CHAP. X.
How Meats may be prepared in places where there is nothing to rost them with.
SOmetimes it falls out that Men are in places where there want many things fit to provide supper; but where convenience wants, wit may do it: if you want a frying pan, you shall know
How to fry fish on a paper.
Make a frying pan with plain paper, put in oyl and fishes: then set this on burning coles, without flame, and it will be done the sooner and better. But if you will
Rost a Chickin without a fire;
Page 323 That Chickins may rost whilst we are in our Voyage: Put a piece of steel into the fire, put this into a Chicken that is pulled and his guts taken forth, and cover him well with clothes, that the heat breathe not out▪ and if he do smell ill, yet the meat is good. If you want Servants to turn the spit, and you would have
A Bird to rost himself,
do thus: For the Bird will turn himself. Albertus writes, That a Bird called a Ren, that is the smallest of all Birds, if you put him on a spit, made of Hazel-wood, and put fire under, he will turn as if he turned himself. Which comes from the proper∣ty of the wood, not from the Bird: and that is false the Philosopher said; for if you put fire under a Hazel-rod, it will twist, and seem to turn it self; and what flesh you put on it, if it be not too weighty, will turn about with it. So
Eggs are rosted without fire.
Eggs laid in quick Lime, and sprinkled with water, are rosted; for the Lime will grow as hot as fire. The Babylonians have their invention, when they are in the Wilderness, and cannot have an opportunity to boil Eggs; they put raw Eggs into a sling, and turn them about till they be rosted. But if you
Want Salt
for your meats, the seed of Sumach strewed in with Benjamin, will season any thing. Pliny. If you want Salt, and would
Keep flesh without Salt,
Cover what flesh you will with honey, when they are fresh; but hang up the vessel you put it into, longer in winter, a less time in summer. If you would have
That Salt-flesh should be made fresh.
First, boil your Salted flesh in milk, and then in water, and it will be fresh. Apicius▪ You shall learn thus
To wash spots from linnen clothes,
If you want Sope, for red wine will so stain them, that you can hardly wash them out without it: But when it doth fall down and stain them, cast Salt upon them, and it will take out the spots. If there want
Groundlings, how to make them.
Suidas saith, That when Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, longed for some of these Fish, and living far from the Sea, could get none; Apicius the glutton, made the Pictures of these Fish, and set them on the Table, so like, as if they had been the same. They were prepared thus: He cut the female Rape-root into long thin pieces, like to these Fish, which he boil'd in Oyl, and strewed with Salt and Pepper, and so he freed him from his longing. As Aethenaeus saith, in Cuphron. Comic. If there want fire, I have shewed already how to make divers sorts of Artificial fires.
