oles or ramparts of their castles, when acting as
viceroys for their sovereign lords, no doubt could well dispense with the
minor occupations of refined civilization.

The bill of fare of a feudal banquet would possibly astonish and puzzle
the gastronomic powers and digestive organs of the nineteenth century,
although cookery was esteemed as a noble science even then, in the days
when Soyer was not. The boar's head, the peacock, occasionally served up
in his feathers, the crane or young herons, might not have been
altogether bad substitutes for turkeys and geese, but whether larded,
roasted, and eaten with ginger, and often served in their feathers, they
might have been suited to our modern tastes is problematical; porpoises
and seals that often appeared in the list of "goodly provisions" for
special occasions, may scarcely be deemed more of dainties; and the
compounds that figure in some of the recipes extant, of the more mystical
entrees, present to the eye such medleys, that we feel certain of a
preference for the plain "roast" or "boil," in feudal times, at least, if
not at all others. Force-meats, compounded of pork, figs, cheese, and
ale, seasoned with pepper, saffron, and salt, baked in a crust, and
garnished with powderings of sugar and comforts, may be quoted as a
sample of their made dishes, while beef-tea, enriched with pork fat,
beaten up with cream and sweetened with honey, as directed by their form,
possibly was classed among the delicate soups, or ranged under the head
of "_sick cookery_."

The bread that formed the substitute for our best and "second
households," was of various kinds, the finest being a sort of spice-cake
of superior quality; simnel and wastel cakes were the ordinary food for
the aristocracy, while commoners were content with a coarse brown
material manufactured from rye, oats, or barley, that would at this day
cause a revolution in prisons, or pauper workhouses, were it to be found
in the dietary table of either, much less on the dinner-table. The
special wines, hippocras, pigment, morat, and mead, were the temptations
to inebriety among the rich; cider, perry, and ale, the form of alcoholic
drinks common to the less affluent.

The record of Peter de Blois, in one of his letters from the Court of
Henry II., may be estimated perhaps as a faithful, if not attractive,
description of the ordinary fare on which many unfortunate knights and
retainers were sometimes compelled to subsist.