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Well, a mermaid pie was made of pork and eels, and was terribly rich and indigestible; a taffaty tart was an apple-pie, seasoned with lemon-peel and fennel-seed; and the receipt for furmety a very famous and favourite dish with our forefathers I give as it stands in a curious little book, entitled, The Compleat Cook, printed in 1683.
We have given the worthy farmer and his family a good while to sit down to supper, which that night included a kettle of furmety, a mermaid pie, and a taffaty tart. What were they? A very reasonable question, especially as to the mermaid pie, since mermaids are rather scarce articles in the market.
For besides nature hath lent him a flab-berkin face, like one of the four winds, and cheeks that sag like a woman's dug over his chinbone, his apparel is so stuffed up with bladders of taffaty, and his back like beef stuffed with parsley, so drawn out with ribbands and devises, and blistered with light sarcenet bastings, that you would think him nothing but a swarm of butterflies, if you saw him afar off."
For we saw that Inks of several Kinds might in a trice be depriv'd of all their Blackness; and those made with Logwood and Red-Roses might also be chang'd, the one into a Red, the other into a Reddish Liquor; and with Oyl of Vitriol I have sometimes turn'd Black pieces of Silk into a kind of Yellow, and though the Taffaty were thereby made Rotten, yet the spoyling of that does no way prejudice the Experiment, the change of Black Silk into Yellow, being never the less True, because the Yellow Silk is the less good.
George was dressed in a rich Grecian habit of sky-coloured velvet embroidered with large silver stars: the top of his cap was encompassed with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, saphirs, amythists, and other precious stones of various colours, set in rows in the exact form of a rainbow: a light robe of crimson taffaty, fringed with silver, was fastened by a knot of jewels on his left shoulder, and crossed his back to the right side, where it was tucked into a belt of the finest oriental pearls, and thence hung down and trail'd a little on the ground: in fine, there was nothing that exceeded the magnificence and eloquence of his appearance, or was in any measure equal to it in the whole assembly, except that of the princess Louisa his sister.
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