core of usefulness to the
housewife I forbear all judgment. The recipes may be thought extravagant in
these late hard times--though epicurism has changed rather than vanished.
Lord Bacon's receipt for making "Manus Christi for the Stomach" begins,
"Take of the best pearls very finely pulverised one drachm"; and a health
resolution runs, "To take once during supper wine in which gold is
quenched." Costly ingredients such as pearls and leaf gold appear only once
among Digby's receipts. The modern housewife may be aghast at the thought
of more than a hundred ways of making mead and metheglin. Mead recalls to
her perhaps her first history-book, wherein she learnt of it as a drink of
the primitive Anglo-Saxons. If she doubt the usefulness of the collection
in her own kitchen, let her take the little volume to her boudoir, and read
it there as gossiping notes of the _beau monde_ in the days when James I
and the Charleses ruled the land. She will find herself in lofty company,
and on intimate terms with them. They come down to our level, without any
show of condescension. Lords and ladies who were personages of a solemn
state pageant, are now human neighbourly creatures, owning to likes and
dislikes, and letting us into the secrets of their daily habits.

It pleases me to think of Henrietta Maria, in her exile, busying herself in
her still-room, and forgetting her dangers and sorrows in simpling and
stilling and kitchen messes; and of her devoted Sir Kenelm, in the moments
when he is neither abeting her Royalist plots, nor diverting her mind to
matters of high science, or the mysteries of the Faith, but bringing to her
such lowlier consolations as are hinted in "Hydromel as I made it weak for
the Queen Mother." We are not waiting in a chill ante-chamber when we read,
"The Queen's ordinary Bouillon de Sante in a morning was thus," or of the
Pressis which she "used to take at nights--of great yet temperate
nourishment--instead of a Supper." And who can hint at Court scandals in
the face of such evidence of domesticity as "The Queen useth to baste meat
with yolks of fresh eggs, &c." or "The way that the Countess de Penalva
makes the Portuguese eggs for the Queen is this"? We cannot help being
interested in the habits of Lady Hungerford, who "useth to make her mead at
the end of summer, when she takes up her Honey, and begins to drink it in
Lent." My Lady Gower and her husband were of independent tastes. Each had
their own receipts.