Having made wide search amongst old and musty manuscripts, I can find no record of a bill-of-fare of the first meal of the ancient Britons. Our blue forefathers, in all probability, but seldom assisted at any such smart function as a wedding-breakfast, or even a hunting one; for the simple reason that it was a case with them of, “no hunt, no breakfast.” Unless one or other had killed the deer, or the wild-boar, or some other living thing to furnish the refection the feast was a Barmecide one, and much as we have heard of the strength and hardiness of our blue forefathers, many of them must have died of sheer starvation. For they had no weapons but clubs, and rough cut flints, with which to kill the beasts of the country—who were, however, occasionally lured into pitfalls; and as to fish, unless they “tickled” them, the denizens of the streams must have had an easy time of it. They had sheep, but these were valuable chiefly on account of their wool; as used to be the case in Australia, ere the tinned meat trade was established. Most of the fruits and vegetables which we enjoy to-day were introduced into Britain by the Romans. Snipe and woodcock and (in the north) grouse may have been bagged, as well as hares. But these poor savages knew not rabbits by sight, nor indeed, much of the feathered fowl which their more favoured descendants are in the habit of shooting, or otherwise destroying, for food. The ancient Britons knew not bacon and eggs, nor the toothsome kipper, nor yet the marmalade of Dundee. As for bread, it was not invented in any shape or form until much later; and its primitive state was a tough paste of flour, water, and (occasionally) milk—something like the “damper” of the Australian bush, or the unleavened chupati which the poorer classes in Hindustan put up with, after baking it, at the present day.
The hardy, independent Saxon, had a much better time of it, in the way of meat and drink. But with supper forming the chief meal of the day, his breakfast was a simple, though plentiful one, and consisted chiefly of venison pasty and the flesh of goats, washed down with ale, or mead.
“A free breakfast-table of Elizabeth’s time,” says an old authority, “or even during the more recent reign of Charles II., would contrast oddly with our modern morning meal. There were meats, hot and cold; beef and brawn, and boar’s head, the venison pasty, and the
Wardon Pie
of west country pears. There was hot bread, too, and sundry ‘cates’ which would now be strange to our eyes. But to wash down these substantial viands there was little save ale. The most delicate lady could procure no more suitable beverage than the blood of John Barleycorn. The most fretful invalid had to be content with a mug of small beer, stirred up with a sprig of rosemary. Wine, hippocras, and metheglin were potations for supper-time, not for breakfast, and beer reigned supreme. None but home productions figured on the board of our ancestors. Not for them were seas traversed, or tropical shores visited, as for us. Yemen and Ceylon, Assam and Cathay, Cuba and Peru, did not send daily tribute to their tables, and the very names of tea and coffee, of cocoa and chocolate, were to them unknown. The dethronement of ale, subsequent on the introduction of these eastern products, is one of the most marked events which have severed the social life of the present day from that of the past.”
With the exception of the Wardon pie and the “cates,” the above bill-of-fare would probably satisfy the cravings of the ordinary “Johnny” of to-day, who has heard the chimes at midnight, and would sooner face a charging tiger than drink tea or coffee with his first meal, which, alas! but too often consists of a hot-pickle sandwich and a “brandy and soda,” with not quite all the soda in. But just imagine the fine lady of to-day with a large tankard of Burton ale facing her at the breakfast-table.
Tea,
which is said to have been introduced into China by Djarma, a native of India, about A.D. 500, was not familiar in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. And it was not until 1657, when Garraway opened a tea-house in Exchange Alley, that Londoners began tea-drinking as an experiment. In 1662 Pepys writes—
“Home, and there find my wife making of tea”—two years before, he called it “tee (a China drink)”—“a drink which Mr. Pelling the Pothicary tells her is good for her cold and defluxions.”