“Both artificer [craftsman] and husbandman [farmer] are sufficiently liberal and very friendly at their tables; and when they meet they are so merry without malice and plain without inward Italian or French craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them ... the inferior sort are somewhat to be blamed that being thus assembled talk is now and then such as savoreth of scurrility and ribaldry, a thing naturally incident to carters and clowns.” [Illustration: Harvesting] Preparing the feast, however, was seldom so leisurely for the housewife and her daughters. After a month of cooking and carting meals for half a dozen men famished from working nearly twenty hours a day (and frequently being called on to join them in the fields when rains threatened), the housewife was required to set forth “a humble feast, of an ordinary proportion which any good man may keep in his family, for the entertainment of his true and worthy friends ... that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and not empty, or for show; and of these sixteen is a good proportion both [for your] first and second and third course....” This “humble” smorgasbord, totaling forty-eight dishes, from the first popular English cookbook, Gervase Markham’s =The English Huswife= (1623), was for the housewife more ideal than real. The typical harvest feast was more modest. A Yorkshire farmer, Henry Best, wrote that “it is usual, in most places, after they get all the pease pulled or the last grain down, to invite all the workfolks and their wives (that helped them that harvest) to supper, and then they have puddings, bacon, or boiled beef, flesh or apple pies, and then cream brought in platters, and every one a spoon; then after all they have hot cakes and ale; for they bake cakes and send for ale against that time.” In communities where labor was pooled at harvest and families helped each other, there would be a round of these meals—in form and function similar to small parish tureen suppers today except that one hostess at a time would assume overall responsibility, excepting neighborly help from other wives.