truly excellent conduct of Lord WINCHILSEA and Lord STANHOPE, who, as I
read, have taken great pains to make the labourers on their estates
comfortable, by allotting to each a piece of ground sufficient for the
keeping of a cow. I once, when I lived at Botley, proposed to the
copyholders and other farmers in my neighbourhood, that we should petition
the Bishop of Winchester, who was lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant
titles to all the numerous persons called _trespassers on the wastes_; and
also to give titles to others of the poor parishioners, who were willing
to make, on the skirts of the wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre
each. This I am convinced, would have done a great deal towards relieving
the parishes, then greatly burdened by men out of work. This would have
been better than digging holes one day to fill them up the next. Not a
single man would agree to my proposal! One, a bullfrog farmer (now, I
hear, pretty well sweated down,) said it would only make them _saucy_! And
one, a true disciple of _Malthus_, said, that to facilitate their rearing
of children _was a harm_! This man had, at the time, in his own
occupation, land that had formerly been _six farms_, and he had, too, ten
or a dozen children. I will not mention names; but this farmer will _now_,
perhaps, have occasion to call to mind what I told him on that day, when
his opposition, and particularly the ground of it, gave me the more pain,
as he was a very industrious, civil, and honest man. Never was there a
greater mistake than to suppose that men are made saucy and idle by just
and kind treatment. _Slaves_ are always lazy and saucy; nothing but the
lash will extort from them either labour or respectful deportment. I never
met with a _saucy_ Yankee (New Englander) in my life. Never servile;
always civil. This must necessarily be the character of _freemen living in
a state of competence_. They have nobody to envy; nobody to complain of;
they are in good humour with mankind. It must, however, be confessed, that
very little, comparatively speaking, is to be accomplished by the
individual efforts even of benevolent men like the two noblemen before
mentioned. They have a strife to maintain against the _general tendency of
the national state of things_. It is by general and indirect means, and
not by partial and direct and positive regulations, that so great a good
as that which they generously aim at can be accomplished. When we are to
see such means adopted, God only knows; but, if much longer delayed, I am
of opinion, that they will come too late to prevent something very much
resembling a dissolution of society.
145. The cottager's pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter;
and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time;
for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order
to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If
a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more
solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same
degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a
younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn,
is very apt to _boil out_, as they call it; that is to say, come out of
the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by
degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed
_high_ all at once, the hog is apt to _surfeit_, and then a great loss of
food takes place. Peas, or barley-meal is the food; the latter rather the
best, and does the work quicker. Make him _quite fat_ by all means. The
last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can
walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the
most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable,
except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly
appetite. The man who cannot live on _solid fat_ bacon, well-fed and
well-cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour, or is fit for the hospital.
But, then, it must be _bacon_, the effect of barley or peas, (not beans,)
and not of whey, potatoes, or _messes_ of any kind. It is frequently said,
and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon, made from corn, _costs
more than it is worth_! Why do they take care to have it then? They know
better. They know well, that it is the very _cheapest_ they can have; and
they, who look at both ends and both sides of every cost, would as soon
think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on _messes_; that is to
say, for _their own use_, however willing they might now-and-then be to
regale the Londoners with a bit of potato-pork.
146. About _Christmas_, if the weather be coldish, is a good time to kill.
If the weather be very mild, you may wait a little longer; for the hog
cannot be too fat. The day before killing he should have no food. To kill
a hog nicely is so much of a profession, that it is better to pay a
shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass
about. I shall not speak of _pork_; for I would by no means recommend it.
There are two ways of going to work to make bacon; in the one you take off
the hair by _scalding_. This is the practice in most parts of England, and
all over America. But the _Hampshire_ way, and the best way, is to _burn
the hair off_. There is a great deal of difference in the consequences.
