other offal of poultry. Fish was cooked in salt water or
diluted wine.

Pepper and salt were freely used, and the former must have been ground
as it was wanted, for a pepper-mill is named as a requisite. Mustard
we do not encounter till the time of Johannes de Garlandia (early
thirteenth century), who states that it grew in his own garden at
Paris. Garlic, or gar-leac (in the same way as the onion is called
_yn-leac_), had established itself as a flavouring medium. The
nasturtium was also taken into service in the tenth or eleventh
century for the same purpose, and is classed with herbs.

When the dish was ready, it was served up with green sauce, in which
the chief ingredients were sage, parsley, pepper, and oil, with a
little salt. Green geese were eaten with raisin or crab-apple sauce.
Poultry was to be well larded or basted while it was before the fire.

I may be allowed to refer the reader, for some interesting jottings
respecting the first introduction of coal into London, to "Our English
Home," 1861. "The middle classes," says the anonymous writer, "were
the first to appreciate its value; but the nobility, whose mansions
were in the pleasant suburbs of Holborn and the Strand, regarded it as
a nuisance." This was about the middle of the thirteenth century. It
may be a mite contributed to our knowledge of early household economy
to mention, by the way, that in the supernatural tale of the "Smith
and his Dame" (sixteenth century) "a quarter of coal" occurs. The
smith lays it on the fire all at once; but then it was for his forge.
He also poured water on the flames, to make them, by means of his
bellows, blaze more fiercely. But the proportion of coal to wood
was long probably very small. One of the tenants of the Abbey of
Peterborough, in 852, was obliged to furnish forty loads of wood, but
of coal two only.

In the time of Charles I., however, coals seem to have been usual
in the kitchen, for Breton, in this "Fantasticks," 1626, says, under
January:--"The Maid is stirring betimes, and slipping on her Shooes
and her Petticoat, groaps for the tinder box, where after a conflict
between the steele and the stone, she begets a spark, at last the
Candle lights on his Match; then upon an old rotten foundation of
broaken boards she erects an artificiall fabrick of the black Bowels
of New-Castle soyle, to which she sets fire with as much confidence as
the Romans to their Funerall Pyles."

Under July, in the same work,