" Costly ingredients such as pearls and leaf gold appear only once
among Digby's receipts. The modern housewife may be aghast at the thought
of more than a hundred ways of making mead and metheglin. Mead recalls to
her perhaps her first history-book, wherein she learnt of it as a drink of
the primitive Anglo-Saxons. If she doubt the usefulness of the collection
in her own kitchen, let her take the little volume to her boudoir, and read
it there as gossiping notes of the _beau monde_ in the days when James I
and the Charleses ruled the land. She will find herself in lofty company,
and on intimate terms with them. They come down to our level, without any
show of condescension. Lords and ladies who were personages of a solemn
state pageant, are now human neighbourly creatures, owning to likes and
dislikes, and letting us into the secrets of their daily habits.
It pleases me to think of Henrietta Maria, in her exile, busying herself in
her still-room, and forgetting her dangers and sorrows in simpling and
stilling and kitchen messes; and of her devoted Sir Kenelm, in the moments
when he is neither abeting her Royalist plots, nor diverting her mind to
matters of high science, or the mysteries of the Faith, but bringing to her
such lowlier consolations as are hinted in "Hydromel as I made it weak for
the Queen Mother.
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