It angers me to pass a grocer's shop, and see in the window a display of
foreign butter. This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the
prospects of England. The deterioration of English butter is one of the
worst signs of the moral state of our people. Naturally, this article of
food would at once betray a decline in the virtues of its maker; butter
must be a subject of the dairyman's honest pride, or there is no hope of
its goodness. Begin to save your labour, to aim at dishonest profits, to
feel disgust or contempt for your work--and the churn declares every one
of these vices. They must be very prevalent, for it is getting to be a
rare thing to eat English butter which is even tolerable. What! England
dependent for dairy-produce upon France, Denmark, America? Had we but
one true statesman--but one genuine leader of the people--the ears of
English landowners and farmers would ring and tingle with this proof of
their imbecility.
Nobody cares. Who cares for anything but the show and bluster which are
threatening our ruin? English food, not long ago the best in the world,
is falling off in quality, and even our national genius for cooking shows
a decline; to anyone who knows England, these are facts significant
enough. Foolish persons have prated about "our insular cuisine,"
demanding its reform on Continental models, and they have found too many
like unto themselves who were ready to listen; the result will be, before
long, that our excellence will be forgotten, and paltry methods be
universally introduced, together with the indifferent viands to which
they are suited. Yet, if any generality at all be true, it is a plain
fact that English diet and English virtue--in the largest sense of the
word--are inseparably bound together.
Our supremacy in this matter of the table came with little taking of
thought; what we should now do is to reflect upon the things which used
to be instinctive, perceive the reasons of our excellence, and set to
work to re-establish it. Of course the vilest cooking in the kingdom is
found in London; is it not with the exorbitant growth of London that many
an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the
domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that
direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country
districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a
reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption.
I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with
schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful.
Little girls should be taught cooking and baking more assiduously than
they are taught to read. But with ever in view the great English
principle--that food is only cooked aright when it yields the utmost of
its native and characteristic savour. Let sauces be utterly
forbidden--save the natural sauce made of gravy. In the same way with
sweets; keep in view the insurpassable English ideals of baked tarts (or
pies, if so you call them), and boiled puddings; as they are the
wholesomest, so are they the most delicious of sweet cakes yet invented;
it is merely a question of having them well made and cooked. Bread,
again; we are getting used to bread of poor quality, and ill-made, but
the English loaf at its best--such as you were once sure of getting in
every village--is the faultless form of the staff of life. Think of the
glorious revolution that could be wrought in our troubled England if it
could be ordained that no maid, of whatever rank, might become a wife
unless she had proved her ability to make and bake a perfect loaf of
bread.