AN UNKNOWN SIDE OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 48, 26 February 1938, Page 27

AN UNKNOWN SIDE OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Nowadays, popular journals give the public almost all that the almanac maker used to offer it; but for two hundred years before the first daily newspaper appeared in England, almanacs had little or no competition to face in their own field, writes R.H.H. in the "Birmingham Post."

There lie before me some pieces of an almanac published towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. That was perhaps the time when almanacs flourished most, for in those days almost everyone who could read seems to have bought and studied them.

They must have been poured over in thousands of English homes where nothing else was ever read except, perhaps, the Bible. In this one, there are doggerel verses foreach month of the year, giving advice on suitable diet for the season; there is a forecast of the weather for each week of the year; there are dates of Church festivals and saints' days, and a table showing the times of high tide around the coasts and at neighbouring foreign ports.

We do not usually imagine that a meticulous care for diet was among the characteristics of the full-blooded subjects of Queen Elizabeth, whose hearty breakfasts off sides of beef and gallons of beer, and whose banquets of innumerable courses have passed into a legend".

The compiler of the almanac thought differently; and he was in a position to know the minds and the digestive capacities of the Elizabethans better than we can know them. At any rate, he considered it worth while to give monthly warnings about diet in verse ; and we can be sure that he would

not have done so if the public had been bored with the subject.

In March, he gave his readers a formidable list of foods to be avoided by invalids because they "breed ill blood and melancholy"; his list began with pears and apples and ended with beef and goat's flesh. In April, he broke into (more or less) lyrical praises of wine, and had no word of warning for anybody on that score; but in June he thought it a fitting season to admonish those with hearty appetites:—

In spring your dinner must not much exceed In summer's heat but little meat shall need;

In autumn beware you eat not too much fruit With winter's cold, full meals do Attest suit.

In July, he praised the health-giving properties- of cherries, and also advised that cheese ought to be eaten after meat, but nuts after fish or fruit. In August, the reader was warned to be careful of what kinds of meat he ate, and was told that veal and various kinds of fowl, including the lark and woodcock, were best for a prudent eater at that season.

In October there was a warning to all except those in bouncing health to avoid cheese, because:—

Cheese Is an heavy meat, gross, and cold. And breedeth costlveness both new and old; For healthy mon may cheese be wholesome food, But for the weak and sickly 'tis not good.

Finally, in December, these Elizabethan dietetics ended with a rather surprising verse in favour of giving ass's milk to invalids, - instead of the product of the cow. It all goes to show that that age of heroic appetites and gargantuan boards was conscious, after all, of its digestion.