In the fourteenth century the broths and soups were made with millet-flour and mixed wheats.  The pure wheat flour was steeped in milk seasoned with sugar, saffron, honey, sweet wine or aromatic herbs, and sometimes butter, fat, and yolks of eggs were added.  It was on account of this that the bread of the ancients so much resembled cakes, and it was also from this fact that the art of the pastrycook took its rise.

Wheat made into gruel for a long time was an important ingredient in cooking, being the basis of a famous preparation called fromentee, which was a bouillie of milk, made creamy by the addition of yolks of eggs, and which served as a liquor in which to roast meats and fish.  There were, besides, several sorts of fromentee, all equally esteemed, and Taillevent recommended the following receipt, which differs from the one above given:—­“First boil your wheat in water, then put into it the juice or gravy of fat meat, or, if you like it better, milk of almonds, and by this means you will make a soup fit for fasts, because it dissolves slowly, is of slow digestion and nourishes much.  In this way, too, you can make ordiat, or barley soup, which is more generally approved than the said fromentee.”

[Illustration:  Fig. 116.—­Interior of a Kitchen.—­Fac-simile from a Woodcut in the “Calendarium Romanum” of J. Staeffler, folio, Tubingen, 1518.]

Semolina, vermicelli, macaroni, &c., which were called Italian because they originally came from that country, have been in use in France longer than is generally supposed.  They were first introduced after the expedition of Charles VIII. into Italy, and the conquest of the kingdom of Naples; that is, in the reign of Louis XII., or the first years of the sixteenth century.

Pies, Stews, Roasts, Salads, &c.—­Pastry made with fat, which might be supposed to have been the invention of modern kitchens, was in great repute amongst our ancestors.  The manufacture of sweet and savoury pastry was intrusted to the care of the good menagiers of all ranks and conditions, and to the corporation of pastrycooks, who obtained their statutes only in the middle of the sixteenth century; the united skill of these, both in Paris and in the provinces, multiplied the different sorts of tarts and meat pies to a very great extent.  So much was this the case that these ingenious productions became a special art, worthy of rivalling even cookery itself (Figs. 117, 118, and 130).  One of the earliest known receipts for making pies is that of Gaces de la Bigne, first chaplain of Kings John, Charles V., and Charles VI.  We find it in a sporting poem, and it deserves to be quoted verbatim as a record of the royal kitchen of the fourteenth century.  It will be observed on perusing it that nothing was spared either in pastry or in cookery, and that expense was not considered when it was a question of satisfying the appetite.