieties had penetrated into England at that early period. The most skilful horticulturists of the Middle Ages were ecclesiastics, and it is possible that in the gardens of monasteries many vegetables were reared which were not in common use among the laity. Even in the fifteenth century, the general produce of the English kitchen garden was contemptible when compared with that of the Low Countries, France, and Italy. Gilbert Kymer can enumerate only, besides a few wild and forgotten sorts, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, beetroot, trefoil, bugloss, borage, celery, purslane, fennel, smallage, thyme, hyssop, parsley, mint, a species of turnip, and small white onions. According to him, all these plants were boiled with meat. He observes also that some were eaten raw, in spring and summer, with olive-oil and spices, but questions the propriety of the custom. This is, perhaps, the earliest notice extant of the use of salads in England.
The subject of the supplies of the table with food is a very large one; and leaves us but space to remark that the condition of food, an important point of its worth, must have suffered from the slow mode of conveyance in former times. The advantages which we enjoy in this age of rapid transit have been thus cleverly illustrated by a contemporary:—"A little more than half a century ago it took about six weeks to drive the herds of cattle from the north of Scotland to the metropolis: now they can be whirled here in a few hours. Fish in great variety may be caught in the morning on the coast of Berwick and Coquet, and be boiling in the kitchens of Belgravia on the same evening for dinner. In exchange for the sheep and beeves from the highlands and Cheviot, the choice fruits and early vegetables of the south are rapidly passed. By means of steamships and other quick sailing vessels, the oranges of Spain and Portugal, the grapes of France and Italy, and the oxen, sheep, fruits, &c. of other foreign parts are brought in fine condition; and delicacies which were not easily obtained even by the rich are now common amongst the multitude. But for this increased facility of conveyance how would it be possible to feed the immense multitude of London, which, in half a century of time, will in all probability number 5,000,000?"