Old-Time Cookery

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 31, 5 August 1933, Page 19

Old-Time Cookery

In ancient chronicles we read that our first parents had little use for culinary knowledge. The world was created in the autumn and the fruits of the earth were ripe and ready for theif maintenance. All that might have been, required was the boiling or roasting of the cruder products, or the preservation of richer kinds, states an exchange. AYe are ,s:d, also, that after the fall the> sinful couple were not allowed to eat the flesh of the animals which iiad developed in the interval. But, following the Flood, the ban was removed, and Noah and his family thus "indulged"—lived sumptuously there after. The. brevity of this note about old-timo cookery makes it imperative to pass to less imaginary data. : Kefinement of the culinary arts in the Western world camp with the Greeks, whoso highly-esteemed cooks introduced to Athenian kitchens Spices and sauces from the East and from Egypt, as aids to appetite and digestion. Many of the Greek recipes were adapted by thft Komans, whose taste, however, lacked the nuances of the Greek. At first they cared more f6r Abnndancy than for the delicacy of their dishes. But at the apogee of their civilisation profusion gave way to succulent incentives to their palates. Hare was greatly esteemed by the Bomans, and 'Caesar was astonished when he learned that, his English ctrlbMsts-would not touch it. Th«y had

also a passion for pork. Pigs were fed on figs until they died Of "apoplectic pain," which, as a writer says, was the nearest approach to the "dying of a rose in aromatic pain." Scotsmen may care to know that the Eomaus were the first to make the '' true and original haggis" of pork Instead of mutton. It was called "vcntrein porcinum," and in Apicius there is a full list of its numerous ingredients. The aborigines Of Britain lived the simple life. They had no oil, barbarian butter is not mentioned, and neither hares, geese, nor liens were eaten "from a notion of superstition." They lived mainly on'milk and flesh. The Normans it was who inaugurated a period of "grand entertainments.", Hichard II was renowned for the "splendour and elegance of his table, his nieeness and delicacy in eating, like Heliogabalus, whose favourite dishes are said to have been the tongues of peacocks and nightingales, and the brains of pheasants." From these ■ records we pass to the time of the rare first edition of a volume on cookery, which was compiled by Bartolomeo Scappi, private cook to Pius V, and published in Florence in 1570. Among the various remarkable pictures in this book are an instrument for raising large pots on to the. fire and a mill.with three spits revolving simultaneously, above a. big fii~,- each at a different Speed, regulated by clock-, work machinery.