Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

the spytte, iiijd." and this was when the mayor of the borough dined with the prior. A royal personage gave, of course, more. The play of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," written about 1560, opens with a speech of Diccon the Bedlam, or poor Tom, where he says:-- "Many a gossip's cup in my time have I tasted, And many a broach and spit have I both turned and basted." The spit, again, was supplanted by the jack. The "History of Friar Rush," 1620, opens with a scene in which the hero introduces himself to a monastery, and is sent by the unsuspecting prior to the master-cook, who finds him subordinate employment. MEALS. It has been noted that for a great length of time two meals were made to suffice the requirements of all classes. Our own experience shows how immaterial the names are which people from age to age choose to bestow on their feeding intervals. Some call supper _dinner_, and others call dinner _luncheon._ First comes the prevailing mode instituted by fashionable society, and then a foolish subscription to it by a section of the community who are too poor to follow it, and too proud not to seem to do so. Formerly it was usual for the Great to dine and sup earlier than the Little; but now the rule is reversed, and the later a man dines the more distinguished he argues himself. We have multiplied our daily seasons of refreshment, and eat and drink far oftener than our ancestors; but the truly genteel Briton never sups; the word is scarcely in his vocabulary,--like Beau Brummel and the farthing--"Fellow, I do not know the coin!" In a glossary of the tenth-eleventh century only two meals are quoted: undermeat = _prandium_, and even-meat = _coena_. That is to say, our Saxon precursors were satisfied as a rule with two repasts daily, but to this in more luxurious times were added the supper and even the rear-supper, the latter being, so far as we know, a second course or dessert and the bipartite collation corresponding to the modern late dinner.