in those days richer in rewards than digging and herding. Seeds were stored for the new crop and when the winters were so hard that they had to grind their seed corn, there was no way of sending and importing new seed from other lands; but food in the Neolithic age as compared with the old Stone age, though perhaps it was not very much more varied, still was more dependable.

Gardening was becoming more and more careful, for man found that the more skilled his culture the more mouths could be fed. This perhaps will give us a simple idea of the provisions that were available to early man.

As soon as written history begins, it is possible to tell more accurately what man did eat.

One of the earliest sources of written history which we can study are the legends of Homer, although Homer pays but little attention in his narratives of Gods and Heroes to the more material subject of food, because there would be want of decorum in dwelling on the preparation of such things which he considered beneath the dignity of Gods and Heroes.

Still we know that he looks on fish with great disfavor, which he regards as unhealthful, as they were apt to be in Asia Minor where Homer himself came from, and Plutarch says "heroes" accustomed themselves to a spare diet, banishing from their table all delicacies to such a degree that they abstained even from fish.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey fish apparently does not appear at the banquets of the rich-only in connection with the poor and starving does it appear.

Now take note, you tarpon fishers. "Fishing," Plato says, "is not an occupation worthy of a man well born or well brought up because it demands more of address and of ruse than of force, and is not for young people, like hunting, the occasion of healthy exercise."

But there is still a great deal of evidence that much fish was eaten by the Greeks who in comparison with Rome had a less fertile soil to cultivate and therefore took more naturally to such easily found foods as those that were drawn from the sea.

It was a Greek too, Athenaeus, who

wrote the first comprehensive cook book; and his works though pompous in style are of great assistance in showing what dishes were served in classical times. In fact his works together with the many that were written in the first years of our era by the Romans like Plato, Pliny the younger, Apicius, Varro,* together with occasional statements by the Roman satyrists, give pretty definite ideas of the life of those times.

When we read of the triumphal feasts, of the elaborate dinners, of the curious and complicated dishes, and of the unusual articles of food, we must not get the idea that our ancestors in the days of the Roman Empire, or for that matter in the days of the American Colonies, were tremendous eaters. The chief luxury of the rich throughout the centuries has been plenty of food so as to be able to set a liberal table; but it must be remembered that there were large numbers of the population who had no access to such banquets and for them it was often a long time between meals.

One can hardly imagine anything less attractive from our point of view than were the Roman dishes, and the banquets where they were served. In the first place the reclining position adopted by the diners was not conducive to easy digestion; and the dishes described in detail could hardly be nastier. Apicius in his De Re Culinaria tells how a chicken-en-casserole should be cooked. "Put the following ingredients into the pot: aniseed, dried mint, asafoetida-it was asafoetida you will remember that we students at college used to put on a piece of fresh pork so that the initiates into our secret societies would think they were kissing a decayed corpse-cover it with vinegar, add dates, pour on garum, add oil, some mustard seeds, boil it down, add red wine, and pour all this sauce over the chicken previously boiled in aniseed water." I do not think that anything more was needed to send the guests on a trip to the vomitorium;—but there were many other things that sound more reasonable. They had a considerable number of vegetables such as exist today

cabbage, turnips, and even broccoli, the favorite vegetable of the modern Italians, *Story of Varro's aunt and the raising of thrushes.

which we are beginning to see on our own tables, and which Mark Twain described as "cabbage with a college education." Apicius, more than 2,000 years ago, gives us a recipe for doing broccoli: 'Boil it in water with chopped onions together with coriander seeds and a little good wine."

Favorite among all dishes, particularly in the days of the Empire, was fish cooked in many different ways; and, I am afraid, in every state from freshness to complete decay.

The Romans seem to make very nice distinctions as to what localities the best fish came from. They claimed that when brought to the table they could tell the age of the fish, the sex of the fish, even though the freshness or the rottenness of it did not enter into their dietetic code. Cuvier, the French naturalist of a century ago, says that the ancients apparently knew of 150 varieties of Mediterranean fish. It is astonishing the prices they were willing to pay for even a single fish -today's equivalent of $70. to $80. for a three or four pound mullet, and the importance of fish is shown by the fact that Juvenal says Domitian once ordered a special session of the Senate in order to determine what was the best way of cooking a turbot.

