1 In William Byrd’s diary, 43 references to meat appeared within a period of three months, from 1 Dec. 1709 to 1 March 1710. Beef was mentioned twenty-four times, pork five times, mutton three times, fish, goose, turkey and chicken twice each, and venison, pigeon and duck once each; in other periods Byrd abstained from meat. Main, Tobacco Colony, 209.

2OED, s.v. “mess,” I.I, a “prepared dish. …” In England, this usage was identified as “now only archaic” as early as the 19th century, but it continued in the American south until the 20th century and is still current in black culture throughout the United States, as a “mess of greens.”

3 Main, Tobacco Colony, 220-21; for English diet in the records of Berkshire farmers, see G. E. Fussell, ed., “Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, 1610-1620,” CS 3d series 53 (1936), passim; Cicely A. H. Howell, “The Social Condition of the Peasantry in South East Leicestershire, AD 1300-1700” (thesis, Univ. of Leicester, 1974), 193.

4 Byrd, London Diary and Other Writings, 462, 248, passim.

5 Many English cookery books survive in ms. from the 17th century, both in country houses and county record offices. One of them, from a Berkshire household circa 1650, included recipes for artichoke pie, almond pudding, roast pullet stuffed with oysters, buttered lobster, boiled carp in blood, potted lamprey, marinated cherries, hartshorn jelly, blow pudding (“the lights and heart of a hog”) carrot pudding, gooseberry fool, blanc mange, marrow pudding and many fricassees. See “Book of Cookery …,” ms. D/ED F37, BERKRO.