Healths improvement: or, Rules comprizing and discovering the nature, method, and manner of preparing all sorts of food used in this nation. Written by that ever famous Thomas Muffett, Doctor in Physick: corrected and enlarged by Christopher Bennet, Doctor in Physick, and fellow of the Colledg of Physitians in London.

Conger.

Conger is nothing but a sea-eele of a white sweet and fatty flesh: little Congers are taken in great plenty in the Severn, betwixt Glocester and Tewkesbury, but the great ones keep onely in the salt seas, which are whiter-flesht, and more tender; they feed (as eels do) upon fat waters at the mouths of rivers running into the sea: they are hard of digestion for most stomacks, engendring chollicks if they be eaten cold, & leprosies if they be eaten hot after their seething. Philemon the Comical Poet seeing a Con∣ger * 1.1seething in a Cooks-shop for divers young Gentle∣men, that bespake it to dinner, suddenly snacht away the * 1.2pan wherein it boiled, and ran away with it, the Gentlemen followed and catcht at him like a number of Chickens; whom he had crossed, and turned, and mocked

for a great while, till having sported himself enough, he flang down pan and all with these words: O humane fol∣ly! how do fooles long for unwholsome meats? for he thought Conger to be bad enough of its owne nature, but far worse if it were eaten hot out of the pan. In England we do not amiss first to boil it tender in wa∣ter with salt, time, parsly, baies, and hot herbs, then to lay it covered in vinegar, and then to broil it; for so is it a meetly good nourishment in Sommer, for hot sto∣machs.

Notes

• * 1.1

  Athen. l. 8. c. 6.
• * 1.2

  Vict. l. 18. c. 17. var. lect.