With the worship of food carried to such a point, one can understand the aphorism of Brilla Savarin, the great French gourmet of 100 years ago, who said: "The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new planet." A rather difficult thing for me to admit, as I have spent a good deal of my time during the last few years in administering the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff where they are strenuously looking for a new planet.

The Romans had three meals a day. In the beginning dinner was held at noon, and it was only later that it was changed to the evening. The toastmaster at a banquet called on each man under penalty, to drink to his mistress, one cup to each letter in her name. The longer her name, the more cups, and the wine from our modern point of view must have been vile, badly fermented and unquestionably with wild yeasts straying into the vats and jars, producing acidity and bitterness,

the whole sweetened to the point of stickiness with honey. What heads it must have produced the next morning!—though Pliny says: "If the greatest wine sop adopts the precaution of chewing four or five bitter almonds before drinking, he may drink any amount without being the worse for it." (I have never tried it.)

We have but little information as to what occurred during the middle ages, for such ephemeral things as menus and stewards' accounts have mostly disappeared with the lapse of time; but we know from the History of Nations that there were constant plagues and famines and but little was being done to better conditions. It was not until the times of the Italian Renaissance when the world blossomed out once more that conditions began to grow better. We know, however, from a few lists that have been preserved, that the food, though it varied at times greatly in quantity, had changed but little in quality.

The art of cooking constantly moved onward with the other arts, the Greeks having acquired their skill from the Egyptians and the Persians, and the Romans in turn being taught by the Greeks just as were their sculptors, their poets, and their dramatists. In turn, the art of cooking slumbered during the middle ages only to be awakened in Italy at the time of the revival of learning, and it travelled from Italy to France, with the Medici wives of Henry II and Henry IV.

A description of an English manor house in the 13th century tells us that the kitchen was in a detached outhouse, that there was a poultry house, that there was a granary, and we furthermore know that at that period hay was being cut so that there was some possibility of keeping the stock fattened during the cold winters of northern Europe.

It is curious to note that a family in those days required 40 bushel of grain for bread, and 50 bushel of barley for beer. They had their eggs from the hens and the geese, and for a short period during the year, milk from the cows. Such a manor was largely self-sustaining and the menus consisted of beans, peas, vetch, grains, nuts, fruits, an abundance of game, and a little meat, but in no sense the meat of today.

D'Avenel, who has written a most interesting book on the variation in the price of necessities and luxuries during the last few centuries, shows that butcher's meat of today is quite different from what it was a few centuries ago; for it was not until the 18th century in England and the early 19th in America that scientific breeding of cattle really began that is, that attention was paid to better strains in breeding, with all the effect it had on food. Since the middle ages the weight of a head of cattle has almost doubled, due to the increase in fat; and in consequence, though formerly the fat sold at twice the price of the meat, today the meat sells at double the price of fat.

It is probably due to this fact that meat has for so long been considered the food of the rich. We do know, however, that in the 17th and 18th centuries there were 10 or 12 lbs. of veal or mutton sheep killed for every pound of beef. Lacking to a large extent hay, root crops and cheap grain, it was impossible to fatten the stock during the cold months and in consequence the animals were so much more valuable for work than as meat by the pound that they were not slaughtered. It too must be remembered there was no way such as we have today of preserving butcher's meat from day to day till it found a consumer, nor for that matter was there a method of using all the byproducts of the butcher's trade. Perhaps the church was wise when it established the long periods of fasting each year, as it did in the past centuries. One of the chief means of support of the hospitals was the monopoly they had of selling meat during the seasons of fasting. Under Louis XV an investigation was made you see they had prohibition agents even in those days-in order to see how much bootleg meat was being sold in Paris. The alleged bootleggers of meat at that time, it turned out, were all members of the aristocracy.

In the absence of meat, of course, the fish mongers plied their trade, but here again came the difficulty of lack of transportation to bring the food from the seashore to the inland towns. What was called a fresh fish in Paris-la maréewas fish that had been salted when

caught, brought to Paris, washed with lime or with alum, flavored with some seasoning, and sold to the rich at prices that made it impossible for the poor to have any.