The first method slackens the skin, opens all the pores of it, makes it
loose and flabby by drawing out the roots of the hair. The second tightens
the skin in every part, contracts all the sinews and veins in the skin,
makes the flitch a solider thing, and the skin a better protection to the
meat. The taste of the meat is very different from that of a scalded hog;
and to this chiefly it was that Hampshire bacon owed its reputation for
excellence. As the hair is to be _burnt_ off it must be _dry_, and care
must be taken, that the hog be kept on dry litter of some sort the day
previous to killing. When killed he is laid upon a narrow bed of straw,
not wider than his carcass, and only two or three inches thick. He is then
covered all over thinly with straw, to which, according as the wind may
be, the fire is put at one end. As the straw burns, it burns the hair. It
requires two or three coverings and burnings, and care is taken, that the
skin be not in any part burnt, or parched. When the hair is all burnt off
close, the hog is _scraped_ clean, but never touched with _water_. The
upper side being finished, the hog is turned over, and the other side is
treated in like manner. This work should always be done _before
day-light_; for in the day-light you cannot so nicely discover whether the
hair be sufficiently burnt off. The light of the fire is weakened by that
of the day. Besides, it makes the boys get up very early for once at any
rate, and that is something; for boys always like a bonfire.
147. The _inwards_ are next taken out, and if the wife be not a slattern,
here, in the mere offal, in the mere garbage, there is food, and delicate
food too, for a large family for a week; and hog's puddings for the
children, and some for neighbours' children, who come to play with them;
for these things are by no means to be overlooked, seeing that they tend
to the keeping alive of that affection in children for their parents,
which, later in life, will be found absolutely necessary to give effect to
wholesome precept, especially when opposed to the boisterous passions of
youth.
148. The butcher, the next day, cuts the hog up; and then the house is
_filled with meat_! Souse, griskins, blade-bones, thigh-bones, spare-ribs,
chines, belly-pieces, cheeks, all coming into use one after the other, and
the last of the latter not before the end of about four or five weeks. But
about this time, it is more than possible that the Methodist parson will
pay you a visit. It is remarked in America, that these gentry are
attracted by the squeaking of the pigs, as the fox is by the cackling of
the hen. This may be called slander; but I will tell you what I did know
to happen. A good honest careful fellow had a spare-rib, on which he
intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day's work at
coppice-cutting. Home he came at dark with his two little boys, each with
a nitch of wood that they had carried four miles, cheered with the thought
of the repast that awaited them. In he went, found his wife, the Methodist
parson, and a whole troop of the sisterhood, engaged in prayer, and on the
table lay scattered the clean-polished bones of the spare-rib! Can any
reasonable creature believe, that, to save the soul, God requires us to
give up the food necessary to sustain the body? Did Saint Paul preach
this? He, who, while he spread the gospel abroad, _worked himself_, in
order to have it to give to those who were unable to work? Upon what,
then, do these modern saints; these evangelical gentlemen, found their
claim to live on the labour of others.
149. All the other parts taken away, the two sides that remain, and that
are called _flitches_, are to be cured for _bacon_. They are first rubbed
with salt on their insides, or flesh sides, then placed, one on the other,
the flesh sides uppermost, in a salting trough which has a gutter round
its edges to drain away the _brine_; for, to have sweet and fine bacon,
the flitches must not lie sopping in brine; which gives it that sort of
taste which barrel-pork and sea-jonk have, and than which nothing is more
villanous. Every one knows how different is the taste of fresh, dry salt,
from that of salt in a dissolved state. The one is savoury, the other
nauseous. Therefore, _change the salt often_. Once in four or five days.
