Elizabethan England - From 'A Description of England,' by William Harrison

Harrison’s chapter “Of the Food and Diet of the English” is very interesting, with its accounts of the dinners of the nobility “whose cookies are, for the most part, musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers,” and who eat “delicates wherein ... Read more

Harrison’s chapter “Of the Food and Diet of the English” is very interesting, with its accounts of the dinners of the nobility “whose cookies are, for the most part, musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers,” and who eat “delicates wherein the sweet hand of the seafaring Portingale is not wanting.” Then it notices the rage for Venice glass among all classes—as Falstaff says, a.d. 1598, in 2 Hen. IV., II. i. 154, “Glasses, glasses, is the only drinking.” This is followd by capital accounts of the diet of the gentlemen and merchants, and the artificers; the bread and drink of all classes; and how Mrs. Wm. Harrison brewed the family beer, “and hereof we make three hogsheads of good beer, such (I mean) as is meet for poor men as I am, to live with all, whose small maintenance (for what great thing is forty pounds a year, Computations computandis, able to perform?) may endure no deeper cut;” with touches like Theologicum being the best wine of old, because “the merchant would have thought that his soul should have gone straightway to the diuell, if he should have served them [the monks] with other than the best;” and this kindly opinion of working-men, for which one can’t help liking the old person Less