For them the chief article of diet was bread. Not what we think of today. No Parker House rolls, no white flour, just wheat or oats ground up with the husks and the chaff and sometimes dipped in hot water to make a soup.

About the time that Columbus and the other great explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries were making ready to try and find more direct ways of bringing the riches of the Indies to the doors of Europe, François Villon mentions dates and figs as the food of the rich; in fact in the poems of the 15th century there is constant reference to hunger and famine. Think what a change transportation and commerce with the East was going to make in the matter of food.

What were people drinking in those days? In the northern countries they were brewing, in the central parts of Europe they were raising wine. Here again, as in the case of meat, and as with other varieties of food, the costs were higher than today, and I am sure as in the case of the Roman wine, that it must have been quite nasty. An occasional vintager undoubtedly succeeded in bringing through a crop with a fair amount of success, but that must have been the exception and not the rule; and yet our ancestors both in France and in Italy found that wine was an important form of nourishment.

In the 13th century a bottle of Burgundy cost what would be the equivalent of from $1.00 to $2.00 a bottle, only it is to be remembered that there were no glass bottles for the preservation of wine in those days; wine was drawn from the cask and brought to the table in open flagons or uncorked bottles and jugs. This probably meant that wine in the cask soon spoiled after it was once tapped, and in consequence there was a habit when the cask was half emptied, of turning over the balance to the maître d'hôtel. I find that Richelieu paid 150 francs for the 100-quart cask of wine for his own table; 100 francs for his suite; and 75 francs for the servant's; and when

you realize that each person drank from 2 to 3 quarts a day, you realize that a cask was soon finished.

A few rules of etiquette from "Galathee," a handbook of the 16th century, seem amusing:

"At the beginning of the meal everyone should wash their hands in each other's presence in order that those who are going to put their hands in the same dish together may have no doubt about the cleanliness of each other's hands." It was perfectly proper to throw the bones, the gristle, the uneaten parts of the vegetables on the floor behind one-the servants swept it up. "Galathee" says: "It isn't proper to scratch yourself at table, and one should abstain as much as possible from spitting, but if one has to, do it 'gentilely.'" "I have heard it said," the book continues, "that there are nations so well behaved that they do not spit. Furthermore one should not gobble one's meat so rapidly that one makes a noise and loses one's breath." Henry the Third, by a royal decree, ordered that when he was at his meals, no one else should lean on the royal chair but the Captain of the Guard. Furthermore, Henry ordered that guests should arrive at meals clean and sober, should not drink too constantly lest they get drunk, nor blow their nose in the tablecloth. (Se moucher dans la nappe.)

I have personally always been interested in historical romances, and it was trying to imagine what the condition of the inns was in the times of d'Artagnan and Porthos that first aroused my architectural interest in conditions of food, travel and habitation. Alexandre Dumas wrote a cook book himself. He was a great gourmet, but he was also a great story teller; and I am inclined to think that the descriptions he wrote in the 19th century of 17th century conditions, were no more accurate and no more capable of giving a correct historical impression than was Paul Veronese's great painting of the marriage feast at Cana of giving an accurate picture of the miracle of wine and

water.

The chicken roasted on the spit made of d'Artagnan's sword was surely a skeleton made up of feathers and of bones. Wine, too, even if it was free from the maladies

of bad fermentation, was probably weak in color from the use of too much sulphur, and acid because of the existence of aerobic bacteria. The chicken would probably cost four or five francs; a fat one would cost eight or ten francs; had they had a carp from a neighboring carp pond

for the nobility often made much money by raising fresh water fish in elaborately built fish pools-, they might have paid seventy-five francs for it, and even lampreys cost sixty or seventy francs apiece. They, the lampreys, in the 16th and 17th centuries, were great favorites on the tables of the rich.

A story is told of Pope Leo X, who ordered prepared for a guest who was extremely fond of lampreys, a dish consisting of bits of old rope arranged to look like the fish, but buried in a most delicious sauce. Marinareus, the guest, tried to cut it, and when he had failed even to bite through it, he looked up and saw all the other guests laughing at him; but he turned the tables on his Holiness by saying that if covered with such a delicious sauce he would be willing even to bite through a piece of iron chain.

