Our viands : whence they come and how they are cooked, with a bundle of old recipes from cookery books of the last century

Front matter

By the same Author.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES.

By A. W. Buckland.

PART II V. — Christmas Fare — The Roast Beef of Old England

and the Boar’s Head,

.

VI. — Sundry Meats,

VII. — Game and Poultry, .

.

VIII.— Eggs,

.

IX. — Dairy Produce,

.

X.— Fish,

XI. — Unappreciated Trifles,

.

XII. — Condiments,

• • •

VI

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

XIII. — Nuts and Apples, ..... 171

XIV. — Grapes, Figs, and Oranges, .... 183

XV. — Stone fruits and Berries, . . . v. 193

XVI. — On the Borderland ’twixt Fruit and Vegetable, . 206

XVIII. — Pulse and Cabbage, .... 228

XIX. — Salads and Seasonings, .... 240

M

The art of cookery is no new thing, yet the tastes of mankind are so diverse, that the proverb, ‘ One man’s meat is another man’s poison,’ becomes a truism. There still exist savages who prefer raw meat to cooked, as did the Fuegians who were lately exhibited in London, but even they had acquired a taste for hard boiled eggs, which they devoured with great relish.

There may also be found in the heart of savage Africa, in Australia, and in some of the South Sea Islands, tribes who prefer human flesh to any other, but these all like their meat, whatever it may be, cooked ; and following the custom of the most ancient of men, will sit round a fire broiling their bones, cutting off bits by degrees just scorched, and repeating the process till nothing but the bare bone remains. But even then the feast is not ended, for all the bones are broken, and the marrow, which is highly esteemed, is sucked out as a concluding bonne bouche.

In this mode of cooking and eating, the modern savage closely follows the ancient cave-dwellers, amongst whom marrow seems to have been always esteemed a prime delicacy.

This we know, because many of the bones found in the kitchen middens of these early people are partly charred, and all the marrow-bones are broken. But these troglodytes were not extravagant cooks, nothing was thrown away which might prove useful. Having split the bones and devoured the marrow, they proceeded to make spear and arrow heads from the splinters, for the capture of fresh game to furnish future feasts, and it is more than probable that they crushed and ate the smaller bones, for this is still the custom among savages. Mr. Borcherds, an early South African traveller, describes a feast among some Bushmen to whom a sheep had been given : he says, ‘ Each bone was separated from the flesh as cleanly as possible, the bones were crushed, and together with the raw kidneys, distributed amongst the children, who seemed to enjoy the delicacy as much as ours do cakes. The meat was laid on the fire, and when half cooked devoured.’ Mr. Lumholtz, in his travels ‘Among Cannibals’ in Australia, describes a feast of snakes, in which the bones were also crushed and eaten ; and in that singularly interesting legend, denominated ‘The Mountain Chant,’ given in the Smithsonian Reports , the hero is represented as killing two rabbits, and pounding them up bones and all with seeds, for food. So that here we have from three parts of the world evidence of the use of crushed bones, and may reasonably infer that the custom was universal, especially in times of scarcity.

Sitting at our well-appointed tables, we smile at the primitive devices adopted by savages, yet some of them have hit upon a mode of cooking which may fairly be termed scientific, so well is it calculated to retain the juices of the meat ; as for instance, in Australia, the snakes which furnished the feast described by Lumholtz, were coiled up, tied together, and baked in an oven scooped out of the earth, in which a large fire was made, serving to heat several stones. Some of these were removed, and upon the others a large quantity of green leaves or grass was laid, and upon this the snakes, which were covered with more green leaves and more hot stones, and then the earth was pressed down tight over the whole, no steam being allowed to escape. When done, the meat, tender and juicy, was taken out in the leaves which served as a dish. Mr. Lumholtz extols this method of cooking for salt beef and pork, especially when ginger leaves are used,* but the natives reserve it for snakes and human flesh, cooking other things by throwing them on the hot embers like the Bushmen, and eating them half raw. The New Zealanders cook their potatoes in the same kind of earth-oven, which, probably, in cannibal times also served for the long pig in which they delighted.

