Italians had a sauce of their own, according to Moryson (who has also supplied all the above German recipes), made of bread steeped in broth, walnuts, some leaves of marjoram pounded in a mortar, and gooseberry juice. Much need they had of a sauce, too, for by the "lex Foscarini" it was forbidden to kill an ox until he was unfit for work in the fields. It may be suggested that it is time the "lex Foscarini" was repealed. In the north was plenty of mutton and veal; variety of fish and poultry, mushrooms, snails, and frogs; in Tuscany, kid and boar. First and last everywhere came butter and cheese; everywhere, that is, where any pretence was made of catering for tourists; at Carrara Moryson found the inns only fit for labourers, and dined on herbs, eggs, and chestnuts, while Peter Mundy, near Turin, had to pay the equivalent of six shillings for "an egg and a frog and bad wine." De Thou, moreover, using a main road, that from Naples to Rome, became so done up through the badness of the inns as to seem to have completed a long and troublesome illness rather than a journey. But something might be said for the average Italian inn as seen from the street. Through the great open windows—really open, for there was rarely glass in Italian windows except at Venice—the tables were in view, always spread with white cloths, strewn with flowers and fig-leaves and fruits, with glasses set filled with different coloured wines; during summer, the glasses would be floating in an earthen vessel, for coolness.
In France, for some reason, Normandy seems to have made foreigners more comfortable than elsewhere, yet Picardy, so little distant, was just the opposite. Picardy, however, at this time was stamped with the character of border-country more disastrously than any other district of France. Nothing remained, indeed, to the country as a whole, as regards cooking, but a reputation for entrées, or, as they were called then, "quelques-choses." "A hard bed and an empty kitchen" was a common experience in different districts; one party arrived at Antibes, on the Riviera, in 1606, to find one melon constituting all the provisions of the only inn.
Comparison of the fare in the various countries of Europe shows no more striking inequalities of supply than is the case with butter: in Poland so plentiful as to be used for greasing cart-wheels; in France so scarce and so bad that English ambassadors used to import theirs from home; in Spain still scarcer, except in cow-breeding Estremadura. A German, when he wanted to buy butter, was directed to an apothecary, who produced a little, and that much rancid, preserved in a she-goat's bladder for use as an ingredient in salves, telling him there was not such another quantity in all Castile.
It was not merely on account of the sleeping accommodation that those who had been to Spain thanked God for their return and wondered at it. The wine, they said, was undrinkable, owing to the flavour imparted to it by the skins that held it; and as for eatables, all had to be bought separately by the traveller and cooked by him when he was tired. A still greater trouble was to find any to buy. One complains that his stomach roared for want of victuals and had to be answered with nothing but roast onions; and so on. But here again can be traced the effects of their buying their experience in the north: what the south thought of the north may be guessed from the Andalusian hero of a picaresque tale recollecting how the food of a Catalan acquaintance of his consisted of hard bread once every three days. The force of prejudice may be exemplified by a note or two from the journal of a courtier[96] who followed after Prince Charles when the latter went incognito to Madrid. His chief complaints as to food are: At the first stopping-place past Santander, whither notice of their coming had been sent a fortnight earlier, they had a plank instead of a table, a few eggs, half a kid burnt black, and no table linen. At a tavern in a wood, the woman laid a cloth on a stool by way of a table, and placed two loaves on it while she fried eggs and bacon for them: enter, from the wood, two black swine who knock the stool over and depart with a loaf each. And yet, although he has noted having enjoyed a good fat turkey at one place and very good hens at another, when he lands at Weymouth he says that there was more meat on the table than he had seen in two hundred miles riding in Spain.
But even in the north different tales are told sometimes. Charles II, when in exile, writes from Saragossa,[97] "But I am very much deceived in the travelling in Spain, for, by all reports, I did expect ill cheer and worse living, and hitherto we have found both the beds, and especially the meat very good.... God keep you, and send you to eat as good mutton as we have every meal." Lady Fanshawe is more detailed. "I find it a received opinion that Spain affords not food either good or plentiful; true it is that strangers who have neither skill to choose, nor money to buy, will find themselves at a loss: but there is not in the Christian world better wines than their midland wines are especially, besides sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk; their corn white to a miracle, and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world; bacon beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much larger and fatter than ours; mutton most excellent; capons much better than ours.... They have the best partridges I ever eat, and the best sausages; and salmons, pikes, and sea-breams which they send up in pickle to Madrid, and dolphins, which are excellent meat and carps, and many other sorts of fish. The cream, called 'nata,' is much sweeter and thicker than any I ever saw in England; their eggs much exceed ours; and so all sorts of salads and roots and fruits. What I most admired are melons, peaches, burgamot pears, grapes, oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, pomegranates; besides that I have eaten many sorts of biscuits, cakes, cheese, and excellent sweetmeats I have not here mentioned."
Both these quotations, it is true, refer to the middle of the seventeenth century.
England was a land of plenty in these days; Poland no less so. The sum of the experience of those who had first-hand means of comparison suggests that Poland was as great an importer of luxuries as any country in Europe. Muscovy did not import, but was well off, nevertheless; plenty of beef, mutton, pork, and veal, and all the more of them for foreigners seeing that, with fast-days so numerous as they were, the natives had become so used to salt fish that they ate little meat, although the salt fish, insufficiently salted, was often in a state like that of the fish which the good angel provided for Tobit to protect him from a demon, the scent whereof was so terrible that it drove the fiend into the uttermost parts of Egypt. In Lent butter was replaced by caviare. An ambassador's secretary has a pleasant picture to draw of wayside fare; when they reached a village, the local priest would appear with gooseberries, or fish, or a hen, or some eggs, as a present; was rewarded with aqua-vitæ, and generally went home drunk.
As for food at sea, on small boats no fires were allowed. Then you were limited, in the Mediterranean, to biscuit, onions, garlic, and dried fish. On the bigger ships there was garlic again, to roast which and call it "pigeon" was a stock joke with the Greek sailors. On an Italian ship of nine hundred tons one traveller fared well: there were two table-d'hôte rates; he chose the higher one: knife, spoon, fork, and a glass to himself were provided, fresh bread for three days after leaving a harbour, fresh meat at first and afterwards salt meat, and on fast days, eggs, fish, vegetables, and fruit. An English idea[98] of victualling a ship included wheat, rice, currants, sugar, prunes, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, cloves, oil, old cheese, wine, vinegar, canary sack, aqua-vitæ, water, lemon juice, biscuit, oatmeal, bacon, dried neats' tongues, roast beef preserved in vinegar, and legs of mutton minced and stewed and packed in butter in earthen pots; together with a few luxuries, such as marmalade and almonds.
Finally, there is the food to be met with in Ireland, concerning which it is enough to quote:[99] "Your diet shall be more welcome and plentiful than cleanly and handsome; for although they did never see you before, they will make you the best cheer their country yieldeth for two or three days and take not anything therefor."
Except in Italy, fingers invariably did the work of forks; and often of knives, too. The French were the only people who were in the habit of washing before they sat down to table; but this is by no means so much to their credit as it seems at first sight, for it was the result of their getting into such a state previously as to render them intolerable even to themselves. Except for the effects of drunkenness, the Germans appear to have been the pleasantest table companions, in spite of all sitting at one round table; or rather, because of it, for men were the more careful of behaving in a way to which they would have no objection if their neighbours imitated it. Moreover Germans made a practice of having a bath every Saturday night. From this common table no one was excluded in Germany except the hangman, for whose exclusive use a separate table was reserved. The rest of the dining-room furniture consisted of a leather-covered couch for those who were too drunk to do anything but lie down.