““Absit,” said the doctor; “far from us be any such base thought! There is nothing in the world less nourishing than an olla podrida; to canons, or rectors of colleges, or peasants’ weddings with your ollas podridas, but let us have none of them on the tables of governors, where everything that is present should be delicate and refined; and the reason is, that always, everywhere and by everybody, simple medicines are more esteemed than compound ones, for we cannot go wrong in those that are simple, while in the compound we may, by merely altering the quantity of the things composing them. But what I am of opinion the governor should eat now in order to preserve and fortify his health is a hundred or so of wafer cakes and a few thin slices of conserve of quinces, which will settle his stomach and help his digestion.””
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Take a Pipkin or Pot of some three Gallons, fill it with fair water, and set it over a Fire of Charcoals, and put in first your hardest meats, a rump of Beef, _Bolonia_ sausages, neats tongues two dry, and two green, boiled and larded, about two hours after the Pot is boil'd and scummed: but put in more presently after your Beef is scum'd, Mutton, Venison, Pork, Bacon, all the aforesaid in Gubbins, as big as a Ducks Egg, in equal pieces; put in also Carrots, Turnips, Onions, Cabbidge, in good big pieces, as big as your meat, a faggot of sweet herbs, well bound up, and some whole Spinage, Sorrel, Burrage, Endive, Marigolds, and other good Pot-Herbs a little chopped; and sometimes _French_ Barley, or Lupins green or dry.
Sources: The passage is from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, Complete, tr. Ormsby, John, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — ochre cloth, windmill stamp.