The period which intervened between the arrival of Catherine de Medicis from Italy and the accession of Louis XIV is one concern ing which there is practically no authentic cul inary record, although there is not the slightest reason to doubt that prodigious advances were made by the gastronomic art during that time. In fact, one has but to refer to one of the menus from the table of Louis XIV to realize that cookery had ceased to be an experiment, and it is necessary to go but a step further and compare the foods of Paris in Louis' time with those in use in' other parts of the world, to realize the progress that had been made by the French cooks by the middle of the 16th century. In Paris, for example, the foods were not dissimilar to those of our own day, to which the following menu of a dinner which was served to Emperor Charles V, by the city of Halle, would certainly be a contrast : (1) Raisins in malt flour; (2) fried eggs; (3) pancakes; (4) steamed carrots; (5) fried slices of bread; (6) a covered por ridge; (7) a high pasty; (8) a pea-soup with marrow, covered richly-with peas and eggs; (9) yellow codfish boiled in butter; (10) carps. boiled; (11) fried fish, with hitter oranges, spiced; (12) sweet pikes; (13) pulverized kernels. with almonds; (14) maize in almonds' milk; (15) fried fish with small olives; (16) cakes; (17) pears and confect.
And during this' time England, too, had made some little progress in the improvement of its cuisine, although Henry VIII was one of the first monarchs who exhibited any ity in rewarding originality in cookery. Henry, •owever, seemed unable to do enough for those who ministered to the gratification of his ap petite, and on one occasion, he was so much delighted with the flavor of a new pudding that he presented a manor to its inventor.
From the early days when the housewives of Briton had adopted a cuisine which may quite properly be termed an amalgamation of German and Roman cookery England had maintained a position of her own in the world of gastronomy. By no means as ostentatious as the ancient disciples of the art; less dainty, perhaps, than the more modern disciples in the various Euro pean countries, their school of the kitchen was so largely their own that it is not strange that Cardinal Campeggio, one of the legates charged to treat with Henry VIII concerning his di vorce from Catherine, should have been re quested to draw up a report on the state of English cookery as compared with that of Italy and France, by the express desire and for the especial use of his Holiness the Pope.
There are certain historical documents con nected with the Seymour family still on file in London, which throw a most interesting light upon the culinary customs in vogue in England during the reign of the Eighth Henry.. They show, for example, the manner in which he was entertained at Wulfhall on the occasion of his marriage to Jane Seymour. The facts, pre sented in a paper prepared by the Duchess of Somerset, are as follows: The king, with his whole household and nobility, arrived at Wulfhall on Saturday. 9 Aug. 1339. They remained
Sunday. Monday and Tuesday. How or where so many were lodged does not appear; but " covers," as we should call them, " messes," as the book calls them, were laid for two hundred the first day. There are only two meals a day accounted for, and it appears that on Saturdays, as well as on Fridays, ho meat was eaten, abstinence from flesh on those days having been ordered by a Royal proclamation, not only for health and discipline, but for the benefit of the commonwealth and the profit of the fishing-trade. The kings supper on his arrival, therefore, consisted only of fish. Country places in Wiltshire must have been better supplied with fish than they arew, for the bill of fare included pikes, gills, salmon, tenches. lobsters, bream, plaice, trouts, congers. carps, roach, eels, potted sea-fish and salmon pasties, • sack of oysters, salt haberdine (which was cod-fish salted at Abeideen), soles, and whitings.
The next day being Sunday, there were messes for four hundred, and the provisions amounted to 6 oxen. 2 muttons. 12 meals, 5 cygnets, 21 great capons, 7 good capons. 10 Kentiah capons, 3 dozen and 6 coarse capons, 70 pullets, 91 chickens, 38 quails,e9 mews, 6 greta, 2 shields of brawn. 7 swans, 2 cranes, 2 storks, 3 pheasants, 40 partridges, 2 peachicks, 21 snipe, besides larks and brews — whatever they were.
It is scarcely necessary to trace the history of the banquet—which is, of course, but an other name for the history of with more close attention to detail. In contrasting the banquets of other days with those of to-day, however, one is struck by the fact that the modern peoples have also made some consider able improvement in the manner of eating and drinking, for one has but to turn to the menus of meals served at the beginning of the 19th entury to find that dinners were not infre qbently burdened by 20 or more entrees.
In the last century before the Christian era a stoic, Posidonius of Rhodes, in discussing the methods of cookery, took advantage of the op portunity to preach simplicity. He insisted that man, who had been blessed with good teeth, glands and secretions, a tongue and the usual apparatus for digestion was independent of the cuisine, and this ancient pagan idea that the object of all repasts should be to take away the desire of eating and to maintain health and vigor has become more acceptable to thought ful people during the past century. To-day our private banquets at least are simplicity itself when compared with those of even a century ago, and while their somewhat monotonous dearth of any entertainment except that of eat ing and drinking, with occasional music, has recently resulted in a sort of mania for the odd and eccentric, it is so obvious that these ban vents are based upon the old desire for noto nety, the wish to dazzle which has inspired so many of the world's great feasts since the days of King Solomon's entertainment of the Queen of Sheba, that no particular attention is paid to such puerile attempts to provide a novelty.