The accomplisht cook: or, The art & mystery of cookery

it into little balls or rolls. Then have fresh fish scal'd, washed, dryed, and parted into equal pieces, season them with pepper, nutmeg, salt, and set them by; then make ready shell-fish, and season them as the other fishes lightly with the same spices. Then make ready roots, as potatoes, skirrets, artichocks and chesnuts, boil them, cleanse them, and season them with the former spices. Next have yolks of hard eggs, large mace, barberries, grapes, or gooseberries, and butter, make your pye, and put butter in the bottom of it, mix them all together, and fill the pye, then put in two or three bay-leaves, and a few whole cloves, mix the minced balls among the other meat and roots; then lay on the top some large mace, potatoes, barberries, grapes, or gooseberries, chesnuts, pistaches and butter, close it up and bake it, fill it up with beaten butter, beaten with the juyce of oranges, dish and cut up the cover, and put all over it slic't lemons, and sometimes to the lear the yolk of an egg or two. _To make minced Herring Pies._ Take salt herrings being watered, crush them between your hands, and you shall loose the fish from the skin, take off the skin whole, and lay them in a dish; then have a pound of almond paste ready, mince the herrings, and stamp them with the almond paste, two of the milts or rows, five or six dates, some grated manchet, sugar, sack, rose-water, and saffron, make the composition somewhat stiff, and fill the skins, put butter in the bottom of your pye, lay on the herring, and on them dates, gooseberries, currans, barberries, and butter, close it up and bake it, being baked liquor it with butter, verjuyce, and sugar. Make minced pyes of any meat, as you may see in page 232, in the dishes of minced pyes you may use those forms for any kind of minced pies, either of flesh, fish, or fowl, which I have particularized in some places of my Book. _Otherways._ Bone them, and mince them being finely