caraways, and cracknels: and
this is the first occurrence of the bun that I have hitherto been able
to detect. The same tract supplies us with a few other items germane
to my subject: figs, almonds, long pepper, dates, prunes, and nutmegs.
It is curious to watch how by degrees the kitchen department was
furnished with articles which nowadays are viewed as the commonest
necessaries of life.

In the 17th century the increased communication with the Continent
made us by degrees larger partakers of the discoveries of foreign
cooks. Noblemen and gentlemen travelling abroad brought back with them
receipts for making the dishes which they had tasted in the course
of their tours. In the "Compleat Cook," 1655 and 1662, the beneficial
operation of actual experience of this kind, and of the introduction
of such books as the "Receipts for Dutch Victual" and "Epulario, or
the Italian Banquet," to English readers and students, is manifest
enough; for in the latter volume we get such entries as these: "To
make a Portugal dish;" "To make a Virginia dish;" "A Persian dish;" "A
Spanish olio;" and then there are receipts "To make a Posset the
Earl of Arundel's way;" "To make the Lady Abergavenny's Cheese;"
"The Jacobin's Pottage;" "To make Mrs. Leeds' Cheesecakes;" "The Lord
Conway His Lordship's receipt for the making of Amber Puddings;" "The
Countess of Rutland's receipt of making the Rare Banbury Cake, which
was so much praised as her daughter's (the Right Honourable Lady
Chaworth) Pudding," and "To make Poor Knights"--the last a medley in
which bread, cream, and eggs were the leading materials.

Warner, however, in the "Additional Notes and Observations" to his
"Antiquitates Culinariae," 1791, expresses himself adversely to
the foreign systems of cookery from an English point of view.
"Notwithstanding," he remarks, "the partiality of our countrymen
to French cookery, yet that mode of disguising meat in this kingdom
(except perhaps in the hottest part of the hottest season of the year)
is an absurdity. It is _here_ the art of _spoiling good meat_. The
same art, indeed, in the South of France; where the climate is much
warmer, and the flesh of the animal lean and insipid, is highly
valuable; it is the art of making _bad meat eatable_." At the same
time, he acknowledges the superior thrift and intelligence of the
French cooks, and instances the frog and the horse. "The frog is
considered in this country as a disgusting animal, altogeth