But it is needless to say that Neckam merely dealt with a theme, which had been familiar many centuries before his time, and compiled his treatise, "De Utensilibus," as Bishop Alfric had his earlier "Colloquy," with an educational, not a culinary, object, and with a view to facilitate the knowledge of Latin among his scholars. It is rather interesting to know that he was a native of St. Albans, where he was born in 1157. He died in 1217, so that the composition of this work of his (one of many) may be referred to the close of the twelfth century. Its value is, in a certain sense, impaired by the almost complete absence of English terms; Latin and (so called) Norman-French being the languages almost exclusively employed in it. But we have good reason indeed to be grateful for such a legacy in any shape, and when we consider the tendency of ways of life to pass unchanged from one generation to another, and when we think how many archaic and (to our apprehension) almost barbarous fashions and forms in domestic management lingered within living recollection, it will not be hazarding much after all to presume that the particulars so casually supplied to us by Neckam have an application alike before and after.
A student should also bear in mind that, from the strong Anglo-Gallic complexion of our society and manners in early days, the accounts collected by Lacroix are largely applicable to this country, and the same facilities for administering to the comfort and luxuries of the table, which he furnishes as illustrative of the gradual outgrowth from the wood fire and the pot-au-feu among his own countrymen, or certain classes of them, may be received as something like counterparts of what we possessed in England at or about the same period. We keep the phrase pot luck; but, for most of those who use it, it has parted with all its meaning. This said production of Neckam of St. Albans purports to be a guide to young housekeepers. It instructs them what they will require, if they desire to see their establishment well-ordered; but we soon perceive that the author has in view the arrangements indispensable for a family of high rank and pretensions; and it may be once for all observed that this kind of literature seldom proves of much service to us in an investigation of the state of the poor, until we come to the fifteenth or even sixteenth century, when the artists of Germany and the Low Countries began to delineate those scenes in industrial and servile life, which time and change have rendered so valuable.
Where their superiors in rank regarded them as little more than mechanical instruments for carrying on the business of life, the poor have left behind them few records of their mode of sustenance and of the food which enabled them to follow their daily toil. The anecdotes, whatever they may be worth, of Alfred and the burnt cakes, and of Tom Thumb's mamma and her Christmas pudding, made in a bowl, of which the principal material was pork, stand almost alone; for we get, wherever we look, nothing but descriptions by learned and educated men of their equals or betters, how they fed and what they ate—their houses, their furniture, their weapons, and their dress. Even in the passage of the old fabliau of the "King and the Hermit" the latter, instead of admitting us to a cottage interior, has a servant to wait on him, brings out a tablecloth, lights two candles, and lays before his disguised guest venison and wine. In most of our own romances, and in the epics of antiquity, we have to be satisfied with vague and splendid generalisations. We do not learn much of the dishes which were on the tables, how they were cooked, and how [Greek: oi polloi] cooked theirs.
The Liber, or rather Codex, Princeps in the very long and extensive catalogue of works on English Cookery, is a vellum roll called the Form of Cury, and is supposed to have been written about the beginning of the fifteenth century by the master-cook of Richard II who reigned from 1377 to 1399, and spent the public money in eating and drinking, instead of wasting it, as his grandfather had done, in foreign wars. This singular relic was once in the Harleian collection, but did not pass with the rest of the MSS. to the British Museum; it is now however, Additional MS. 5016, having been presented to the Library by Mr. Gustavus Brander. It was edited by Dr. Pegge in 1780, and included by Warner in his "Antiquitates Culinariae," 1791. The Roll comprises 196 receipts, and commences with a sort of preamble and a Table of Contents. In the former it is worth noting that the enterprise was undertaken "by the assent and avisement of masters of physic and of philosophy, that dwelled in his (Richard II.'s) court," which illustrates the ancient alliance between medicine and cookery, which has not till lately been dissolved. The directions were to enable a man "to make common pottages and common meats for the household, as they should be made, craftily and wholesomely;" so that this body of cookery was not prepared exclusively for the use of the royal kitchen, but for those who had not the taste or wish for what are termed, in contra-distinction, in the next sentence, "curious pottages, and meats, and subtleties." It is to be conjectured that copies of such a MS. were multiplied, and from time to time reproduced with suitable changes; but with the exception of two different, though nearly coeval, collections, embracing 31 and 162 receipts or nyms, and also successively printed by Pegge and Warner, there is no apparent trace of any systematic compilation of this nature at so remote a date.
The "Form of Cury" was in the 28 Eliz., in the possession of the Stafford family, and was in that year presented to the Queen by Edward, Lord Stafford, as is to be gathered from a Latin memorandum at the end, in his lordship's hand, preserved by Pegge and Warner in their editions. The fellowship between the arts of healing and cooking is brought to our recollection by a leonine verse at the end of one of the shorter separate collections above described:—
"Explicit de Coquina
Quae est optima Medicina."
The "Form of Cury" will amply remunerate a study. It presents the earliest mention, so far as I can discern, of olive oil, cloves, mace, and gourds. In the receipts for making Aigredouce and Bardolf, sugar, that indispensable feature in the cuisine, makes its appearance; but it does so, I should add, in such a way as to lead to the belief that the use of sugar was at this time becoming more general. The difficulty, at first, seems to have been in refining it. We encounter here, too, onions under the name borrowed from the French instead of the Anglo-Saxon form "ynne leac"; and the prescriptions for making messes of almonds, pork, peas, and beans are numerous. There is "Saracen sauce," moreover, possibly as old as the Crusades, and pig with sage stuffing (from which it was but one step to duck). More than one species of "galantine" was already known; and I observe the distinction, in one of the smaller collections printed by Warner, between the tartlet formed of meat and the tartlet de fritures, of which the latter approaches more nearly our notion. The imperfect comprehension of harmonies, which is illustrated by the prehistoric bag-pudding of King Arthur, still continued in the unnatural union of flesh with sweets. It is now confined to the cottage, whence Arthur may have himself introduced it at Court and to the Knights of the Round Table.
In this authority, several of the dishes were to be cooked in white grease, which Warner interprets into lard; others demanded olive oil; but there is no allusion to butter. Among the receipts are some for dishes "in gravy"; rabbits and chickens were to be treated similarly; and the gravy appears to have consisted merely of the broth in which they were boiled, and which was flavoured with pounded almonds, powdered ginger, and sugar.
The "Liber Cure Cocorum," which is apparently extant only in a fifteenth century MS., is a metrical treatise, instructing its readers how to prepare certain dishes, condiments and accessories; and presents, for the most part, a repetition of what has already occurred in earlier and more comprehensive undertakings. It is a curious aid to our knowledge of the manner in which the table of the well-to-do Englishman was furnished in the time of Henry VI., and it is so far special, that it deals with the subject more from a middle-class point of view than the "Regulations for the Royal Household," and other similar compilations, which I have to bring under notice. The names, as usual, are often misleading, as in blanc manger, which is very different from our blanc-mange; and the receipt for "goose in a hog pot" leaves one in doubt as to its adaptability to the modern palate. The poetical ambition of the author has proved a source of embarrassment here and there; and in the receipt "for a service on a fish-day" the practitioner is prayed within four lines to cover his white herring for God's sake, and lay mustard over his red for God's love, because sake and love rhyme with take and above.