The art of baking in ovens is of great antiquity; the ovens of ancient Egypt are frequently represented in contemporary paintings ; and the African savage will scoop out the adhesive earth of ants’ nests, or the clay of river courses, to form an oven wherein to bake bread, stopping up the opening with wood and clay or cow dung, just as our cottagers used to do with the earth-ovens made at the end of most cottages, at a time when it was the wholesome custom among farm-labourers to make and bake their own bread.

Boiling is another primitive mode of cooking, and the method which is still employed in some uncivilised countries, is to take the hide of the slaughtered animal, tie it up so as

* Years ago it was the custom in some parts of England to bake bread rolls wrapped up in cabbage leaves. This imparted a peculiar and, to many palates, agreeable flavour to the bread. In a description of a recent Chinese dinner, we find among the delicacies, a knife fish, rolled in banana leaves, and baked between hot stones.

IO to form a bag, place the meat in this bag with some water, and then drop in stones, heated in the fire to a white heat, until the meat is cooked. It must be a very tedious process, and not particularly appetising, but the only one available where pottery and metal are alike unknown. The alternative method of placing the meat on hot stones and covering it with the ashes was doubtless that most generally practised, and is still adopted by hunters and by the gipsies in our own country; one of the dainties of the latter being a hedgehog thus roasted, whilst the hunter in Africa will regale himself with the foot of the elephant, or a porcupine cooked in the same manner. Then of course there is the tripod of sticks, upon which the meat is hung over the flame, and it is doubtful whether meat thus cooked is not of finer flavour than that which we dry up in ovens, or boil to death in ordinary saucepans.

In very hot countries the sun turns cook, and the hunter has only to place his steak on heated stones exposed to the mid-day sun, and it will soon be sufficiently cooked, or he may cut his game in slices and hang the pieces on a thorn-bush to be thoroughly dried in the sun, and then carry it away with him as biltong in South Africa, or jerked beef ( charki ) in America.

We have heard of nests of eggs cooked by the heat of the sun in South Africa, whilst in Iceland and some other countries it is possible to cook by means of the boiling springs.

We are apt to experience a feeling of disgust in reading of the Eskimo crowded in their snow houses, regaling themselves with great pieces of seal-blubber, and washing down the feast with train oil, but we do not consider the disadvantages under which these poor people" labour in

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a country where it would be impossible to indulge in gastronomic luxuries, not only on account of the scarcity of food, but also because of the scarcity of fuel, their only cooking apparatus consisting of that simple oil lamp, which serves the treble purpose of fire, candle, and cooking-stove. Yet French and Italian cooks achieve most of their culinary triumphs by the aid of a cooking-stove only once removed from that of the Eskimo, being heated by charcoal only.

Luxury has now taken such hold upon us that we wonder how it could ever have been possible to eat comfortably without silver forks, yet our grandmothers knew them not, but used forks of steel, at first with only two tines or prongs, which they managed as deftly as the Chinese do their chop-sticks, although they did not scruple to put the knife in the mouth on occasion, and, in fact, the knives were made rounded at the end for that purpose. Forks, indeed, are but a late invention, and our Saxon ancestors cut their meat from the spit with their hunting knives, not only when engaged in the chase, but when seated at table in their great banqueting halls, as witness a curious old drawing in the Cotton Manuscript, in which two servingmen or cooks are represented kneeling holding a spit in one hand and a platter in the other, whilst three guests — seated at a table covered with a heavy cloth, upon which are various dishes, and cakes of bread marked with a cross — cut from the spit presented to them such meat as they please, apparently letting it fall into the platter held to receive it. Yet we are told that the Anglo-Saxons possessed forks, some having been found with coins of Csenwulf, King of Mercia and Athelstan,* but these are supposed to have * See Chambers’s ‘Book of Days.’

been mere toys, for forks certainly did not come into general use in England before the end of the seventeenth century, although they appear to have been used in Italy at an earlier date. They have now penetrated into the heart of savage Africa, and Mr. A. A. Anderson * describes an interview with Lo Bengula, in which ‘ a little Mashona boy brought, on a piece of grass matting, four large pieces of bullock’s lights, that had been broiled over a fire, and a fork ; advancing on hands and knees to his dreaded master, he placed them on the grass in front of his majesty, who took the fork, and transfixing one after the other they disappeared from sight in his capacious mouth.’

