[381] Blunt, op. cit. pp. xxx-xxxi.
[382] Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale, IV, ii, 38 sqq.
[383] For sowce, see below, p. [565].
[384] The weekly allowance of beer to each member was supposed to be seven gallons, four of the better sort and three weaker, but the amount varied from house to house. See Linc. Visit. II, p. 89 (note). The Syon nuns had water on certain days, but doubtless as a mortification of the flesh, for it was sometimes complained of as a hardship when nuns had to drink water. (“Item they say that they do not get their corrody (i.e. weekly allowance of bread and beer) at the due times, but it is sometimes omitted for a fortnight and sometimes for a month, so that the nuns, by reason of the non-payment of the corrody, drink water.” Test. Ebor. I, p. 284.) The weekly allowance of bread was seven loaves. A note in the Register of Shaftesbury Abbey (15th century) which then numbered about 50 nuns and a large household, says: “Hit is to wytyng that me baketh and breweth by the wike in the Abbey of Shaftesbury atte leste weye xxxvj quarters whete and malt. And other while me baketh and breweth xlj quarters and ij bz. whete and malte.” Dugdale, Mon. II, p. 473.
[385] Aungier, op. cit. pp. 393-4.
[387] They are diversely defined as pancakes, cheese cakes or custards, but they differed from our pancakes in being made in crusts. See the recipe in Liber Cure Cocorum for flawns made with cheese:
Take new chese and grynde hyt fayre,
In morter with egges, without dysware;
Put powder therto of sugur, I say,
Coloure hit with safrone ful wele thou may;
Put hit in cofyns that ben fayre,
And bake hit forthe, I the pray.
Liber Cure Cocorum, ed. Morris (Phil. Soc. 1862), p. 39. A fifteenth century cookery book gives this recipe for Flathouns in lente: “Take and draw a thrifty Milke of Almandes; temper with Sugre Water; than take hardid cofyns [pie-crusts] and pore thin comad [mixture] theron; blaunch Almaundis hol and caste theron Pouder Gyngere, Canelle, Sugre, Salt and Safroun; bake hem and serue forth.” Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, ed. T. Austen (E.E.T.S. 1888), p. 56.