Page:A History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England During the Middle Ages.djvu/163

 and Sentiments. 143 been entertained, that living in the middle ages was coarfe and not elaborate ; and that old Englilli fare confirted chiefly in roafl: beef and plum-pudding. That nothing, however, could be more incorre6t, is fully proved by the rather numerous mediaeval cookery books which are ftill preferved, and which contain chiefly directions for made diflies, many of them very complicated, and, to appearance, extremely delicate. The office of cook, indeed, was one of great importance, and was well paid j and the kitchens of the arifl:ocracy were very extenfive, and were fur- niflied with a confiderable variety of implements of cookery. On account, no doubt, of this importance, Alexander Neckam, although an ecclefiaftic, commences his vocabulary (or, as it is commonly entitled. Liber de Utenfilibus), compiled in the latter part of the twelfth century, with an account of the kitchen and its furniture. He enumerates, among other obje6ts, a table for chopping and mincing herbs and vegetables 5 pots, trivets or tripods, an axe, a mortar and peftle, a mover, or pot-flick, for flirring, a crook or pot-hook {uncus), a caldron, a frying-pan, a grid- iron, a polhet or faucepan, a difli, a platter, a faucer, or veflel for mixing fauce, a hand-mill, a pepper-mill, a mier, or inftrument for reducing bread to crumbs. John de Garlande, in his " Diftionarius," compofed towards the middle of the thirteenth centuty, gives a fimilar enumeration 3 and a companion of the vocabularies of the fifteenth century, lliows that the arrangements of the kitchen had undergone little change during the intervening period. From thele vocabularies the following lifl of kitchen utenfils is gathered : — a brandreth, or iron tripod, for fupporting the caldron over the fire ; a caldron, a drefling-board and drefling-knife, a brafs-pot, a pofnet, a frying-pan, a gridiron, or, as it is fometimes called, a roafting-iron ; a fpit, a "gobard," explained in the MS. by ipegurgium ; a mier, a flefli-hook, a fcummer, a ladle, a pot-flick, a flice for turning meat in the frying-pan, a pot-hook, a mortar and peflle, a pepper-quern, a platter, a laucer. The older illuminated manulcripts are rarely fo elaborate as to furnifli us with reprefentations of all thefe kitchen implements ; and, in faft, it is not in the more elaborately illuminated manufcripts that kitchen fcenes are often found. But we meet with reprefentations of fome of them in artiftic