The table appointments of ancient Egypt are familiar to us from the paintings. We see the guests seated at table in gala dress, be-wigged and be-jewelled, holding the lotus-lily in their hands by way of nosegay, whilst attendants in the very scantiest of attire, naked except for a girdle and a necklace to show that they are slaves, serve them with meat and wine, evidently in too great profusion, for that disgusting practice, which prevailed also among the epicures and gluttons of ancient Rome, of taking emetics when satiated f in order to be able to renew the feast, is most realistically depicted.

That which is rerriarkable in these Egyptian feasts is the * ‘Twenty-five Years in a Waggon.’

+ It may be of interest here to give the receipt of Apicius for digestive salts from Soyer’s ‘ History of Food : ’ — take I lb. of common salt pulverised, mix with 3 oz. white pepper, 2 oz. ginger, I oz. lamoni, oz. thyme, 1^ oz. celery seed, 2 oz. wild marjoram, oz. rocket seed, 3 oz. black pepper, ij oz. holy thistle, 2 oz. hyssop, 2 oz. spikenard, 2 oz. parsley, 2 oz. aniseed. Take a small quantity after a too plentiful dinner.

preponderance of women represented. It is evident that in those remote times ladies were not consigned to the galleries to look on whilst their lords and masters enjoyed the good things provided by Egyptian cooks, but were allowed their full share both of the comestibles and of the table talk.

The ancient Greeks were studiously simple in their habits, and their cookery in early times appears to have partaken of this simplicity. The famous black broth of the Spartans, which was the national dish, and of which they were so fond that they seldom ate anything else, appears to have been a horrible compound of pork broth, with vinegar and salt. Of this dish it is related, that Dionysius, the elder, having had it carefully prepared by a Lacedaemonian slave, just tasted it and threw it from him in disgust, demanding of the slave whether that was the broth of which the Spartans were so found — cNo,’ replied the slave, ‘it lacks one ingredient, that of violent exercise before partaking of it.’

In Attica the common people lived almost entirely upon ■ vegetables, but among the wealthy there was great profusion . as soon as luxuries began to be introduced from abroad. At entertainments a king of the feast was chosen by lot, whose duty it was to fix the quantity of wine to be drunk by the L guests, and to determine in what manner they were to pass I the evening ; this was often by music and singing patriotic -songs, although the king of the feast frequently proposed a -subject which all present were expected to discuss. The .guests at the dinner parties of the Athenians seem to have 1 been limited to nine, for it was an Athenian saying that a r convivial meeting should not consist of fewer than the Graces or more than the Muses, and before sitting down they were accustomed to use the warm bath, and to anoint themselves with oil.

The institution of ‘ King of the Feast ’ appears to have descended to the Romans, for this functionary is mentioned with approbation both by Plutarch and Cato. His office somewhat resembled that of the chairman or president of to-day, although he would appear to have had more to do with the general conduct of the feast, regulating the quantity of wine to be drunk, and who should sing or tell a story, or in any other way amuse the guests.

The Romans in Republican times were as frugal in their diet as the Spartans, seldom tasting meat, but living chiefly upon milk, eggs, and vegetables, and a kind of pudding somewhat resembling our batter pudding ; but this simple mode of life was quickly abandoned, and the luxury of the wealthy Romans exceeded anything known in the present day. Nero’s banqueting-room was wainscotted with ivory, and the panels were so constructed as to turn on pivots and shower down flowers and perfumes on the guests, whilst the circular roof imitated the movements of the spheres, representing a different season of the year as each course was placed on the table. ‘ The supper-rooms of Elagabalus,’ we are told, ‘ were hung with cloth of gold and silver, enriched with jewellery ; the frames of the couches were of massive silver, with mattresses covered with the richest embroidery ; and the tables and table services were of pure gold ;* whilst even of private individuals Horace writes —

* ‘ Sketches of Manners and Institutions of the Romans,’ p. 164.

