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Cakes & Ale, A Dissertation on Banquets Interspersed with Various Recipes, More or Less Original, and anecdotes, mainly veracious

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<h2>CHAPTER I</h2> <h3>BREAKFAST</h3> <div class="poetry-container"> <div class="stanza"> “The day breaks slow, but e’en must man break-fast.” </div> </div> <blockquote> Formal or informal?—An eccentric old gentleman—The ancient Britons—Breakfast in the days of Good Queen Bess—A few tea statistics—“Garraway’s”—Something about coffee—Brandy for breakfast—The evolution of the staff of life—Free Trade—The cheap loaf, and no cash to buy it. </blockquote> This is a very serious subject. The first meal of the day has exercised more influence over history than many people may be aware of. It is not easy to preserve an equal mind or keep a stiff upper lip upon an empty stomach; and indigestible food-stuffs have probably lost more battles than sore feet and bad ammunition. It is an incontestable fact that the great Napoleon lost the battles of Borodino and Leipsic through eating too fast. When good digestion waits on appetite, great men are less liable to commit mistakes—and a mistake in a great man is a crime—than when dyspepsia has marked them for her own; and this rule applies to all men. There should be no hurry or formality about[Pg 2] breakfast. Your punctual host and hostess may be all very well from their own point of view; but black looks and sarcastic welcomings are an abomination to the guest who may have overslept himself or herself, and who fails to say, “Good-morning” just on the stroke of nine o’clock. Far be it from the author’s wish to decry the system of family prayers, although the spectacle of the full strength of the domestic company, from the stern-featured housekeeper, or the chief lady’s-maid (the housekeeper is frequently too grand, or too much cumbered with other duties to attend public worship), to the diminutive page-boy, standing all in a row, facing the cups and saucers, is occasionally more provocative of mirth than reverence. But too much law and order about fast-breaking is to be deplored. “I’m not very punctual, I’m afraid, Sir John,” I once heard a very charming lady observe to her host, as she took her seat at the table, exactly ten minutes after the line of menials had filed out. “On the contrary, Lady V——” returned the master of the house, with a cast-iron smile, “you are punctual in your unpunctuality; for you have missed prayers by the sixth part of one hour, every morning since you came.” Now what should be done to a host like that? In the long ago I was favoured with the acquaintance of an elderly gentleman of property, a most estimable, though eccentric, man. And he invariably breakfasted with his hat on. It did not matter if ladies were present or not. Down he would sit, opposite the ham and eggs—or whatever dish it might chance to be—with a[Pg 3] white hat, with mourning band attached, surmounting his fine head. We used to think the presence of the hat was owing to partial baldness; but, as he never wore it at luncheon or dinner, that idea was abandoned. In fact, he pleaded that the hat kept his thoughts in; and as after breakfast he was closeted with his steward, or agent, or stud-groom, or keeper, for several hours, he doubtless let loose some of those thoughts to one or the other. At all events we never saw him again till luncheon, unless there was any hunting or shooting to be done. This same old gentleman once rehearsed his own funeral on the carriage drive outside, and stage-managed the solemn ceremony from his study window. An under-gardener pushed a wheelbarrow, containing a box of choice cuttings, to represent the body; and the butler posed as chief mourner. And when anybody went wrong, or the pall-bearers—six grooms—failed to keep in step, the master would throw up the window-sash, and roar— “Begin again!” But this is wandering from the subject. Let us try back. Having made wide search amongst old and musty manuscripts, I can find no record of a bill-of-fare of the first meal of the ancient Britons. Our blue forefathers, in all probability, but seldom assisted at any such smart function as a wedding-breakfast, or even a hunting one; for the simple reason that it was a case with them of, “no hunt, no breakfast.” Unless one or other had killed the deer, or the wild-boar, or[Pg 4] some other living thing to furnish the refection the feast was a Barmecide one, and much as we have heard of the strength and hardiness of our blue forefathers, many of them must have died of sheer starvation. For they had no weapons but clubs, and rough cut flints, with which to kill the beasts of the country—who were, however, occasionally lured into pitfalls; and as to fish, unless they “tickled” them, the denizens of the streams must have had an easy time of it. They had sheep, but these were valuable chiefly on account of their wool; as used to be the case in Australia, ere the tinned meat trade was established. Most of the fruits and vegetables which we enjoy to-day were introduced into Britain by the Romans. Snipe and woodcock and (in the north) grouse may have been bagged, as well as hares. But these poor savages knew not rabbits by sight, nor indeed, much of the feathered fowl which their more favoured descendants are in the habit of shooting, or otherwise destroying, for food. The ancient Britons knew not bacon and eggs, nor the toothsome kipper, nor yet the marmalade of Dundee. As for bread, it was not invented in any shape or form until much later; and its primitive state was a tough paste of flour, water, and (occasionally) milk—something like the “damper” of the Australian bush, or the unleavened chupati which the poorer classes in Hindustan put up with, after baking it, at the present day. The hardy, independent Saxon, had a much better time of it, in the way of meat and drink. But with supper forming the chief meal of the[Pg 5] day, his breakfast was a simple, though plentiful one, and consisted chiefly of venison pasty and the flesh of goats, washed down with ale, or mead. “A free breakfast-table of Elizabeth’s time,” says an old authority, “or even during the more recent reign of Charles II., would contrast oddly with our modern morning meal. There were meats, hot and cold; beef and brawn, and boar’s