Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

it was wanted, for a pepper-mill is named as a requisite. Mustard we do not encounter till the time of Johannes de Garlandia (early thirteenth century), who states that it grew in his own garden at Paris. Garlic, or gar-leac (in the same way as the onion is called _yn-leac_), had established itself as a flavouring medium. The nasturtium was also taken into service in the tenth or eleventh century for the same purpose, and is classed with herbs. When the dish was ready, it was served up with green sauce, in which the chief ingredients were sage, parsley, pepper, and oil, with a little salt. Green geese were eaten with raisin or crab-apple sauce. Poultry was to be well larded or basted while it was before the fire. I may be allowed to refer the reader, for some interesting jottings respecting the first introduction of coal into London, to "Our English Home," 1861. "The middle classes," says the anonymous writer, "were the first to appreciate its value; but the nobility, whose mansions were in the pleasant suburbs of Holborn and the Strand, regarded it as a nuisance." This was about the middle of the thirteenth century. It may be a mite contributed to our knowledge of early household economy to mention, by the way, that in the supernatural tale of the "Smith and his Dame" (sixteenth century) "a quarter of coal" occurs. The smith lays it on the fire all at once; but then it was for his forge. He also poured water on the flames, to make them, by means of his bellows, blaze more fiercely. But the proportion of coal to wood was long probably very small. One of the tenants of the Abbey of Peterborough, in 852, was obliged to furnish forty loads of wood, but of coal two only. In the time of Charles I., however, coals seem to have been usual in the kitchen, for Breton, in this "Fantasticks," 1626, says, under January:--"The Maid is stirring betimes, and slipping on her Shooes and her Petticoat, groaps for the tinder box, where after a conflict