The guests reposed upon elegant couches placed round the tables, and only sat in sign of mourning ; each was provided with a special robe, generally white, by the host, a custom alluded to in the New Testament ; whilst a bill of fare, or, as we should say now, a menu was placed before every guest. As for plate, Crassus is said to have possessed some, of which the workmanship alone cost about fifty-two shillings the ounce. Sylla had silver dishes of sixteen hundred ounces ; and a freedman of the Emperor Claudius had one which weighed five hundred pounds, forming the centre dish of eight others, each weighing fifty pounds. But m the midst of all this luxury it is amusing to read that every guest was expected to bring his own napkin, which he generally sent home by a slave filled with some of the good things from the table* — a custom which, perhaps, some of us would not be sorry to see revived.

Small figures of Mercury, Hercules, and the penates were placed on the table, and libations were poured to them at the beginning and end of a feast; whilst the salt placed beside them was regarded as sacred. We find, too, the superstitions regarding the spilling of salt, and the unlucky number thirteen, in full force among the Romans. Pliny says the purchase of a cook cost as much as the expense of a triumph, and no mortal was so valued as the slave who was most expert in the art of ruining his master. Hosts seemed to vie with each other in the costliness of feasts, and of Apicius it is related that, after having wasted half a million sterling on the pleasures of the table, he committed suicide because, having only eighty thousand pounds left, he could not continue his extravagances.

Sketches of Manners and Institutions of the Romans,’ p. 164.

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And yet, during the early part of the Empire, sumptuary laws were in force regulating the expenses to be incurred at banquets, and even the number of dishes, and it is said that Julius Ceesar frequently sent lictors to suspected houses, and had the dishes carried off from the tables if they exceeded the number permitted by law ; whilst Augustus decreed that an ordinary repast should not cost more than 200 sesterces (about jQi, 12s. 6d.), or 300 on feasts or days of solemnity, and 1000 at a wedding. If we compare this with the luxury of Nero and Elagabalus and later emperors, when a single fish cost fifty guineas, when pearls were dissolved in vinegar and drunk, not for pleasure, but only to add to the cost of a feast ; and when the senate was convened to consult as to the best manner of dressing a turbot for the emperor’s table, we shall hardly be surprised at the decline and fall of Rome.

Yet this excess of luxury was a great incentive to commerce, for merchants who scoured the seas for things rare and costly were sure of a market on their return ; whilst they carried with them in their wanderings to distant shores not only many useful wares by way of barter, but also those germs of civilisation, destined to grow up and bear fruit when the pomp of the Roman emperors which had caused their transplantation had withered and fallen into an untimely grave.

PART I

WHEAT, BARLEY, RYE, OATS

Chapter I

Man is an omnivorous animal : nothing comes amiss to him. When hunger impels he will eat the vilest refuse, but in times of prosperity bread, meat, and vegetables form the staple of his diet. ‘ Doctors differ 3 as to the original food of mankind. It varied probably, as now, according to climate, consisting of fruit and seeds where these grew spontaneously and in abundance, and of animal food where fruit, etc., could not be readily obtained ; but with the dawn of civilisation man began to cultivate plants for food, and particularly the several grains still used for making bread. Of these, wheat, barley, and rye seem to have been the earliest cultivated, oats being later, whilst it is doubtful whether maize was known except on the American continent.

We are so accustomed to look upon bread as the ‘ staff of life,3 the food above all others necessary for our sustenance, that the term, ‘without bread,3 has long been in our language synonymous with ‘ starvation.3 Hence we find it hard to realise the fact that, if we restrict the term bread to that which is generally so called, that is food prepared from the farina or flour of various grains, not only individuals, but entire nations have lived, and continue to live to this day without bread; nay, that we may trace the history of mankind back to a time when bread was utterly unknown.

