He was not a bad judge of what was palatable, and prescribes as an agreeable and wholesome meal a couple of poached eggs with a little salt and vinegar, and a few corns of pepper, some bread and butter, and a draught of pure claret. He gives a receipt--the earliest I have seen in print--for making metheglin or hydromel. He does not object to furmety or junket, or indeed to custards, if they are eaten at the proper seasons, and in the middle or at the end of meals. But he dislikes mushrooms, and advises you to wash out your mouth, and rub your teeth and gums with a dry cloth, after drinking milk. The potato, however, he praises as nutritious and pleasant to the taste, yet, as Gerarde the herbalist also says, flatulent. Venner refers to a mode of sopping them in wine as existing in his time. They were sometimes roasted in the embers, and there were other ways of dressing them. John Forster, of Hanlop, in Bucks, wrote a pamphlet in 1664 to shew that the more extended cultivation of this root would be a great national benefit. Venner, who practised in the spring and autumn at Bath as a physician, had no relish for the poorer classes, who did not fare well at the hands of their superiors in any sense in the excellent old days. But he liked the Quality, in which he embraced the Universities, and he tenders them, among other little hints, the information that green ginger was good for the memory, and conserve of roses (not the salad of roses immortalised by Apuleius) was a capital posset against bed-time. "A conserve of rosemary and sage," says he, "to be often used by students, especially mornings fasting, doth greatly delight the brain." The military ascendency of Spain did not fail to influence the culinary civilisation of those countries to which it temporarily extended its rule; and in a Venetian work entitled "Epulario, or the Italian Banquet," printed in 1549, we recognise the Spanish tone which had in the sixteenth century communicated itself to the cookery of the Peninsula, shewing that Charles V. and his son carried at least one art with them as an indemnity for the havoc which they committed. The nursery rhyme of "Sing a song of sixpence" receives a singular and diverting illustration from the pages of this "Epulario," where occurs a receipt "to make Pies that the Birds may be alive in them, and fly out when it is cut up." Some of the other more salient beads relate to the mode of dressing sundry dishes in the Roman and Catalonian fashion, and teach us how to seethe gourds, as they did in Spain, and to make mustard after the manner of Padua. I propose here to register certain contributions to our acquaintance with early culinary ideas and practices, which I have not specifically described:-- 1. The Book of Carving. W. de Worde. 4to, 1508, 1513. Reprinted down to 1613. 2. A Proper New Book of Cookery. 12mo, 1546. Often reprinted. It is a recension of the "Book of Cookery," 1500.