Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

Sunda, was the most plentiful; but the West Indian produce, as well as that of Mauritius, Madeira, and other cane-growing countries, was unknown. Of bread, the fifteenth century had several descriptions in use: pain-main or bread of very fine flour, wheat-bread, barley-meal bread, bran-bread, bean-bread, pease-bread, oat-bread or oat-cakes, hard-bread, and unleavened bread. The poor often used a mixture of rye, lentils, and oatmeal, varied according to the season and district. The author of "The Serving-man's Comfort," 1598, however, seems to say that it was counted by the poorer sort at that time a hardship only to be tolerated in a dear year to mix beans and peas with their corn, and he adds: "So must I yield you a loaf of coarse cockle, having no acquaintance with coin to buy corn." In a _Nominale_ of this period mention is made of "oblys," or small round loaves, perhaps like the old-fashioned "turnover"; and we come across the explicit phrase, _a loaf of bread_, for the first time, a pictorial vocabulary of the period even furnishing us with a representation of its usual form. Nor were the good folks of those days without their simnels, cracknels, and other sorts of cakes for the table, among which in the _wastel_ we recognise the equivalent of the modern French _gâteau_. Besides march-pain or pain-main, and pain-puff, two sorts baked on special occasions, and rather entering into the class of confectionery, our better-to-do ancestors usually employed three descriptions of bread: manchete for the master's table, made of fine boulted flour; chete, of unboulted flour, but not mixed with any coarser ingredient; and brown-bread, composed of flour and rye meal, and known as _maslin_ (mystelon). A bushel of wheat, in a romance of the thirteenth century, is estimated to produce twenty loaves; but the statement is obviously to be taken with allowance. The manchet was sometimes thought to be sufficient without butter, as we now eat a scone. In the "Conceits of Old Hobson," 1607, the worthy haberdasher of the Poultry gives some friends what is facetiously described as a "light" banquet--a cup of wine