of sugar. The other essential to cookery that the earlier inhabitants 

 of Britain lacked was oil. We unfortunately are obliged to use 

 butter in our cookery instead of oil : the ancient Britons certainly 

 had no oil, and they either had no butter at all, or else it was full 

 of hairs, and probably rancid. I am inclined to think that they, 

 like more civilized countries, had no butter : according to Bishop 

 Patrick, the Greeks had no butter in the fourth century before 

 Christ ; neither Homer, Euripides, Hesiod, or Aristotle, ever 

 mention butter, though they mention cheese. 



It is to the Romans we must accredit the introduction of the 

 art of cookery into these islands. 



I hope to show you from whence the Romans got the art of 

 cookery, and when : what their cookery was like, and the influence 

 it has had upon the present state of the art in this country. 



Like many other things, the art of cookery came from the East : 

 the Romans got it from the Greeks, and the Greeks got it from 

 the Lydians, whose cooks were highly celebrated. 



Some archaeologists have speculated on the cookery of the ante- 

 diluvians : as these persons were or ought to have been vegetarians, 

 they probably cooked but little : the patriarchs seem to have been 

 acquainted with roasting, boiling, and baking, and they knew how 

 to make savoury meat with sauce, probably with oil, for though 

 butter is mentioned in the Old Testament, cream is more likely 

 meant. Kids and lambs were their main meats : the common 

 fowl was unknown to the patriarchs : indeed it is never mentioned 

 by the writers of the Old Testament, nor by Homer or Hesiod. 

 It was a later introduction, and found its way from India to Rome 

 vid the Red Sea, or far more probably by Babylon. 



It is impossible to majce a continuous history of the art of 

 cookery from the times of the patriarchs downwards : we have to 

 skip, and we pick up our thread again with the Lydians. Lydia 

 was a district of Asia Minor, and was a very early seat of Asiatic 

 civilization : from the Lydians the Greeks derived many civilized 

 arts, such as the weaving and dying of fine fabrics : various pro- 

 cesses of metallurgy : the use of gold and silver money, various 