Let it melt, and sink in; but let it not lie too long. Change the
flitches. Put that at bottom which was first put on the top. Do this a
couple of times. This mode will cost you a great deal more in salt, or
rather in _taxes_, than the _sopping mode_; but without it, your bacon
will not be sweet and fine, and _will not keep so well_. As to the _time_
required for making the flitches sufficiently salt, it depends on
circumstances; the thickness of the flitch, the state of the weather, the
place wherein the salting is going on. It takes a longer time for a thick
than for a thin flitch; it takes longer in dry, than in damp weather; it
takes longer in a dry than in a damp place. But for the flitches of a hog
of twelve score, in weather not very dry or very damp, about six weeks may
do; and as yours is to be _fat_, which receives little injury from
over-salting, give time enough; for you are to have bacon till Christmas
comes again. The place for salting should, like a dairy, always be cool,
but always admit of a _free circulation of air_: _confined_ air, though
_cool_, will taint meat sooner than the mid-day sun accompanied with a
breeze. Ice will not melt in the hottest sun so soon as in a close and
damp cellar. Put a lump of ice in _cold water_, and one of the same size
before a _hot fire_, and the former will dissolve in half the time that
the latter will. Let me take this occasion of observing, that an ice-house
should never be _under ground_, or _under the shade of trees_. That the
bed of it ought to be three feet above the level of the ground; that this
bed ought to consist of something that will admit the drippings to go
instantly off; and that the house should stand in a place _open to the sun
and air_. This is the way they have the ice-houses under the burning sun
of Virginia; and here they keep their fish and meat as fresh and sweet as
in winter, when at the same time neither will keep for twelve hours,
though let down to the depth of a hundred feet in a well. A Virginian,
with some poles and straw, will stick up an ice-house for ten dollars,
worth a dozen of those ice-houses, each of which costs our men of taste as
many scores of pounds. It is very hard to imagine, indeed, what any one
should want ice _for_, in a country like this, except for clodpole boys to
slide upon, and to drown cockneys in skaiting-time; but if people must
have ice in summer, they may as well go a right way as a wrong way to get
it.
150. However, the patient that I have at this time under my hands wants
nothing to cool his blood, but something to warm it, and, therefore, I
will get back to the flitches of bacon, which are now to be _smoked_; for
smoking is a great deal better than merely _drying_, as is the fashion in
the dairy countries in the West of England. When there were plenty of
_farm_-houses there were plenty of places to smoke bacon in; since farmers
have lived in gentleman's houses, and the main part of the farm-houses
have been knocked down, these places are not so plenty. However, there is
scarcely any neighbourhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. Two
precautions are necessary: first, to hang the flitches where no _rain_
comes down upon them: second, not to let them be so near the fire as to
_melt_. These precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed
from _wood_, not turf, peat, or coal. Stubble or litter might do; but the
trouble would be great. _Fir_, or _deal_, smoke is not fit for the
purpose. I take it, that the absence of wood, as fuel, in the dairy
countries, and in the North, has led to the making of pork and dried
bacon. As to the _time_ that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend
a good deal upon whether there be a _constant fire beneath_, and whether
the fire be large or small. A month may do, if the fire be pretty
constant, and such as a farm-house fire usually is. But over smoking, or,
rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon _rust_. Great
attention should, therefore, be paid to this matter. The flitch ought not
be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly
dry. Before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh-side
pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine saw-dust other than that
of deal or fir. Rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. This
keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of
crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would
otherwise be.
151. To keep the bacon sweet and good, and free from nasty things that
they call _hoppers_; that is to say, a sort of skipping maggots,
engendered by a fly which has a great relish for bacon: to provide against
this mischief, and also to keep the bacon from becoming rusty, the
Americans, whose country is so hot in summer, have two methods. They smoke
no part of the hog except the hams, or gammons. They cover these with
coarse linen cloth such as the finest hop-bags are made of, which they sew
neatly on. They then _white-wash_ the cloth all over with _lime_
white-wash, such as we put on walls, their lime being excellent
stone-lime. They give the ham four or five washings, the one succeeding as
the former gets dry; and in the sun, all these washings are put on in a
few hours. The flies cannot get through this; and thus the meat is
preserved from them. The _other_ mode, and that is the mode for you, is,
to sift _fine_ some clean and dry _wood-ashes_. Put some at the bottom of
a box, or chest, which is long enough to hold a flitch of bacon. Lay in
one flitch; then put in more ashes; then the _other flitch_; and then
cover this with six or eight inches of the ashes. This will effectually
keep away all flies; and will keep the bacon as fresh and good as when it
came out of the chimney, which it will not be for any great length of
time, if put on a rack, or kept hung up in the open air. _Dust_, or even
_sand_, very, very _dry_, would, perhaps, do as well. The object is not
only to keep out the flies, but the _air_. The place where the chest, or
box, is kept, ought to be _dry_; and, if the ashes should get damp (as
they are apt to do from the salts they contain,) they should be put in the
fire-place to dry, and then be put back again. Peat-ashes, or turf-ashes,
might do very well for this purpose. With these precautions, the bacon
will be as good at the end of the year as on the first day; and it will
keep two, and even three years, perfectly good, for which, however, there
can be no necessity.