head, the venison pasty, and the <h4>Wardon Pie</h4> of west country pears. There was hot bread, too, and sundry ‘cates’ which would now be strange to our eyes. But to wash down these substantial viands there was little save ale. The most delicate lady could procure no more suitable beverage than the blood of John Barleycorn. The most fretful invalid had to be content with a mug of small beer, stirred up with a sprig of rosemary. Wine, hippocras, and metheglin were potations for supper-time, not for breakfast, and beer reigned supreme. None but home productions figured on the board of our ancestors. Not for them were seas traversed, or tropical shores visited, as for us. Yemen and Ceylon, Assam and Cathay, Cuba and Peru, did not send daily tribute to their tables, and the very names of tea and coffee, of cocoa and chocolate, were to them unknown. The dethronement of ale, subsequent on the introduction of these eastern products, is one of the most marked events which have severed the social life of the present day from that of the past.” [Pg 6] With the exception of the Wardon pie and the “cates,” the above bill-of-fare would probably satisfy the cravings of the ordinary “Johnny” of to-day, who has heard the chimes at midnight, and would sooner face a charging tiger than drink tea or coffee with his first meal, which, alas! but too often consists of a hot-pickle sandwich and a “brandy and soda,” with not quite all the soda in. But just imagine the fine lady of to-day with a large tankard of Burton ale facing her at the breakfast-table. <h4>Tea,</h4> which is said to have been introduced into China by Djarma, a native of India, about A.D. 500, was not familiar in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. And it was not until 1657, when Garraway opened a tea-house in Exchange Alley, that Londoners began tea-drinking as an experiment. In 1662 Pepys writes— “Home, and there find my wife making of tea”—two years before, he called it “tee (a China drink)”—“a drink which Mr. Pelling the Pothicary tells her is good for her cold and defluxions.” In 1740 the price of tea ranged from 7s. to 24s. per lb. In 1725, 370,323 lbs. were drunk in England, and in 1890, 194,008,000. In 1840 the duty was 2s. 2¼d. per lb.; in 1858 1s. 5d. per lb.; and in 1890 4d. per lb. The seed of <h4>The Coffee-Tree,</h4> which, when roasted, ground, and mixed with water, and unmixed with horse-beans, dandelion-root,[Pg 7] or road-scrapings, forms a most agreeable beverage to those who can digest it, was not known to the Greeks or Romans, but has been used in Abyssinia and along the north-east coast of Africa almost as long as those parts have been populated. Here, in merry England, where coffee was not introduced until the eighteenth century, it was at first used but sparingly, until it almost entirely took the place of chocolate, which was the favoured beverage of the duchesses and fine madams who minced and flirted, and plotted, during the reign of the Merry Monarch, fifty years or so before. The march of knowledge has taught the thrifty housewife of to-day to roast her own coffee, instead of purchasing it in that form from the retail shopkeeper, who, as a rule, under-roasts the berry, in order to “keep the weight in.” But do not blame him too freely, for he is occasionally a Poor Law Guardian, and has to “keep pace with the Stores.” During the Georgian era, the hard-drinking epoch, breakfast far too often consisted chiefly of French brandy; and the first meal was, in consequence, not altogether a happy or wholesome one, nor conducive to the close study of serious subjects. The history of <h4>The Staff of Life[1]</h4> would require a much larger volume than this, all to itself. That the evolution of bread-making has been very gradual admits of no denial; and[Pg 8] as late as the Tudor and Stuart periods the art was still in its infancy. The quality of the bread consumed was a test of social standing. Thus, whilst the haut monde, the height of society, lords and dukes, with countesses and dames of high degree, were in the habit of consuming delicate manchets, made of the finest wheaten flour, of snowy purity, the middle classes had to content themselves with white loaves of inferior quality. To the journeyman and the ’prentice (who had to endure, with patience, the buffets of master and mistress) was meted out coarse but wholesome brown bread, made from an admixture of wheat and barley flour; whilst the agricultural labourer staved off starvation with loaves made from rye, occasionally mixed with red wheat or barley. The introduction of <h4>Free Trade</h4> —by no means an unmixed blessing—has changed all this; and the working-classes, with their wives and families, can, when out of the workhouse, in the intervals between “strikes,” enjoy the same quality of bread, that “cheap loaf” which appears on the table of the wicked squire and the all-devouring parson. In Yorkshire, at the present day, almost the worst thing that can be urged against a woman is that she “canna mak’ a bit o’ bread.” “Just look,” wrote an enthusiastic Free Trader, a quarter of a century ago, “at the immense change[Pg 9] that has latterly taken place in the food of the English peasantry. Rye bread and pease-pudding exchanged for wheaten loaves. A startling change, but not greatly different from what has occurred in France, where, with the abuses of the Bourbon rule, an end was put to the semi-starvation of French tillers of the soil. Black bread is now almost as much a rarity in France as on our side of the Channel; while barley in Wales, oats in Scotland, and the potato in Ireland, are no longer the food-staples that they were.” I have no wish for anything of a contentious nature to appear in this volume; but may deliver, with regard to the above, the opinion that pease-pudding is by no means despicable fare, when associated with a boiled leg of pork; and I may add that too many of the English peasantry, nowadays, have been reduced, by this same Free Trade, to a diet of no bread at all, in place of wheaten, or any other loaves. Wedding breakfasts, with the formal speeches, and cutting of the cake, have gone out of fashion, and the subject of the British breakfast of to-day demands a new chapter. <hr class="chap" /> [Pg 10] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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