Some dishes of the olden dinner-table are not very inviting. Our ancestors had no objection to stale fish; and blubber, if they could get it from a stray whale, or grampus or porpoise, was considered a delicacy. Yet some of the old dishes have stood the test of ages, as we see in the case of a Christmas Pie, the receipt to make which is preserved in the books of the Salters' Company, in the City of London. "For to make a moost choyce Paaste of Gamys to be eten at ye Feste of Chrystemasse" (17th Richard II. A.D. 1394). A pie so made by the Company's cook in 1836 was found excellent. It consisted of a pheasant, hare, and capon; two partridges, two pigeons, and two rabbits; all boned and put into paste in the shape of a bird, with the livers and hearts, two mutton kidneys, forced-meats, and egg-balls, seasoning, spice, catsup, and pickled mushrooms, filled up with gravy made from the various bones. We must, however, remember that Cookery flourished in the reign of Richard II., who rebuilt Westminster Hall, and gave therein a _house-warming_, at which old Stow says, "he feasted ten thousand persons." Richard is also said to have kept 2,000 cooks, who left to the world their famous cookery-book, the "Form of Cury, or, a Roll of English Cookery," compiled about the year 1390, by the master-cooks of the Royal Kitchen. Sugar was at first regarded as a spice, and was introduced as a substitute for honey after the Crusades. It was sold by the pound in the thirteenth century, and was procurable even in such remote towns as Ross and Hereford. Before the discovery of America, however, Sugar was a costly luxury, and only used on rare occasions. About 1459, Margaret Barton, writing to her husband, who was a gentleman and landowner of Norfolk, begs that he will vouchsafe "to buy her a pound of sugar." Again: "I pray that ye will vouchsafe to send me another sugar-loaf, for my old one is done." The art of refining sugar, and what is called loaf-sugar, was discovered by a Venetian about the end of the fifteenth, or the beginning of the sixteenth century. Sugar-candy is of much earlier date; for in Marin's _Storia di Commercio de Veneziani_, there is an account of a shipment made at Venice for England, in 1319, of 100,000 pounds of sugar, and 10,000 pounds of sugar-candy. Refined or loaf-sugar is thus mentioned in a roll of provisions in the reign of Henry VIII.: "two loaves of sugar, weighing sixteen pound two ounces, at ---- per pound." A letter from Sir Edward Wotton to Lord Cobham, dated Calais, March 6, 1546, informs him that he had taken up for his lordship twenty-five sugar-loaves, at six shillings a loaf, "which is eightepence a pounde." Up to the close of the fifteenth century its price varied from one-and-sixpence to three shillings a pound, "or, on an average, to a sum equivalent to about thirty shillings at present." Sugar has become to us almost a necessary of life.