Our foreign kitchen vegetables have, for the most part, been procured from the southern countries, but chiefly from Italy; and the number of them has increased in an uncommon degree in the course of the last two centuries. Many of them require laborious attention to make them thrive in our severe climate. On the other hand, some grow so readily, and increase so much without culture, even in the open fields, that they have become like indigenous weeds, as is the case with hops, which at present abound in our hedges. Some plants, however, both indigenous and foreign, which were formerly raised by art and used at the table, are no longer cultivated, because we have become acquainted with others more beneficial. Many of them served our forefathers in the room of foreign spices, to the use of which trading companies have accustomed us, much to their advantage and to our hurt. It is true also that many have been banished merely by fashion; for this tyrant, which rules with universal sway, commands the taste as well as the smell to consider as intolerable articles to which our ancestors had a peculiar attachment.
In the oldest times mankind were so fond of sweet things, that the goodness and agreeable taste of every kind of food was determined according to the degree of its sweetness; and such is the manner of judging even at present throughout all the East, in Africa, and in America. This is the case also among us with the greater part of the lower classes, who are not able to follow the mode of richer tables. In the northern countries this taste is almost everywhere prevalent. Thus the Swedes spoil, by the addition of sugar, costly Rhenish wine, sour kraut, and other articles, the agreeable tartness of which is gratifying to other nations. In proportion to their population and luxury, the Swedes seem to use more sugar than the Germans, and the Germans more than the English or French; and one might almost suspect that a taste for sweet things were in the inverse ratio of civilization[843]. At any rate, one can thus explain why many vegetable productions, which some centuries ago were reckoned among the most agreeable dishes, appear to us to be nauseously sweet. Skirret, which the emperor Tiberius caused to be brought for the use of his table from the Rhine, is little relished at present; and the case is the same with parsnips, some kinds of apples, and several other things.
Fashion sometimes recalls into use species long forgotten, and with the greatest success, when they are introduced under a different name. Thus, after an interval of many years, some began to cultivate again monks-rhubarb[844], and to recommend this sourish plant instead of the more savoury spinage. According to Bock, it was transplanted in the middle ages by the monks from the woods into gardens, to which it has been again brought back under the imposing appellation of English spinage.
Before the commencement of the Christian æra, when the use of sensual enjoyments was not so well-regulated and modified by religious and political principles, many vegetables and other dishes were praised and recommended by writers on agriculture and cookery, as well as by the most favourite poets and eminent authors, on account of effects which cannot at present be named, except in the writings of physicians, without disgusting the reader and incurring the imputation of indelicacy. When this mode of thinking began to prevail, people detested to see in their gardens or on their tables plants which, in consequence of indecent properties, were generally known; and by being thus disused, the knowledge of them was at length so much lost, that we know only their old names, and what the ancients have related respecting them. In this manner, many receipts in Apicius are totally unintelligible, because we are no longer acquainted with the things for the preparation of which he gives directions. Of this kind are the numerous bulbous roots (bulbi), which formed the most favourite dishes of the Greeks and the Romans, and which at present no botanist, much less commentator, would be able to determine. They belong to the lost arts, but not to those which were abandoned because better ones were found to supply their place. The American vanilla, which perhaps was indebted only to its high price for the permission of being mixed with chocolate, does not certainly supply the place of the ancient Megarean bulbs, as our gunpowder does that of the Greek fire.
Among those kitchen vegetables which were formerly cultivated, but at present are no more esteemed, are the following:—Winter-cresses[845], an indigenous plant, the young leaves of which, like water-cresses, may be eaten in winter as salad; also common alexanders[846], which in the seventeenth century was used instead of celery; bulbous chærophyllum[847], the roots of which are still brought to market at Vienna, where people well know what is good, and where they are boiled and eaten as salad with vinegar and oil. Rampion[848] was formerly used in the like manner. The earth-nut[849], which grows wild in many parts of Germany, is still cultivated in Holland and in some districts on the Rhine. Rocket (Eruca sativa), the young leaves of which were readily eaten by our forefathers as salad, is no longer esteemed, partly on account of its harsh taste, and partly on account of its nauseous smell, which resembles that of rancid bacon; it has however been still retained in Italy, “excitet ut Veneri tardos eruca maritos[850].” Vetches (Lathyrus sativus, and Cicer) are now banished from our gardens, as experience has shown that they are prejudicial to the health. When pepper was so dear, that to promise a saint yearly a pound of it was considered as a liberal bequest, economical housewives seasoned their dishes with the leaves of pepper-wort (Lepidium latifolium), which on this account is called at present in England poor man’s pepper.