The early men who hunted the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the bear through the forests which now lie beneath the waves of Torbay and Cromer, and sheltered themselves in Brixham caverns, Kent’s Hole, and the Victoria and Welsh caves, knew nothing of bread ; they may indeed, and probably did, as savages do now, eat such roots and fruits as came in their way, but it is abundantly evident that they did not cultivate the soil, nor prepare grain for food. They have left us their rude stone tools, and later the bone harpoons with which they caught their fish, the needles with which they sewed their skin garments, and the shell, bone, and stone ornaments in which they delighted, but they evidently lived like the hyenas, their contemporaries, upon flesh and marrow, and it is doubtful whether they even knew how to light a fire, or to cook in any way the game they fed upon. There is, at all events among the older relics, no trace of fire, no implements for grinding corn, and no calcined grains, such as are so abundant in those singularly interesting deposits of much later date, the Swiss Lake dwellings, where corn and fruits of different kinds, calcined and thus rendered indestructible, have been found beneath the mud of lakes where they have lain for at least two thousand years, so little injured by time that even the seeds of the raspberry can be identified. We can prove that these ancient lake-dwellers were advanced agriculturists, because we can distinguish among these remains cereals of various kinds, two or three sorts of wheats, one being that kind denominated Egyptian, two or three barleys, millets, and peas, also apples, pears, raspberries, blackberries, hazel nuts, and beech nuts, but no trace of any agricultural implement has been found, and we do not know how they turned over the soil, planted their seed, and gathered their harvest.

Probably their chief agricultural implements were pointed sticks, such as are still used by many semi-civilised peoples, and they ground or crushed their corn by means of such mullers or hand-mills as are found so frequently among remains of the later Stone (Neolithic) age ; certain it is that they made bread, or at least unleavened cakes of the imperfectly ground corn ; they also stored the crushed corn in coarse earthenware pots, and ate it either roasted, boiled, or moistened, as it still is sometimes in Germany and Switzerland. Many of these relics are of a people wholly unacquainted with the use of metal, yet they knew how to weave linen, to make nets for fishing, and pottery similar to that often discovered in tumuli in Great Britain. It is not, however, till we come to the Bronze age that oats are found among the cereals in use, thus indicating progress, not only in the art of tool-making, but also in that of agriculture. Between the age of the earliest cave-dwellers and the earliest of the Swiss Lake dwellers archaeologists place the well-known ‘ kitchen-middens ’ of Denmark, upon which Sir Charles Lyell based so strong an argument in favour of the antiquity of man, but although these relics show a decided advancement upon those of the primitive cave-men here and elsewhere, no trace can be found in them of even the rudiments of agricultural knowledge. It may indeed be said by some, that difference of climate may account for this want of agricultural knowledge in the Danish savages, who have left their refuse heaps to show us what they ate and what were their occupations, and that whilst these kitchen-middens were accumulating in Denmark, and the stalagmite slowly sealing down the records of early man in Kent’s Cavern and elsewhere, that in other more favoured spots men were tilling the soil, gathering in their harvests of wheat and barley, grinding their corn, and making their bread ; and undoubtedly this may have been the case, because the beginning of agriculture cannot be traced, and the first glimpses we get of the art in the Swiss Lake dwellings show it already in an advanced stage ; and since it seems certain that man did not originate either in England or Denmark, but made his way thither by slow degrees, at a period when the conformation of land and sea differed widely from that with which we are now so familiar; therefore during this slow advance of mankind from his primeval home to the utmost bounds of the universe, those remaining in the original cradle of the race would have had time to progress in civilisation, and to attain skill in those arts which can only be successfully practised in settled communities ; nevertheless, the extreme antiquity of the art even in Britain, is testified by traces of furrows found beneath peat-bogs in Scotland where now corn will not grow, and may be seen in Cornwall also, among those heaps of metallic waste which are now looked upon as hopelessly barren ; but who these early agriculturists

were, and at what time they lived, is an unsolved problem.

