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In Markham's treatise there is a sauce for green-geese and one for stubble-geese, a sauce for pigeons and stock-doves, a gallantine for bitterns, bustards, and herns. A quelquechose was a fricassee or a mixture of many ingredients, and meats broiled upon the coals were termed carbonadoes. Verjuice was made from crab-apples, to which damask-rose leaves were added previous to fermentation. Vinegar was frequently made from ale placed in the sun to sour, and flavoured with leaves of damask roses. A recipe for hippocras is naturally given, together with directions for the manufacture of all manner of wines and beverages. Puddings, pies, and tarts were still more familiar then than now. Of pies there was an infinite assortment—from Olave, marrow-bone, hare, chicken, bacon, herring, ling, and calves'-foot to oyster, chewet, Warden, pippin, Codlin, and minc'd. Markham's recipe for "A Herring Pye" will serve as well as any to illustrate the character of the amalgams that passed under the names of pies, puddings, and tarts:
"A Herring Pye:—Take white pickled Herrings of one night's watering, and boyl them a little, then take off the skin, and take only the backs of them, and pick the fish clean from the bones; then take good store of Raisins of the sun, and stone them; and put them to the Fish; then take a Warden or two, and pare it, and slice it in small slices from the core, and put it likewise to the fish; then with a very sharp shredding Knife shred all as small and fine as may be: then put to it good store of Currants, Sugar, Cinnamon, slic't Dates, and so put it into the coffin, with good store of sweet Butter, and so cover it, and leave onely a round vent-hole on the top of the lid, and so bake it like Pies of that nature. When it is sufficiently bak't, draw it out, and take Claret Wine, and a little Verjuyce, Sugar, Cinnamon, and sweet Butter, and boyl them together: then put it in at the vent-hole, and shake the Pye a little, and put it again into the Oven for a little space, and so serve it up, the lid being candied over with Sugar, and the sides of the dish trimmed with Sugar."
But many recipes are given in the cook-books, both in the old and the new, which the wise reader will avoid, and perchance Markham's herring-pie was among the number. It were pleasanter, at any rate, to take John Fletcher's prescription for some contemporaneous dishes, where, after he would have "the pig turn merrily, merrily, ah! and let the fat goose swim," he exclaims:
"The stewed cock shall crow, cock-a-loodle loo,
A loud cock-a-loodle shall he crow;
The duck and the drake shall swim in a lake
Of onions and claret below."
The wines and beverages of old corresponded to many of the dishes themselves; which of these was most productive of indigestion it were difficult to state. Hippocras, so generously indulged in, not to mention posset, mead, metheglin, and perry, must have been a potent factor in fomenting the uric-acid diathesis. When to these common beverages are added the fiery, heavy, sweet, and mixed wines that were in general use, it is scarcely surprising that the seeds of gout were sown broadcast, and that the indiscretions of the fathers were visited upon the children unto the existing generation. Even Milton did not escape, while Spenser, Sir William Temple, and a host of worthies who were supposed to be abstemious in their diet were victims to arthritic complaints. How Shakespeare eluded the malady seems a miracle, in view of the existing viands and beverages and the necessary lack of exercise attendant on his literary pursuits. Alexander Neckham, in his twelfth-century treatise, mentions claré and nectar as proper to be found in the cellar or in the storehouse. Claré was a mixture of clear red wine, the best of which came from Guyenne, with honey, sugar, and spices, as distinguished from piment or nectar, a similar compound, but with more substance, founded on the red wine of Burgundy, Dauphiné, etc.
In ancient days the taste was for "strong, sharp, and full-flavoured" wines. Bordeaux, or "claret," as it is now made was unknown. Vitification and vinification were then undeveloped compared with the present time. In place of the existing delicate growths of the Médoc were the fiery wines of Guyenne and Gascony and the heavy products of Provence and Languedoc. It is to be supposed, likewise, that the Rhenish wines at that time were totally different from those of the Rheingau and the Bavarian Palatinate now. But the kinds mostly in vogue were sack and malmsey, muscadel and canary, and "bastard" or malaga, port as yet not having been introduced into England.