The food of the Anglo-Saxons appears to have been in general rather simple in character, although we hear now and then of great feasts, probably consisting more in the quantity of provisions than in any great variety or refinement in gastronomy. Bread formed the staple, which the Anglo-Saxons appear to have eaten in great quantities, with milk, and butter, and cheese. A domestic was termed a man’s _hlaf-ætan_, or loaf-eater. There is a curious passage in one of Alfric’s homilies, that on the life of St. Benedict, where, speaking of the use of oil in Italy, the Anglo-Saxon writer observes, “they eat oil in that country with their food as we do butter.” Vegetables (_wyrtan_) formed a considerable portion of the food of our forefathers at this period; beans (_beana_) are mentioned as articles of food, but I remember no mention of the eating of peas (_pisan_) in Anglo-Saxon writers. A variety of circumstances show that there was a great consumption of fish, as well as of poultry. Of flesh meat, bacon (_spic_) was the most abundant, for the extensive oak forests nourished innumerable droves of swine. Much of their other meat was salted, and the place in which the salt meat was kept was called, on account of the great preponderance of the bacon, a _spic-hus_, or bacon-house; in latter times, for the same reason, named the larder. The practice of eating so much salt meat explains why boiling seems to have been the prevailing mode of cooking it. In the manuscript of Alfric’s translation of Genesis, already mentioned, we have a figure of a boiling vessel (No. 17), which is placed over the fire on a tripod. This vessel was called a pan (_panna_--one Saxon writer mentions _isen panna_, an iron pan) or a kettle (_cytel_). It is very curious to observe how many of our trivial expressions at the present day are derived from very ancient customs; thus, for example, we speak of “a kettle of fish,” though what we now term a kettle would hardly serve for this branch of cookery. In another picture (No. 18) we have a similar boiling vessel, placed similarly on a tripod, while the cook is using a very singular utensil to stir the contents. Bede speaks of a goose being taken down from a wall to be _boiled_. It seems probable that in earlier times among the Anglo-Saxons, and perhaps at a later period, in the case of large feasts, the cooking was done out of doors. The only words in the Anglo-Saxon language for cook and kitchen, are _cóc_ and _cycene_, taken from the Latin _coquus_ and _coquina_, which seems to show that they only improved their rude manner of living in this respect after they had become acquainted with the Romans. Besides boiled meats, they certainly had roast, or broiled, which they called _bræde_, meat which had been spread or displayed to the fire. The vocabularies explain the Latin _coctus_ by “boiled or baked” (_gesoden_, _gebacen_). They also fried meat, which was then called _hyrstyng_, and the vessel in which it was fried was called