“Take hennes and pork and seethe them together. Take the flesh of the hennes and of the pork and hack it small and grind it all to dust. Take bread y-grated, and add thereto and temper it with the self-broth[36] and mix it with yolks of eggs, and cast thereon powder fort,[37] and boil it and do thereto powder of ginger, saffron, and salt, 150 and look that it is standing,[38] and flour it all with powder of ginger.” The lavish use of eggs, pork, and chickens in this recipe could be paralleled in many others, and is evidently to be connected with the custom of receiving manorial dues in kind at stated intervals. Hundreds of eggs would be sent in by the tenants at Easter, and the problem of the housekeeper would not be how to lessen the consumption of eggs in order to keep down the bills, but how to get through those in store before they were hopelessly spoiled.
For the earlier period menus are not available, but a curious rhymed treatise on servants’ duties dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, entitled “John Russell’s Boke of Nurture,” has been reprinted by the Early English Lent Society[39] in the volume entitled “Meals and Manners of the Olden Time,” and from it I extract the following:—
Furst set forth mustard and brawne of boore, the wild swine,
Suche pottage as the cooke hath made of herbis, spice, and wine,
Beef, mutton, stewed feysaund, swan with the chawdyn[40]
Capoun, pigge, venisoun bake, leche lombard,[41] fritter, viant fine,
And then a soteltie.[42]
Maydon Marie that holy Virgin
And Gabrielle greeting her with an ave.