But even in the north different tales are told sometimes. Charles II, when in exile, writes from Saragossa,[97] "But I am very much deceived in the travelling in Spain, for, by all reports, I did expect ill cheer and worse living, and hitherto we have found both the beds, and especially the meat very good.... God keep you, and send you to eat as good mutton as we have every meal." Lady Fanshawe is more detailed. "I find it a received opinion that Spain affords not food either good or plentiful; true it is that strangers who have neither skill to choose, nor money to buy, will find themselves at a loss: but there is not in the Christian world better wines than their midland wines are especially, besides sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk; their corn white to a miracle, and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world; bacon beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much larger and fatter than ours; mutton most excellent; capons much better than ours.... They have the best partridges I ever eat, and the best sausages; and salmons, pikes, and sea-breams which they send up in pickle to Madrid, and dolphins, which are excellent meat and carps, and many other sorts of fish. The cream, called 'nata,' is much sweeter and thicker than any I ever saw in England; their eggs much exceed ours; and so all sorts of salads and roots and fruits. What I most admired are melons, peaches, burgamot pears, grapes, oranges, lemons, citrons, figs, pomegranates; besides that I have eaten many sorts of biscuits, cakes, cheese, and excellent sweetmeats I have not here mentioned."
Both these quotations, it is true, refer to the middle of the seventeenth century.
England was a land of plenty in these days; Poland no less so. The sum of the experience of those who had first-hand means of comparison suggests that Poland was as great an importer of luxuries as any country in Europe. Muscovy did not import, but was well off, nevertheless; plenty of beef, mutton, pork, and veal, and all the more of them for foreigners seeing that, with fast-days so numerous as they were, the natives had become so used to salt fish that they ate little meat, although the salt fish, insufficiently salted, was often in a state like that of the fish which the good angel provided for Tobit to protect him from a demon, the scent whereof was so terrible that it drove the fiend into the uttermost parts of Egypt. In Lent butter was replaced by caviare. An ambassador's secretary has a pleasant picture to draw of wayside fare; when they reached a village, the local priest would appear with gooseberries, or fish, or a hen, or some eggs, as a present; was rewarded with aqua-vitæ, and generally went home drunk.