“Just look,” wrote an enthusiastic Free Trader, a quarter of a century ago, “at the immense change that has latterly taken place in the food of the English peasantry. Rye bread and pease-pudding exchanged for wheaten loaves. A startling change, but not greatly different from what has occurred in France, where, with the abuses of the Bourbon rule, an end was put to the semi-starvation of French tillers of the soil. Black bread is now almost as much a rarity in France as on our side of the Channel; while barley in Wales, oats in Scotland, and the potato in Ireland, are no longer the food-staples that they were.”
I have no wish for anything of a contentious nature to appear in this volume; but may deliver, with regard to the above, the opinion that pease-pudding is by no means despicable fare, when associated with a boiled leg of pork; and I may add that too many of the English peasantry, nowadays, have been reduced, by this same Free Trade, to a diet of no bread at all, in place of wheaten, or any other loaves.
Wedding breakfasts, with the formal speeches, and cutting of the cake, have gone out of fashion, and the subject of the British breakfast of to-day demands a new chapter.
[CHAPTER II]
BREAKFAST (continued)
“Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.”
Country-house life—An Englishwoman at her best—Guests’ comforts—What to eat at the first meal—A few choice recipes—A noble grill-sauce—The poor outcast—Appetising dishes—Hotel “worries”—The old regime and the new—“No cheques”; no soles, and “whitings is hoff”—A halibut steak—Skilly and oakum—Breakfast out of the rates.
By far the pleasantest meal of the day at a large country-house is breakfast. You will be staying there, most likely, an you be a man, for hunting or shooting—it being one of the eccentric dispensations of the great goddess Fashion that country-houses should be guestless, and often ownerless, during that season of the year when nature looks at her loveliest. An you be a woman, you will be staying there for the especial benefit of your daughter; for flirting—or for the more serious purpose of riveting the fetters of the fervid youth who may have been taken captive during the London season—for romping, and probably shooting and hunting, too; for lovely woman up-to-date takes but little account of such frivolities as Berlin wool-work, piano-practice, or drives, well wrapped-up, in a close carriage, to pay calls with her hostess. As for going out with the “guns,” or meeting the sterner sex at luncheon in the keeper’s cottage, or the specially-erected pavilion, the darlings are not content, nowadays, unless they can use dapper little breech-loaders, specially made for them, and some of them are far from bad shots.