. The feast is provided on the bowling green
in front of the Hall, where several long tables are plentifully spread
with Radishes and brown bread and butter, the tables being repeatedly
furnished with guests" ("Gardener's Chronicle").

FOOTNOTES:

[237:1] "Catholicon Anglicum."

RAISINS.

_Clown._

Four pounds of Prunes and as many of Raisins o' the sun.

_Winter's Tale_, act iv, sc. 3 (51).

Raisins are alluded to, if not actually named, in "1st Henry IV.," act
ii, sc. 4, when Falstaff says: "If reasons were as plentiful as
Blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I----" "It
seems that a pun underlies this, the association of reasons with
Blackberries springing out of the fact that _reasons_ sounded like
_raisins_."--EARLE, _Philology_, &c.

Bearing in mind that Raisin is a corruption of _racemus_, a bunch of
Grapes, we can understand that the word was not always applied, as it is
now, to the dried fruit, but was sometimes applied to the bunch of
Grapes as it hung ripe on the tree--

"For no man at the firste stroke
He may not felle down an Oke;
Nor of the Reisins have the wyne
Till Grapes be ripe and welle afyne."

_Romaunt of the Rose._

The best dried fruit were Raisins of the sun, _i.e._, dried in the sun,
to distinguish them from those which were dried in ovens. They were, of
course, foreign fruit, and were largely imported. The process of drying
in the sun is still the method in use, at least, with "the finer kinds,
such as Muscatels, which are distinguished as much by the mode of drying
as by the variety and soil in which they are grown, the finest being
dried on the Vines before gathering, the stalk being partly cut through
when the fruits are ripe, and the leaves being removed from near the
clusters, so as to allow the full effect of the sun in ripening."

The Grape thus becomes a Raisin, but it is still further transformed
when it reaches the cook; it then becomes a Plum, for Plum pudding has,
as we all know, Raisins for its chief ingredient and certainly no Plums;
and the Christmas pie into which Jack Horner put in his thumb and pulled
out a Plum must have been a mince-pie, also made of Raisins; but how a
cooked Raisin came to be called a Plum is not recorded. In Devonshire
and Dorsetshire it undergoes a further transformation, for there Raisins
are called Figs