At all times the people of every country have strained the nature of the soil on which they lived by forcing it to produce that which it seemed destined ever to refuse them.  Such food as human industry was unable to obtain from any particular soil or from any particular climate, commerce undertook to bring from the country which produced it.  This caused Rabelais to say that the stomach was the father and master of industry.

We will rapidly glance over the alimentary matters which our forefathers obtained from the animal and vegetable kingdom, and then trace the progress of culinary art, and examine the rules of feasts and such matters as belong to the epicurean customs of the Middle Ages.

Aliments.

Bread.—­The Gauls, who principally inhabited deep and thick forests, fed on herbs and fruits, and particularly on acorns.  It is even possible that the veneration in which they held the oak had no other origin.  This primitive food continued in use, at least in times of famine, up to the eighth century, and we find in the regulations of St. Chrodegand that if, in consequence of a bad year, the acorn or beech-nut became scarce, it was the bishop’s duty to provide something to make up for it.  Eight centuries later, when Rene du Bellay, Bishop of Mans, came to report to Francis I. the fearful poverty of his diocese, he informed the king that the inhabitants in many places were reduced to subsisting on acorn bread.

[Illustration:  Figs. 72 and 73.—­Corn-threshing and Bread-making.—­Miniatures from the Calendar of a Book of Hours.—­Manuscript of the Sixteenth Century.]

In the earliest times bread was cooked under the embers.  The use of ovens was introduced into Europe by the Romans, who had found them in Egypt.  But, notwithstanding this importation, the old system of cooking was long after employed, for in the tenth century Raimbold, abbot of the monastery of St. Thierry, near Rheims, ordered in his will that on the day of his death bread cooked under the embers—­panes subcinericios—­should be given to his monks.  By feudal law the lord was bound to bake the bread of his vassals, for which they were taxed, but the latter often preferred to cook their flour at home in the embers of their own hearths, rather than to carry it to the public oven.

[Illustration:  Fig. 74.—­The Miller.—­From an Engraving of the Sixteenth Century, by J. Amman.]

It must be stated that the custom of leavening the dough by the addition of a ferment was not universally adopted amongst the ancients.  For this reason, as the dough without leaven could only produce a heavy and indigestible bread, they were careful, in order to secure their loaves being thoroughly cooked, to make them very thin.  These loaves served as plates for cutting up the other food upon, and when they thus became saturated with the sauce and gravy they were eaten as cakes.  The use of the tourteaux (small crusty loaves), which were at first called