na."

The "Form of Cury" will amply remunerate a study. It presents the
earliest mention, so far as I can discern, of olive oil, cloves, mace,
and gourds. In the receipts for making Aigredouce and Bardolf, sugar,
that indispensable feature in the _cuisine_, makes its appearance; but
it does so, I should add, in such a way as to lead to the belief
that the use of sugar was at this time becoming more general. The
difficulty, at first, seems to have been in refining it. We encounter
here, too, onions under the name borrowed from the French instead of
the Anglo-Saxon form "ynne leac"; and the prescriptions for making
messes of almonds, pork, peas, and beans are numerous. There is
"Saracen sauce," moreover, possibly as old as the Crusades, and pig
with sage stuffing (from which it was but one step to duck). More
than one species of "galantine" was already known; and I observe the
distinction, in one of the smaller collections printed by Warner,
between the tartlet formed of meat and the tartlet _de fritures_,
of which the latter approaches more nearly our notion. The imperfect
comprehension of harmonies, which is illustrated by the prehistoric
bag-pudding of King Arthur, still continued in the unnatural union of
flesh with sweets. It is now confined to the cottage, whence Arthur
may have himself introduced it at Court and to the Knights of the
Round Table.

In this authority, several of the dishes were to be cooked in _white
grease_, which Warner interprets into _lard_; others demanded olive
oil; but there is no allusion to butter. Among the receipts are
some for dishes "in gravy"; rabbits and chickens were to be treated
similarly; and the gravy appears to have consisted merely of the
broth in which they were boiled, and which was flavoured with pounded
almonds, powdered ginger, and sugar.

The "Liber Cure Cocorum," which is apparently extant only in a
fifteenth century MS., is a metrical treatise, instructing its
readers how to prepare certain dishes, condiments and accessories; and
presents, for the most part, a repetition of what has already occurred
in earlier and more comprehensive undertakings. It is a curious aid
to our knowledge of the manner in which the table of the well-to-do
Englishman was furnished in the time of Henry VI., and it is so far
special, that it deals with the subject more from a middle-class point
of view than the "Regulations for the Royal Household," and other
similar compilations, which I hav