n at present. This youth, when
he is asked what he drinks, replies, water, or ale if he can get it.
The dish so deftly constructed by King Arthur, according to one of
his numerous biographers, exhibited that wedlock of fruit with animal
matter--fat and plums--which we post-Arthurians eye with a certain
fastidious repugnance, but which, notwithstanding, lingered on to
the Elizabethan or Jacobaean era--nay, did not make the gorge of our
grandsires turn rebellious. It survives among ourselves only in the
modified shape of such accessories as currant jelly and apple sauce.

But the nursery rhyme about Arthur and the bag-pudding of barley
meal with raisins and meat has a documentary worth for us beyond the
shadowy recital of the banquet at Caerleon, for, _mutato nomine_,
it is the description of a favourite article of popular diet in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The narrative of Mrs. Thumb and
her pudding is more circumstantial than that of King Alfred and the
housewife; and if the tradition is worthless, it serves us so far,
that it faithfully portrays a favourite item of rustic consumption in
old times. We are told that the pudding was made in a bowl, and that
it was chiefly composed of the flesh and blood of a newly-killed hog,
laid in batter; and then, when all was ready, the bag with all its
savoury burden was put into a kettle.

As we are already on the threshold of legend and myth, we may linger
there a moment to recall to memory the resemblance between the
description of this piece of handiwork and that ascribed to good King
Arthur, who lived in days when monarchs were their own _chefs_,
for the Arthurian dish was also prepared in a bag, and consisted,
according to the ditty, of barley-meal and fat. Soberly speaking, the
two accounts belong, maybe, to something like the same epoch in the
annals of gastronomy; and a large pudding was, for a vast length
of time, no doubt, a prevailing _piece de resistance_ in all
frugal British households. It was the culinary forefather of
toad-in-the-hole, hot-pot, Irish stew, and of that devil-dreaded
Cornish pasty. The Elizabethan transmitters of these two Apician
nuggets possibly antedated the popular institution of the bag-pudding;
but the ancientest gastronomical records testify to the happy
introduction of the frying-pan about the era when we were under
Alfred's fatherly sway. It may have even preceded the grill, just
as the fork lagged behind the spoon, from which i