Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

and a manchet of bread on a trencher for each guest, in an apartment illuminated with five hundred candles. There is no pictorial record of the mode in which the early baker worked here, analogous to that which Lacroix supplies of his sixteenth century _confrère_. The latter is brought vividly enough before us in a copy of one of Jost Amman's engravings, and we perceive the bakery and its tenants: one (apparently a female) kneading the dough in a trough at the farther end, a second by a roasting fire, with a long ladle or peel in his hand, putting the loaf on the oven, and a third, who is a woman, leaving the place with two baskets of bread, one on her head and one on her arm; the baker himself is almost naked, like the operatives in a modern iron furnace. The artist has skilfully realised the oppressive and enervating atmosphere; and it was till lately quite usual to see in the side streets of Paris in the early morning the _boulanger_ at work precisely in the same informal costume. So tenacious is usage, and so unchanging many of the conditions of life. The Anglo-Norman used butter where his Italian contemporary used oil. But it is doubtful whether before the Conquest our ancestors were commonly acquainted with butter. The early cook understood the art of glazing with yolk of egg, and termed it endoring, and not less well that of presenting dishes under names calculated to mislead the intended partaker, as where we find a receipt given for _pome de oringe_, which turns out to be a preparation of liver of pork with herbs and condiments, served up in the form of glazed force-meat balls. Venison was salted in troughs. In the tale of "The King and the Hermit," the latter exhibits to his unknown visitor his stock of preserved venison from the deer, which he had shot in the forest. The mushroom, of which so many varieties are at present recognised by botanists, seems, from the testimony of an Italian, Giacomo Castelvetri, who was in London in