Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

they have liqueurs to this day on the Continent both after dinner and after the mid-day breakfast. The writer of "Piers of Fulham" lived to see this fashion of introducing a third meal, and that again split into two for luxury's sake; for his metrical biographer tells us, that he refused rear-suppers, from a fear of surfeiting. I collect that in the time of Henry VIII. the supper was a well-established institution, and that the abuse of postponing it to a too advanced hour had crept in; for the writer of a poem of this period especially counsels his readers _not to sup late_. Rear-suppers were not only held in private establishments, but in taverns; and in the early interlude of the "Four Elements," given in my edition of Dodsley, and originally published about 1519, a very graphic and edifying scene occurs of a party of roisterers ordering and enjoying an entertainment of this kind. About seventy years later, Robert Greene, the playwright, fell a victim to a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine, at some merry gathering of his intimates falling under this denomination. Who will venture to deny that the first person who kept unreasonable hours was an author and a poet? Even Shakespeare is not exempt from the suspicion of having hastened his end by indulgence with one or two friends in a gay carouse of this kind. The author of the "Description of England" enlightens us somewhat on the sort of kitchen which the middle class and yeomanry of his time deemed fit and sufficient. The merchant or private gentleman had usually from one to three dishes on the table when there were no visitors, and from four to six when there was company. What the yeoman's every-day diet was Harrison does not express; but at Christmas he had brawn, pudding and souse, with mustard; beef, mutton, and pork; shred pies, goose, pig, capon, turkey, veal, cheese, apples, etc., with good drink, and a blazing fire in the hall. The farmer's bill of fare varied according to the season: in Lent, red herrings and salt