My pen loves to linger long over the gastronomies of those shaven voluptuaries, the ancient Italians; and my Caledonian readers will forgive the old tales when it is further set forth that the Romans introduced, amongst other things,
Haggis
into Bonnie Scotland. Yes, the poet’s “great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race” is but an Italian dish after all. The Apician pork haggis[3] was a boiled pig’s stomach filled with fry and brains, raw eggs, and pine-apples beaten to a pulp, and seasoned with liquamen. For although some of the Romans’ tastes savoured of refinement, many of them were “absolutely beastly.” The idea of pig’s fry and pine-apples mixed is horrible enough; but take a look into the constitution of this liquamen, and wonder no longer that Gibbons wrote his Decline and Fall with so much feeling and gusto. This sauce was obtained from the intestines, gills, and blood of fishes, great and small, stirred together with salt, and exposed in an open vat in the sun, until the compound became putrid. When putrefaction had done its work, wine and spices were added to the hell-broth, which was subsequently strained and sent into the Roman market. This liquamen was manufactured in Greece, and not one of all the poets of sunny Italy seems to have satirised the “made-in-Greece” custom, which in those days must have been almost as obnoxious as the “made-in-Germany” or the “made-in-Whitechapel” scare of to-day.
The usual farinaceous ingredient of the Roman haggis was frumenty, but frequently no grain whatever was applied; and instead of mincing the ingredients, as do the Scots, the ancients pounded them in a mortar, well moistened with liquamen, until reduced to pulp. We are further told in history that a Roman gladiator was capable, after playing with eggs, fish, nightingales’ tongues, dormice, and haggis, of finishing a wild boar at a sitting. But as the old lady remarked of the great tragedy, this happened a long time ago, so let’s hope it isn’t true.
The Saxon dining-table was oblong, and rounded at the ends. The cloth was crimson, with broad gilt edgings hanging low beneath the table, and, it is to be feared, often soiled by the dirty boots of the guests, who sat on chairs with covered backs, the counterfeit presentments of which are still to be seen in the Tottenham Court Road. The food consisted of fish, fowls, beef, mutton, venison, and pork—wild and domestic—either boiled, baked, or broiled, and handed to the company by the attendants on small sples. A favourite “fish joint” of the old Saxon was a cut out of the middle of a porpoise; and bread of the finest wheaten flour reposed in two silver baskets at each end of the table, above the salt, the retainers having to content themselves with coarser “household” out of a wooden cradle. Almost the only vegetable in use amongst the Saxons was colewort, although the Romans had brought over many others, years before; but hatred of anything foreign was more rampant in early Saxon days than at present. Forks were not introduced into England until during the reign of King “Jamie”: so that our ancestors had perforce to “thumb” their victuals. The fair Queen Elizabeth (like much more modern monarchs) was accustomed to raise to her mouth with her virgin fingers a turkey leg and gnaw it. But even in the earliest days of the thirteenth century, each person was provided with a small silver basin and two flowered napkins of the finest linen, for finger-washing and wiping purposes. Grapes, figs, nuts, apples, pears, and almonds, constituted a Saxon dessert; and in the reign of Edward III. an Act of Parliament was passed, forbidding any man or woman to be served with more than two courses, unless on high days and holidays, when each was entitled to three.
Here is the bill for the ingredients of a big dinner provided by a City Company in the fifteenth century: “Two loins of veal and two loins of mutton, 1s. 4d.; one loin of beef, 4d.; one dozen pigeons and 12 rabbits, 9d.; one pig and one capon, 1s.; one goose and 100 eggs, 1s. 0½d.; one leg of mutton, 2½d.; two gallons of sack, 1s. 4d.; eight gallons of strong ale, 1s. 6d.; total, 7s. 6d.” Alas! In these advanced days the goose alone would cost more than the “demmed total.”
Cedric the Saxon’s dining table, described in Ivanhoe, was of a much simpler description than the one noted above; and the fare also. But there was no lack of assorted liquors—old wine and ale, good mead and cider, rich morat (a mixture of honey and mulberry juice, a somewhat gouty beverage, probably), and odoriferous pigment—which was composed of highly-spiced wine, sweetened with honey. The Virgin Queen, at a later epoch, was catered for more delicately; and we read that she detested all coarse meats, evil smells, and strong wines. During the Georgian era coarse meats and strong wines were by no means out of favour; and Highland banquets especially were Gargantuan feasts, to be read of with awe. The dinner given by Fergus MacIvor, in honour of Captain Waverley, consisted of dishes of fish and game, carefully dressed, at the upper end of the table, immediately under the eye of the English stranger. “Lower down stood immense clumsy joints of beef,” says the gifted author, “which, but for the absence of pork, abhorred in the Highlands, resembled the rude festivity of the banquet of Penelope’s suitors. But the central dish was a yearling lamb, called a “hog in har’st,” roasted whole. It was set upon its legs, with a bunch of parsley in its mouth, and was probably exhibited in that form to gratify the pride of the cook, who piqued himself more on the plenty than the elegance of his master’s table. The sides of this poor animal”—the lamb, not the cook, we suppose is meant—“were fiercely attacked by the clansmen, some with dirks, others with the knives worn in the same sheath as the dagger, so that it was soon rendered a mangled and rueful spectacle.”
A spectacle which reminds the writer of a dinner table at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in the early sixties.
“Lower down,” continues Sir Walter, “the victuals seemed of yet coarser quality, though sufficiently abundant. Broth, onions, cheese, and the fragments of the feast, regaled the sons of Ivor, who feasted in the open air.”
The funeral baked meats used after the interment of the chief of the Clan Quhele (described in The Fair Maid of Perth) were also on a very extensive scale, and were, like the other meal, “digested” with pailfuls of usquebaugh, for which no Highland head that supported a bonnet was ever “the waur i’ th’ morn.” And the custom of placing bagpipers behind the chairs of the guests, after they have well drunk, which is still observed in Highland regiments, was probably introduced by the aforesaid Fergus MacIvor, who really ought to have known better.