HOW OUR ANCESTORS USED TO FEED.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 8279, 21 October 1905, Page 7

HOW OUR ANCESTORS USED TO FEED.

When Montesquieu said that dinner killed one half of the Parisians and supper the other half, he might, says a writer on " The Diseases of the Eighteenth Century," in the Cornhill, have spoken for London as well. When one thinks of the succession of heavy meats, of the capons and the boars' heads, the luscious pasties, the creams, stuffings, and mincemeats which the ladies of the family spent all their time and ingenuity in devising, one is tempted to rejoice that such domesticity is indeed a lost art, and to think that to the incapacity of the modern housekeeper is owing no little part of such health and spirits as one has. And then the world not only ate so enormously and so injudiciously, but so often! The terrible breakfast, with small beer and table groaning with large meats, precluded, indeed, a lengthy mid-day meal. But by three or four o'clock great-grandpapa and grandmamma were feeding again. As late as the early Victorian period this fearful repast embraced about twelve courses, all enormously heavy ancl indigestible, and, as far as possible, put on the table together, so that the diner could see his troubles in front of him, and know the worst at once. Does the present age quite realise that when its forefathers had sat, perhaps, three hours over this meal, drunk steadily for two or three more, and taken a dish of tea with their womenkind, Ihe whole party then returned to the diningroom and had a supper on the cold remains of the dinner ?