“The ample tureen of potage royal had a boned duck swimming in its centre.  At the other end of the table scowled in death the grim countenance of a huge roast pike, flanked on one side by a leg of mutton a la daube, and on the other by the tempting delicacies of Bombarded Veal.  To these succeeded that masterpiece of the culinary art a grand Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were embalmed in spices, cocks’ combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a Lear.  A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish of oyster-loaves and a pomepetone of larks.”

As the old order yielded place to the new, this enormous profusion of rich food became by degrees less fashionable, though its terrible traditions endured, through the days of Soyer and Francatelli, almost to our own time.  But gradually refinement began to supersede profusion.  Simultaneously all forms of luxury spread from the aristocracy to the plutocracy; while the middle and lower classes attained a degree of solid comfort which would a few years before have been impossible.  Under Pitt’s administration wealth increased rapidly.  Great fortunes were amassed through the improvement of agricultural methods and the application of machinery to manufacture.  The Indian Nabobs, as they were called, became a recognized and powerful element in society, and their habits of “Asiatic luxury” are represented by Chatham, Burke, Voltaire, and Home Tooke as producing a marked effect upon the social life of the time.  Lord Robert Seymour notes in his diary for 1788 that a fashionable lady gave L100 a year to the cook who superintended her suppers; that at a sale of bric-a-brac 230 guineas were paid for a mirror; and that, at a ball given by the Knights of the Bath at the Pantheon, the decorations cost upwards of L3000.  The general consumption of French and Portuguese wines in place of beer, which had till recently been the beverage even of the affluent, was regarded by grave writers as a most alarming sign of the times, and the cause of a great increase of drunkenness among the upper classes.  The habits and manners prevalent in London spread into the country.  As the distinction between the nobility, who, roughly speaking, had been the frequenters of the capital, and the minor gentry, who had lived almost entirely on their own estates, gradually disappeared, the distinction between town and country life sensibly diminished.