Borage (Borago officinalis), since the fourteenth, or at least the fifteenth century, has been sown not only for medicinal purposes, but for the use of the kitchen. The young leaves, which however soon become hard, rough, and unfit for the table, were used in soup, and the beautiful blue flowers were put into salad and wine. This plant was not known to the ancients; for the conjecture that it was what they called buglossum, is not very probable. As far as I have been able to learn, Nicholas Myrepsus, who lived in the beginning of the fourteenth century, is the first who uses the name πουράκιον, which certainly means borago. But who knows whence this writer, who introduces in his works a great many new inexplicable names, some of them formed from the Greek, Latin, and Italian, obtained that appellation? Some of the old botanists have conjectured that it is derived from the word corago, which Apuleius, whose period is uncertain, gives as a synonym of buglossum. Some think that the reading in Apuleius ought to be borago; and others assert that corago is the true name, and arose from the quality which the plant has of strengthening the heart; consequently we ought properly to read corago, and not borago[851]. It is probable that our forefathers, under the idea that their borage was the buglossum of the ancients, and therefore had the property of strengthening the heart, threw the flowers into wine, that their spirits might by these means be more enlivened. Our borage is certainly a foreign plant, and Cæsalpinus said that it was brought from other countries to Italy. Linnæus[852] positively states that it first came from Aleppo; but I have not yet been able to find on what authority this assertion is founded. At present borage, at least in the German cookery, is no longer used.
Among the kitchen vegetables of which no certain traces are to be found in the works of the ancients, is spinage (Spinacea oleracea). Its native country is unknown; but the name is new, and certainly derived from the nature of its prickly seeds. As far as I know, it first occurs in the year 1351, among the food used by the monks on fast-days[853]; and at that time it was Spinargium or Spinachium. Meursius found in the middle ages σπινάκιον, in a poem which he has often mentioned, but not defined with sufficient accuracy[854]. This plant seems to have been made known from Spain; for many of the old botanists, such for example as Bock, call it olus Hispanicum. Ruellius and others name it Atriplex Hispaniensis; and the latter adds, that the Arabians or Moors called it Hispanach, which signifies Spanish plant; it is however well known that formerly everything foreign was styled Spanish. None of the kitchen vegetables of the ancients seem to approach nearer to spinage than their Blitum, which Rondolet considered to be the same. But all the properties assigned to this vegetable production, namely, that it was insipid, and that on this account it was necessary to render it palatable by the addition of vinegar, pepper, and other things; that it readily multiplied; that it was indigestible and gently aperient; perfectly correspond, not only with our spinage, but with many other plants, such, for example, as our beet and orach, and the good king Henry (Chenopodium bonus Henricus), the young leaves of which are still dressed as spinage. It is also possible that the blitum of the ancients may have been a kind of Amaranthus, some species of which are certainly eatable. Blitum, therefore, will remain as difficult to be defined as the malva, which was used at the same time.
The Brassicæ of the ancients belonged certainly to the cabbage genus; yet no one, as far as I know, has examined botanically what is said of them, and completely proved their identity. It would however be fruitless labour to attempt to apply our modern names to the cabbage kinds of the ancients, and search out in the writings of the Greeks and the Romans those which we use at present; for by continued culture, through so many ages and in so many countries, new varieties have from time to time arisen, and old ones must have become lost; so that it is impossible for us to have all the varieties of the ancients, as it was for them to be acquainted with the whole of those produced in our times. I cannot therefore venture to assert that we still possess that kind of cabbage which the ancients, to prevent intoxication, ate raw like salad[855]. We can dress in this manner cabbage heads when they are chopped fine, but we do not know with certainty whether the ancients were acquainted with our cabbage; though Ruellius, not without probability, considered as such that species which in the time of Pliny was known under the name of lacuturris[856].
But even if this be admitted as true, we nowhere find any traces of that excellent preparation of cabbage called by the Germans sour kraut; though the ancients were acquainted with the art of preparing turnips in the same manner[857]. I should have been inclined to consider sour kraut as a German invention, first made in Lower Saxony, which our neighbours learnt from us in modern times, had not Bellon[858] related that the Turks are accustomed to pickle cabbage for winter food. It appears, however, that these people take the whole heads, as in Germany, but particularly in Upper more than Lower Saxony, some preserve kumskohl, a name which, as well as compost and the French word compote, Frisch derives with great probability from compositum (preserved).
The ancients were acquainted with curled cabbage, and even with some of those kinds which we call broccoli. Under this term is understood all those species, the numerous young flowery heads of which, particularly in spring and autumn, can be used like cauliflowers. Such young shoots are called cymæ, but not turiones; for the latter term denotes the first shoots that arise, like those of hops, asparagus, and other esculent plants. The broccoli used at present was however first brought from Italy to France, together with the name, about the end of the sixteenth century[859].