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.

Anguillae.

Eeles have so sweet a flesh, that they and Lampreyes were dedicated to that filthy Goddess Gula or gluttony; yet withall it is so unwholesome, that some Zoilus or Momus would have accused nature, for putting so sweet a taste into so dangerous a meat: for Eeles (as Hippocra∣tes writeth) live most willingly in muddy places: and in his Epidemiques he rehearseth many mischiefs to have happened to divers through eating of Eeles; they give much nourishment, but very corruptible: they loosen the belly, but bring fluxes, they open the wind-pipes, but stop the liver; they clear the voice, but infect the lungs; they encrease seed, but yet no good seed: final∣ly they bring agues, hurt the stomach and kidneys, en∣gender gravel, cause the strangury, sharpen the gout,

and fill us full of many diseases; they are worst in Som∣mer, but never wholesom: the elder ones are least hurtful and if any be harmless it is the silver-bellied and the san∣dy Eele. Arnoldus de villa nova, saith that no Eele is free from a venemous malignity and a kind of glu∣ish suffocating juice. But Jovius reporteth that some Eeles are engendred in a little River by Cremona, less a great deal, then our little griggs, hurtful in no disease, but of a pure wholesome and good nourishment; which I will believe because so grave a Chronicler reporteth it: otherwise I should think ill with Hippocrates of all Eeles, even of those little ones as well as the Eeles in Ganges, which are thirty foot long, as Pliny writeth: Ve∣rily when Eeles only sink to the bottom, and all other fishes float after they are dead, it cannot but argue them to be of a muddy nature, little participating of that a••ereal substance which moveth and lightneth other fishes. Again sith like an Owle it never comes abroad to feed but in the night time; it argueth a melancholick disposition in it self, and a likelihood to beget the like in us. Great Eeles are best roasted and broild, because their maligne humour lieth more next under the skin then in their flesh, which is corrected or evapourated by the fire. Next of all they are best poudred and sowced, and baked with butter, salt, and pepper; but worst being sodden in water, ale, and yeast, as commonly they are; for the yeast addeth one maglinnity to another, and doth more hurt then I can express to the stomach, liver, and blood.

Notes

• Li. de rect. rat.
• Com. in Sch. sal
• Jov. in desc. Hetrur.
• lib. 9▪ cap. 3.