William Carew Hazlitt

“ In the tenth century Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric, the boy is made to say that he is too young to eat meat, but subsists on cabbages, eggs, fish, cheese, butter, beans, and other things, according to circumstances; so that a vegetable diet was perhaps commoner in those days even among the middle classes than at present. This youth, when he is asked what he drinks, replies, water, or ale if he can get it. ”

“ The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries unquestionably saw a great advance in the mystery of cookery and in the diversity of dishes, and the author of "Piers of Fulham" complains, that men were no longer satisfied with brawn and powdered beef, which he terms "store of house," but would have venison, wild fowl, and heronshaw; and men of simple estate, says he, will have partridges and plovers, when lords lack. ”

“ Wright [Footnote: "Domestic Manners and Sentiments," 1862, p. 91] , "that the articles just mentioned (bread, butter, and cheese) have preserved their Anglo-Saxon names to the present time, while all kinds of meat—beef, veal, mutton, pork, even bacon—have retained only the names given to them by the Normans; which seems to imply that flesh-meat was not in general use for food among the lower classes of society." ”

“ Things were hardly so very bad, however, if, as he states previously, the curtailment of the expenditure on the table still left, as a medium repast, two or three dishes, with fruit and cheese after. The black jack here mentioned was not discarded till comparatively modern days. Nares, who published his Glossary in 1822, states that he recollects them in use.
"A meal's meat twice a week, worth a groat," is mentioned as the farm servant's portion in "Civil and Uncivil Life," 1579. ”

“ He has put into the mouth of his east-country yeoman's son, Tom Strowd, in "The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green," written long before it was printed in 1659, the following:—"As God mend me, and ere thou com'st into Norfolk, I'll give thee as good a dish of Norfolk dumplings as ere thou laydst thy lips to;" and in another passage of the same drama, where Swash's shirt has been stolen, while he is in bed, he describes himself "as naked as your Norfolk dumplin." ”