THE COOKERY OF VENISON 305 



should now condemn as carrion, and which in all 

 human probability may have been centenarians ; and 

 the head and chine of the savage boar which took 

 precedence of the deer may have belonged to a brute 

 who had been the terror of generations and ravaged 

 the woodlands in defiance of the rangers. In those 

 days, and with such impracticable materials, the chief 

 carver and his aides-de-cour had no sinecures. The 

 rather that the fork had not been invented. They 

 grappled the beast or bird with one hand, breaking it 

 up with the other by the way, ' breaking ' was the 

 technical expression for carving the deer. Indeed 

 the technicalities of carving were systematised as a 

 philological fine art, with phrases assigned to each 

 separate species, from the breaking of the deer to the 

 ' unlacing ' of the coney. 



Those ancestors of ours must have been men of 

 heroic mould and iron stomachs. They breakfasted, 

 with their ladies, on salt beef and beer, they spiced 

 their wines into infernal decoctions, and when the 

 cuisine went beyond plain roasting and boiling, the 

 good meat was bedevilled by incompetent cooks. 

 Some of the recipes in * The Noble Boke of Cookery ' 

 are curious, but we can recommend few conscien- 

 tiously for modern imitation. That for the ' rosting ' 

 of venison when the deer was not served entire 



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