[Illustration: _No. 64. Anglo-Norman Bee-keepers._]
We have hardly any information on the cookery during the period we are now describing. It is clear that numerous delicacies were served to the tables of the noble and wealthy, but their culinary receipts are not preserved. We read in William of Malmesbury, incidentally, that a great prince ate garlick with a goose, from which we are led to suppose that the Normans were fond of highly-seasoned dishes. Neckam tells us that pork, roasted or broiled on red embers, required no other sauce than salt or garlick; that a capon done in gobbets should be well peppered; that a goose, roasted on the spit, required a strong garlick-sauce, mixed with wine or “the green juice of grapes or crabs;” that a hen, if boiled, should be cut up and seasoned with cummin, but, if roasted, it should be basted with lard, and might be seasoned with garlick-sauce, though it would be more savoury with simple sauce; that fish should be cooked in a sauce composed of wine and water, and that they should afterwards be served with a sauce composed of sage, parsley, cost, ditany, wild thyme, and garlick, with pepper and salt. We learn from other incidental allusions of contemporary, or nearly contemporary, writers, that bread, butter, and cheese, were the ordinary food of the common people, probably with little else besides vegetables. It is interesting to remark that the three articles just mentioned, have preserved their Anglo-Saxon names to the present times, while all kinds of meat, beef, veal, mutton, pork, even bacon, have retained only the names given to them by the Normans, which seems to imply that flesh-meat was not in general use for food among the lower classes of society.
Bread seems almost always to have been formed in cakes, like our buns, round in the earlier pictures, and in later ones (as in our cut No. 63), shaped more fancifully. We see it generally marked with a cross, perhaps a superstitious precaution of the baker. The bread seems to have been in general made for the occasion, and eaten fresh, perhaps warm. In one of Reginald of Durham’s stories, we are told of a priest in the forest of Arden, who, having nothing but a peck of corn left, and receiving a large number of visitors on a sacred festival, gave it out to be baked to provide for them. The corn was immediately ground, perhaps with querns, and having been mixed with “dewy” water, in the usual manner, was made into twelve loaves, and immediately placed in the hot oven.[19] Cheese and butter seem also to have been tolerably abundant. An illuminator of the Cambridge MS., given in our cut No. 65, represents a man milking and another churning; he who churns appears, to use a vulgar phrase, to be “taking it at his ease.” The milking-pail, too, is rather extraordinary in its form.