Manchets are used in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge to this day. The manchets and cheese, and fine ale, of Magdalen College are well known.
The Manciple, a purveyor of victuals, a clerk of the kitchen, or caterer, still subsists in the universities, where the name is therefore preserved; but Archdeacon Nares believed nowhere else. One of Chaucer's pilgrims is a manciple of the Temple, of whom he gives a good character for his skill in purveying.
It is curious to find that one of the domestic arts which is somewhat neglected in the households of the present generation, should, in the last century, have been considered an accomplishment of such importance as to be taught in schools: this was Pastry-making. There was then resident in London one of the ancient family of the Kidders, of Maresfield, in Sussex, and a descendant of Richard Kidder, Bishop of Bath and Wells. This was Edward Kidder, a pastrycook, or, as he calls himself, "pastry-master," who carried on his business in Queen Street, Cheapside, and was induced to open two schools in the metropolis to teach the art of making pastry, one at his own place of business, and the other in Holborn. He also gave instructions to ladies at their private houses. So popular did his system of teaching become, that he is said to have instructed nearly 6,000 ladies in this art. He also published a book of Receipts of Pastry and Cookery, for the use of his scholars, printed entirely in copper-plate, with a portrait of himself, in the full wig and costume of the day, as a frontispiece. He died in 1739, at the age of seventy-three. By will, he gave to his wife, Mary Kidder, a gold watch, a diamond ring, and all the other rings and trinkets used by her, and also all the furniture of the best room in which she lay in the house in Queen Street; and to his daughters, Elizabeth and Susan, he bequeathed all his money, bank-stock, plate, jewellery, &c. Susan, among other bequests, gave to her cousin, George Kidder, of Canterbury, pastrycook, 150l. and the copper-plates for the receipt-book.
Some dishes of the olden dinner-table are not very inviting. Our ancestors had no objection to stale fish; and blubber, if they could get it from a stray whale, or grampus or porpoise, was considered a delicacy. Yet some of the old dishes have stood the test of ages, as we see in the case of a Christmas Pie, the receipt to make which is preserved in the books of the Salters' Company, in the City of London.
"For to make a moost choyce Paaste of Gamys to be eten at ye Feste of Chrystemasse" (17th Richard II. a.d. 1394). A pie so made by the Company's cook in 1836 was found excellent. It consisted of a pheasant, hare, and capon; two partridges, two pigeons, and two rabbits; all boned and put into paste in the shape of a bird, with the livers and hearts, two mutton kidneys, forced-meats, and egg-balls, seasoning, spice, catsup, and pickled mushrooms, filled up with gravy made from the various bones.
We must, however, remember that Cookery flourished in the reign of Richard II., who rebuilt Westminster Hall, and gave therein a house-warming, at which old Stow says, "he feasted ten thousand persons." Richard is also said to have kept 2,000 cooks, who left to the world their famous cookery-book, the "Form of Cury, or, a Roll of English Cookery," compiled about the year 1390, by the master-cooks of the Royal Kitchen.
Sugar was at first regarded as a spice, and was introduced as a substitute for honey after the Crusades. It was sold by the pound in the thirteenth century, and was procurable even in such remote towns as Ross and Hereford. Before the discovery of America, however, Sugar was a costly luxury, and only used on rare occasions. About 1459, Margaret Barton, writing to her husband, who was a gentleman and landowner of Norfolk, begs that he will vouchsafe "to buy her a pound of sugar." Again: "I pray that ye will vouchsafe to send me another sugar-loaf, for my old one is done." The art of refining sugar, and what is called loaf-sugar, was discovered by a Venetian about the end of the fifteenth, or the beginning of the sixteenth century. Sugar-candy is of much earlier date; for in Marin's Storia di Commercio de Veneziani, there is an account of a shipment made at Venice for England, in 1319, of 100,000 pounds of sugar, and 10,000 pounds of sugar-candy. Refined or loaf-sugar is thus mentioned in a roll of provisions in the reign of Henry VIII.: "two loaves of sugar, weighing sixteen pound two ounces, at —— per pound." A letter from Sir Edward Wotton to Lord Cobham, dated Calais, March 6, 1546, informs him that he had taken up for his lordship twenty-five sugar-loaves, at six shillings a loaf, "which is eightepence a pounde." Up to the close of the fifteenth century its price varied from one-and-sixpence to three shillings a pound, "or, on an average, to a sum equivalent to about thirty shillings at present." Sugar has become to us almost a necessary of life. "We consume it in millions of tons; we employ thousands of ships in transporting it. Millions of men spend their lives in cultivating the plants from which it is extracted, and the fiscal duties imposed upon it add largely to the revenue of nearly every established government. It may be said, therefore, to exercise a more direct and extended influence, not only over the social comfort, but over the social condition, of mankind, than any other production of the vegetable kingdom, with the exception, perhaps, of cotton alone."—J. F. W. Johnston, M.A.[51]
Coffee is mentioned in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, date 1621, several years before coffee-houses were introduced into England. The first coffee-house was opened in 1650, at Oxford, by Jacobs, a Jew, "at the Angel; and there it (coffee) was, by some who delighted in novelty, drunk." About this time, Mr. Edwards, a Turkey merchant, brought from Smyrna to London, one Pasqua Rosee, a Ragusan youth, who prepared this drink for him every morning. But the novelty thereof, drawing too much company to him, he allowed his said servant, with another of his son-in-law, to sell coffee publicly, and they set up the first coffee-house in London, in St. Michael's Alley, in Cornhill. The sign was Pasqua Rosee's own head.
Tea was first sold in London by Thomas Garway, in Change Alley, in 1651, at from 16s. to 50s. per pound; it had been previously sold at from six pounds to ten pounds per pound. Pepys, in his Diary, tells, Sept. 25, 1669, of his sending "for a cup of Tea, a China drink he had not before tasted." Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, about 1666, had introduced Tea at Court. And, in Sir Charles Sedley's Mulberry Garden, we are told that "he who wished to be considered a man of fashion always drank wine-and-water at dinner, and a dish of tea afterwards."[52]