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In his excellent and informative book Good Cheer, Frederick Hackwood has traced the origins and cdhsequences the fork. Until the dawn of the seventeenth century, forks were f and far between. The ordinary Englishman used either his fing or a spoon. A large number of our national dishes were theref in the form of elaborately prepared pottages, highly spiced, sen in a bowl and eaten as porridge with a spoon. Meat was cooked spits, and the servants handed the spits' to each guest who w cut off the portion he desired and allow it to fall upon a piece bread held neatly underneath. That, more or less, was how Shak peare and Ben Jonson fed. Forks were first introduced i England in i625 by Thomas Coryate who had observed these refi ments while in Italy. They were much derided by the stun English as foreign flummery, and there are jokes in Ben Jon and Fletcher about the " fork-carrying traveller." But even if it the fact that the introduction of forks brought us down to hon boiled and roast, the art of more elaborate cookery continued England until the industrial revolution. Pepys, for instance, ma frequent mention of " Botargo," which was a sausage made of e and the blood of the red mullet, and of " Tansy," which was a sw flavoured with the tansy herb. In the eighteenth and ninetee centuries our grandees came to rely more and more on French c ing. The best French cooks migrated to London, with the res that, for a short period, the cooking in Paris declined. CO d'Orsay, when in Paris in 5852, regretted that "the culinary art
sadly fallen off." He visited world-famous restaurants. "At n of these places," he writes, " could you find dinners now such were produced by Ude ; by Soyer, formerly with Lord Chesterfiel by Rotival, with Lord Wilton ; or by Perron, with L Londonderry."
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