Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

by William Carew Hazlitt

"Yea, and we shall be right welcome, I dare well say,

In East Cheap for to dine;

And then we will with Lombards at passage play,

And at the Pope's Head sweet wine assay."

The places of resort in this rollicking locality could furnish, long before The Boar made the acquaintance of Falstaff, every species of delicacy and bonne bouche to their constituents, and the revelry was apt sometimes to extend to an unseasonable hour. In an early naval song we meet with the lines:

"He that will in East Cheap eat a goose so fat,

With harp, pipe, and song,

Must lie in Newgate on a mat,

Be the night never so long."

And these establishments infallibly contributed their quota or more to the prisons in the vicinity.