of the male
portion of the family was to find food for the rest; and a pair of
spurs laid on an empty trencher was well understood by the goodman as
a token that the larder was empty and replenishable.

There are new books on all subjects, of which it is comparatively easy
within a moderate compass to afford an intelligible, perhaps even
a sufficient, account. But there are others which I, for my part,
hesitate to touch, and which do not seem to be amenable to the law
of selection. "Studies in Nidderland," by Mr. Joseph Lucas, is one of
these. It was a labour of love, and it is full of records of singular
survivals to our time of archaisms of all descriptions, culinary and
gardening utensils not forgotten. There is one point, which I may
perhaps advert to, and it is the square of wood with a handle, which
the folk in that part of Yorkshire employed, in lieu of the ladle, for
stirring, and the stone ovens for baking, which, the author tells us,
occur also in a part of Surrey. But the volume should be read as a
whole. We have of such too few.

Under the name of a Roman epicure, Coelius Apicius, has come down
to us what may be accepted as the most ancient European "Book of
Cookery." I think that the idea widely entertained as to this work
having proceeded from the pen of a man, after whom it was christened,
has no more substantial basis than a theory would have that the
"Arabian Nights" were composed by Haroun al Raschid. Warner, in the
introduction to his "Antiquitates Culinariae," 1791, adduces as a
specimen of the rest two receipts from this collection, shewing how
the Roman cook of the Apician epoch was wont to dress a hog's paunch,
and to manufacture sauce for a boiled chicken. Of the three persons
who bore the name, it seems to be thought most likely that the one who
lived under Trajan was the true godfather of the Culinary Manual.

One of Massinger's characters (Holdfast) in the "City Madam," 1658,
is made to charge the gourmets of his time with all the sins of
extravagance perpetrated in their most luxurious and fantastic
epoch. The object was to amuse the audience; but in England no "court
gluttony," much less country Christmas, ever saw buttered eggs which
had cost L30, or pies of carps' tongues, or pheasants drenched with
ambergris, or sauce for a peacock made of the gravy of three fat
wethers, or sucking pigs at twenty marks each.

Both Apicius and our Joe Miller died within L80,000 of being
beggars--Mill