If, however, we turn to Eastern lands, to the records of the earliest of historians, we shall find agriculture in a state of great advancement. Before the days of Moses, not only was wheaten bread in common use, but the art of leavening it was also well known. At that period Egypt was the storehouse of the world, and had been so, at least, from the days of Abraham ; for, although we know from the monuments that corn was grown abundantly in Assyria, yet it was to Egypt that the patriarchs always resorted during those times of famine, which would appear to have been as frequent then in Mesopotamia as they have unfortunately been of late years in India, and it is worthy of remark that Egypt owed her comparative immunity from these terrible visitations, not only to the fertility caused by the annual overflow of the Nile, but to the wisdom of her rulers in instituting vast irrigation works, whereby that overflow was regulated and equalised by means of great reservoirs, wherein surplus water was stored, in order that it might be distributed over the land, through a network of canals when the rise of the Nile was deficient. The first direct mention of meal and bread in the Bible is in Genesis xviii. 5, 6, where Abraham invites the angel to take a morsel of bread, and tells Sarah to ‘ make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.’ This, it may be observed, was subsequent to the time when famine had driven them into Egypt, and although we are told that Adam was sent forth from Paradise to till the ground from whence he was taken, and also find it recorded that Cain was a tiller of the soil, yet it is abundantly evident that the patriarchs were pastoral nomads like the Arabs of the present day, and in no sense of the word agriculturists, and that if we wish to trace the early history of cereals we must look rather to archaeological than to Biblical records.

We know what the bread of ancient Egypt was like, for it has been found in tombs, and may be seen in the British Museum. The authorities say it was chiefly barley cakes, but we learn from the Bible, as well as from the records of the tombs, that wheat was largely grown, and also that leaven was used in the making of bread, for the children of Israel, when they departed out of Egypt, took their c kneading troughs with the dough before it was leavened.’ This was the origin of the Jewish feast of unleavened bread. The leaven employed was doubtless a piece of stale dough, ‘hidden in the meal till the whole was leavened,’ and this is still used in some countries, but it causes an unpleasant sourness, very unpalatable to those unaccustomed to it. The Jews, however, evidently made cakes upon the hearth, of meal mixed with oil, but it does not seem quite clear whether the meal was of wheat or barley.

We know, also by actual specimens, what sort of bread was used by the old Swiss Lake dwellers, who built their pile houses out into the lakes, but who cultivated wheat, barley, and rye on the mainland, and, as time went on, oats also. When their houses were burnt by some enemy to the water’s edge, the food they had stored in them was burnt also, and, with a lot of articles of domestic use, sank down to the bottom of the lake, where it lay unheeded and unknown for many centuries, until discovered by accident only a few years ago.

Another specimen of bread comes down to us after having been buried for centuries — this time by the ashes of a volcano; for among the relics of Pompeii we find loaves of bread, as put into the oven on the day when the rain of fiery ashes fell and caused the baker to fly for his life, leaving his loaves to await customers until this nineteenth century, when they have been withdrawn from the oven to prove to admiring antiquaries that Pompeian bakers knew how to set up a batch of bread almost in the same form as those of London ; but bread was often baked in moulds, which have been found in Herculaneum, and these loaves were all divided into portions by a cross, like scones at the present day. Doubtless, all these ancient breads were what we should now call of whole meal, for there were no millers in those early days to sift away the most nutritious portion of the meal. The corn was mostly crushed on a hollow stone by means of another stone, as we know by the many specimens of these primitive mills which have been found ; or it was passed between two stones fastened together to form what is called a quern, with two sticks to serve as handles, which two women sitting passed round to each other from hand to hand, thus grinding the corn as it was poured in through a hole in the centre, as in a coffee-mill. References to this kind of hand-mill are frequent in the Bible. Even now hand-mills are in use in India and in many Eastern countries ; whilst the primitive form of winnowing the grain — in which a woman stands in a doorway and pours the grain down from a vessel held as high as she can, the wind carrying away the chaff, the heavier corn falling to the ground — is still retained in some parts of Europe, as, for example, among the dwellers in Alpine valleys ; but water-mills are said to have been invented in the reign of Augustus, and, long after that, in Rome, mills were turned by asses and sometimes freemen, who worked thus for a living, whilst slaves were sometimes punished by being sent to work in the mills, being afterwards known as asinus. The poor donkeys enjoyed a holiday during the summer festival, being then turned loose and adorned with garlands.