The number of dishes which could be served was increasing steadily, and a cook book of the 17th century begins to contain many of the dishes that are listed on a modern menu. I have here one of the most famous of the early French cook books by M. de la Varenne, a chef under the Duc d'Uelles. Mrs. Joseph Pennell, who has been deeply interested in collecting cook books, says that Varenne's is one of the rarest and most valuable of early printed books. It shows the great vogue that this work had when we realize that it was first published in 1651 in Paris and that this particular edition-the 6th

is dated only three years later, in 1654. It was translated into many languages, and is as modern and as clear as many of the better known works of today. Nearly 300 years ago many of the dishes were cooked exactly as in the French kitchens of the bourgeoisie today; but most interesting of all, perhaps, are the things that are not mentioned-for instance, tomatoes, and fruits and spices from afar were practically left out, and above all, potatoes.

It is true that some twenty or thirty

years before, potatoes had been introduced into Ireland from America by John Hawkins. It was not the noble article that Luther Burbank developed it into some three hundred years later in Lancaster, Mass. It was formerly considered poisonous. It was even accused of causing leprosy, and as late as the beginning of the 19th century it was considered in Paris a disorderly weed; and yet think of the blessings it has conferred on mankind.

Sugar, too, was so expensive that it found but little place on the tables of the poor. It came originally from India, from Egypt, or the Islands of the Mediterranean, and later from the French Colonies in the Caribbean. In fact, at one time there was a great outcry in Paris because the inhabitants of Santo Domingo proposed to refine their own sugar and send it to Paris in its refined form. The French felt that that was one of their privileges they did not want to have taken away from them; and it was not until the invention of beet sugar that it was possible for the populace to use it freely. In the days of Louis XV sugar cost sixty to eighty francs a pound. In the days of Louis XVI it had fallen to five francs a pound, but in the time of the Napoleonic Wars it rose, owing to the blockade, to double that amount.

The process of making sugar from beets has, however, cut the cost of sugar to a fraction of the earlier amount.

The price of salt has pursued a similar course. In the time of Richelieu, the salt tax or the gabelle was so heavy that it cost three francs a kilogram, whereas today, though still a Government monopoly, the cost per kilogram is only one-tenth of that.

Spices pepper - ginger nutmeg -also were extremely costly. When Mons de la Tremoilles gave a large dinner, though the meat bill was only twelve hundred francs, it cost him eight hundred francs for the spices. I might add as a footnote that the plate and the dishes of silver for the occasion weighed about seventy-five pounds.

The Dutch were the great importers of spices from the East into Europe, and in fact they had a monopoly; but so keen were the French to secure this trade

that in the 17th century they sent two war vessels to Ceylon in order to capture some roots of spice-producing trees to plant in their own colonies. It almost precipitated a war.

Perfection of processes of distribution has made it possible for the parts of the world where there is scarcity to be promptly supplied from the parts of the world where there is plenty.

At the time when gold miners flocked some years ago, to the Yukon in the gold rush-and it must be remembered they were civilized men-they found themselves isolated in the valley during the winter with insufficient food. One of them was asked afterwards what effect famine had on man. He said, "If man goes without food for one day, he will lie; if he goes without food for two days, he will steal; if he goes without food for three days, he will kill." This seems a bit exaggerated to those of us who are, according to the modern fashion, being put on a diet; but it, none-the-less, shows that man has continually before him the great struggle for subsistence, and that though everyone is working to produce in an orderly way, there is occasionally someone, like the locust in La Fontaine's fable, who sings all summer long and then tries to borrow from the industrious ant enough to carry him over the winter.

Food is better than ever today, it is cheaper, it is healthier. Think of the prodigious labor that has been required to bring about this wonder. Agriculture, the biggest trade in the world, had to be revolutionized. It required the inventions and research of Watts, of Stephenson, of Fulton, of Pasteur, of Liebig, to make the transportation and manipulation of food at its present scale possible.

It is of interest that man, through all this period when preoccupied by the question as to where his next meal was coming from, has kept his mind turned to ideas and ideals rather than to such material things as nourishment. The proportional amount of his wages that the working man needs to spend on food has become through the ages less and less, releasing more and more of his earnings to give him a greater leisure, but as Simeon Strunsky recently said, "It does not alas give him a leisure of repose and