Eminence partook of strawberries and cream, perhaps; he is reported to
have been the person who made that pleasant combination fashionable.
The grampus, or sea-wolf, was another article of food which bears
testimony to the coarse palate of the early Englishman, and at
the same time may afford a clue to the partiality for disguising
condiments and spices. But it appears from an entry in his Privy Purse
Expenses, under September 8, 1498, that Henry the Seventh thought a
porpoise a valuable commodity and a fit dish for an ambassador, for on
that date twenty-one shillings were paid to Cardinal Morton's servant,
who had procured one for some envoy then in London, perhaps the French
representative, who is the recipient of a complimentary gratuity of
L49 10s. on April 12, 1499, at his departure from England.

In the fifteenth century the existing stock of fish for culinary
purposes received, if we may trust the vocabularies, a few accessions;
as, for instance, the bream, the skate, the flounder, and the bake.

In "Piers of Fulham (14th century)," we hear of the good store of fat
eels imported into England from the Low Countries, and to be had cheap
by anyone who watched the tides; but the author reprehends the growing
luxury of using the livers of young fish before they were large enough
to be brought to the table.

The most comprehensive catalogue of fish brought to table in the time
of Charles I. is in a pamphlet of 1644, inserted among my "Fugitive
Tracts," 1875; and includes the oyster, which used to be eaten at
breakfast with wine, the crab, lobster, sturgeon, salmon, ling,
flounder, plaice, whiting, sprat, herring, pike, bream, roach, dace,
and eel. The writer states that the sprat and herring were used in
Lent. The sound of the stock-fish, boiled in wort or thin ale till
they were tender, then laid on a cloth and dried, and finally cut into
strips, was thought a good receipt for book-glue.

An acquaintance is in possession of an old cookery-book which exhibits
the gamut of the fish as it lies in the frying-pan, reducing its
supposed lament to musical notation. Here is an ingenious refinement
and a delicate piece of irony, which Walton and Cotton might have
liked to forestall.

The 15th century _Nominale_ enriches the catalogue of dishes then in
vogue. It specifies almond-milk, rice, gruel, fish-broth or soup,
a sort of _fricassee_ of fowl, collops, a pie, a pasty, a tart, a
tartlet, a charlet (minced pork), apple