152. Now, then, this hog is altogether a capital thing. The other parts
will be meat for about four or five weeks. The _lard_, nicely put down,
will last a long while for all the purposes for which it is wanted. To
make it keep well there should be some salt put into it. Country children
are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread, as
we spread butter. Many a score hunches of this sort have I eaten, and I
never knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of
good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently
so hungry as I ought to be; but I should think it no hardship to eat
_sweet_ lard instead of butter. But, now-a-days, the labourers, and
especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of
_niceness_ in food and _finery in dress_; a quarter of a bellyful and rags
are the consequence. The food of their choice is high-priced, so that, for
the greater part of their time, they are half-starved. The dress of their
choice is _showy_ and _flimsy_, so that, to-day, they are _ladies_, and
to-morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. But has not Nature made the
country girls as pretty as ladies? Oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and
white teeth!) and a great deal prettier too! But are they _less_ pretty,
when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural
presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when
drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert Peel,[9] "where tawdry colours
strive with dirty white," exciting violent suspicions that all is not as
it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely
hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and
commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? Are they prettiest
when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or when their
draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? However,
the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. It is _the
system_ of managing the affairs of the nation. This system has made all
_flashy_ and _false_, and has put all things out of their place.
Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy, and obscurity, both in speaking
and in writing; mock-delicacy in manners; mock-liberality, mock-humanity,
and mock-religion. Pitt's false money, Peel's flimsy dresses,
Wilberforce's potatoe diet, Castlereagh's and Mackintosh's oratory, Walter
Scott's poems, Walter's and Stoddart's[10] paragraphs, with all the bad
taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all
have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed, and borne together; and we are
now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, as the fat of the adder is, as
is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the Son of the great worker of
Spinning-Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors of Oxford,
the author of that _Bill_, before which this false, this flashy, this
flimsy, this rotten system will dissolve as one of his father's pasted
calicoes does at the sight of the washing-tub.
153. "What," says the cottager, "has all this to do with hogs and bacon?"
Not directly with hogs and bacon, indeed; but it has a great deal to do,
my good fellow with your affairs, as I shall, probably, hereafter more
fully show, though I shall now leave you to the enjoyment of your flitches
of bacon, which, as I before observed, will do ten thousand times more
than any Methodist parson, or any other parson (except, of course, those
of _our_ church) to make you happy, not only in this world, but in the
world to come. _Meat in the house_ is a great source of _harmony_, a great
preventer of the temptation to commit those things, which, from small
beginnings, lead, finally, to the most fatal and atrocious results; and I
hold that doctrine to be _truly damnable_, which teaches that God has made
any selection, any condition relative to belief, which is to save from
punishment those who violate the principles of _natural justice_.
154. _Some_ other meat you may have; but, bacon is the great thing. It is
always ready; as good cold as hot; goes to the field or the coppice
conveniently; in harvest, and other busy times, demands the pot to be
boiled only on a Sunday; has twice as much strength in it as any other
thing of the same weight; and in short, has in it every quality that tends
to make a labourer's family able to work and well off. One pound of bacon,
such as that which I have described, is, in a labourer's family, worth
four or five of ordinary mutton or beef, which are great part _bone_, and
which, in short, are gone in a moment. But always observe, it is _fat
bacon_ that I am talking about. There will, in spite of all that can be
done, be _some_ lean in the gammons, though comparatively very little; and
therefore you ought to begin at that end of the flitches; for, _old lean
bacon_ is not good.
