dhouse had known of the book. If the admixture of "wood-sorrel and
currens" had seemed to him fraught with peril, he could have fallen back on
the "Oatmeal Pap of Sir John Colladon."

Where are all the old dishes vanished to? Who has ever known "A smoothening
Quiddany of Quinces?" Who can tell the composition of a Tansy? These are
tame days when we have forgotten how to make Cock-Ale. They drank 'Sack
with Clove-gilly-flowers' at the "Mermaid," I am sure. What is Bragot? What
is Stepony? And what Slipp-coat Cheese? Ask the baker for a Manchet. The
old names call for a _Ballade. Ou sont les mets d'antan?_ And, cooks, with
all your exactness about pounds and ounces and minutes of the clock, can
you better directions like these? Watch for "a pale colour with an eye of
green." "Let it stand till you may see your shadow in it"; or "till it
begin to blink." Your liquid may boil "simpringly," or "in a great
ebullition, in great galloping waves." "Make a liaison a moment, about an
Ave Maria while." And all the significance of the times and seasons we have
lost in our neglect to kill male hogs "in the wane of the moon!" For there
is a lingering of astrology in all this kitchen lore. The irascible
Culpeper, Digby's contemporary, poured scorn on such doctors as knew not
the high science, "Physick without astronomy being like a lamp without
Oil."

As for the poetry I promised--well, I have been quoting it, have I not? But
there is more, and better. Surely it was a romantic folk that kept in its
store-rooms the "best Blew raisins of the sun," or "plumpsome raisins of
the sun," and made its mead with dew, and eagerly exchanged with each other
recipes for "Conserve of Red Roses." And now we come to an essential
feature of the whole. It is a _cuisine_ that does not reek of shops and
co-operative stores, but of the wood, the garden, the field and meadow.
Like Culpeper's pharmacopeia, it is made for the most part of "Such Things
only as grow in England, they being most fit for English Bodies." Is it any
wonder that the metheglin should be called the "Liquor of Life," which has
these among its ingredients: Bugloss, borage, hyssop, organ,
sweet-marjoram, rosemary, French cowslip, coltsfoot, thyme, burnet,
self-heal, sanicle, betony, blew-button, harts-tongue, meadowsweet,
liverwort, bistort, St. John's wort, yellow saunders, balm, bugle,
agrimony, tormentilla, comfrey, fennel, clown's allheal, maidenhair,
wall-rue, spleen-wort, sweet oak,