Meat

The Englishman has always been more than usually carnivorous when he could afford to be. Meat and particularly roast meat with a fine sauce or gravy was what everyone, male or female, noble or peasant, wanted for the dinner and the supper table. Until quite late in the eighteenth century, however, meat, including birds, and a fine bread were the basic foods only of the rich; indeed, in 1719 a French visitor to England, Monsieur Misson, * maintained that he had met there people who ate so much meat that they hardly ever touched bread. The poor, on the other hand, were lucky when they touched anything. Coarse bread was their staple food; the very poor ate it with any kind of grease when butter was out of their reach, or with mustard, treacle, or sprinkled with salt. The rich ate enormously and extravagantly. Great dishes of meat were elaborately and wastefully cut and dressed with rich sauces, spiced, seasoned and sometimes sweetened with raisins or apples; cuts of veal and many kinds of birds were set in jelly, made into pies, surrounded with galantine, set in brawn, stuffed, glazed and decorated. Forcemeats were a speciality of the high cooking of England from the fourteenth till the eighteenth century.