155. Now, as to the _cost_. A pig (a _spayed sow_ is best) bought in March
four months old, can be had now for fifteen shillings. The cost till
fatting time is next to nothing to a Cottager; and then the cost, at the
present price of corn, would, for a hog of twelve score, not exceed _three
pounds_; in the whole _four pounds five_; a pot of poison a week bought at
the public-house comes to _twenty-six shillings_ of the money; and more
than _three times the remainder_ is generally flung away upon the
miserable _tea_, as I have clearly shown in the First Number, at Paragraph
24. I have, indeed, there shown, that if the tea were laid aside, the
labourer might supply his family well with beer all the year round, and
have a fat hog of even _fifteen score_ for the _cost of the tea_, which
does him and can do him _no good at all_.
156. The feet, the cheeks, and other bone, being considered, the _bacon
and lard_, taken together, would not exceed _sixpence a pound_. Irish
bacon is "_cheaper_." Yes, _lower-priced_. But, I will engage that a pound
of mine, when it comes _out_ of the pot (to say nothing of the _taste_,)
shall weigh as much as a _pound and a half_ of Irish, or any dairy or
slop-fed bacon, when that comes out of the pot. No, no: the farmers joke
when they say, that their bacon _costs them more than_ they could buy
bacon for. They know well what it is they are doing; and besides, they
always forget, or, rather, remember not to say, that the fatting of a
large hog yields them three or four load of dung, really worth more than
ten or fifteen of common yard dung. In short, without hogs, farming _could
not go on_; and it never has gone on in any country in the world. The hogs
are the great _stay_ of the whole concern. They are _much in small space_;
they make no _show_, as flocks and herds do; but with out them, the
cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern.
SALTING MUTTON AND BEEF.
157. _VERY FAT_ Mutton may be salted to great advantage, and also smoked,
and may be kept thus a long while. Not the shoulders and legs, but the
_back_ of the sheep. I have never made any flitch of _sheep-bacon_; but I
will; for there is nothing like having a _store_ of meat in a house. The
running to the butchers daily is a ridiculous thing. The very idea of
being fed, of a _family_ being fed, by daily supplies, has something in it
perfectly _tormenting_. One half of the time of a mistress of a house,
the affairs of which are carried on in this way, is taken up in talking
about what is to be got for dinner, and in negotiations with the butcher.
One single moment spent at table beyond what is absolutely necessary, is a
moment very shamefully spent; but, to suffer a system of domestic economy,
which unnecessarily wastes daily an hour or two of the mistress's time in
hunting for the provision for the repast, is a shame indeed; and when we
consider how much time is generally spent in this and in equally absurd
ways, it is no wonder that we see so little performed by numerous
individuals as they do perform during the course of their lives.
158. _Very fat parts of Beef_ may be salted and smoked in a like manner.
Not the _lean_; for that is a great waste, and is, in short, good for
nothing. Poor fellows on board of ships are compelled to eat it, but it is
a very bad thing.
No. VII.
BEES, FOWLS, &C. &C.
159. I now proceed to treat of objects of less importance than the
foregoing, but still such as may be worthy of great attention. If all of
them cannot be expected to come within the scope of a labourer's family,
some of them must, and others may: and it is always of great consequence,
that children be brought up to set a just value upon all useful things,
and especially upon all _living things_; to know the _utility_ of them:
for, without this, they never, when grown up, are worthy of being
entrusted with the _care_ of them. One of the greatest, and, perhaps, the
very commonest, fault of servants, is their inadequate care of animals
committed to their charge. It is a well-known saying that "the _master's
eye_ makes the horse fat," and the remissness to which this alludes, is
generally owing to the servant not having been brought up to feel _an
interest_ in the well-being of animals.
BEES.