Were anything like a proper attention given to common things, there would not be such an amount of discomfort, disease, and mortality amongst the young. But we accustom people to act as if there were no such provisions as natural laws. If we violate them, we do not escape the consequences because we have been ignorant of their mode of operation. We have been provided with intelligence that we might know them; and if society keep its members blind and ignorant, the evil consequences are inevitably reaped. Thus tens of thousands perish for lack of knowledge of even the smallest, and yet most necessary conditions of right living.
Women have also need to be taught the important art of domestic economy. If they do not earn the family income, at least they have to spend the money earned; and their instruction ought to have a view to the spending of that money wisely. For this purpose, a knowledge of arithmetic is absolutely necessary. Some may say, "What use can a woman have for arithmetic?" But when men marry, they soon find this out. If the woman who has a household to manage be innocent of addition and multiplication; and if she fail to keep a record of her income or expenditure, she will, before long, find herself in great trouble. She will find that she cannot make the ends meet, and then run into debt. If she spend too much on dress, she will have too little for food or education. She will commit extravagances in one direction or another, and thus subject her household to great discomfort. She may also bring her husband into trouble through the debts she has contracted, and make a beginning of his misfortunes and sometimes of his ruin.
Much might be said in favour of household management, and especially in favour of improved cookery. Ill-cooked meals is a source of discomfort in many families. Bad cooking is waste,—waste of money and loss of comfort. Whom God has joined in matrimony, ill-cooked joints and ill-boiled potatoes have very often put asunder. Among the "common things" which educators should teach the rising generation, this ought certainly not to be overlooked. It is the commonest and yet most neglected of the branches of female education.
The greater part of human labour is occupied in the direct production of the materials for human food. The farming classes and their labourers devote themselves to the planting, rearing, and reaping of oats and other cereals; and the grazing farmer to the production of cattle and sheep, for the maintenance of the population at large. All these articles—corn, beef, mutton, and such-like—are handed over to the female half of the human species to be converted into food, for the sustenance of themselves, their husbands, and their families. How do they use their power? Can they cook? Have they been taught to cook? Is it not a fact that, in this country, cooking is one of the lost or undiscovered arts?
Thousands of artizans and labourers are deprived of half the actual nutriment of their food, and continue half-starved, because their wives are utterly ignorant of the art of cooking. They are yet in entire darkness as to the economizing of food, and the means of rendering it palatable and digestible.
Even the middle classes are badly served in this respect. "If we could see," says a public writer, "by the help of an Asmodeus, what is going on at the dinner hour of the humbler of the middle class,—what a spectacle of discomfort, waste, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct it would be! The man quarrels with his wife because there is nothing he can eat, and he generally makes up in drink for the deficiencies in the article of food. There is thus not only the direct waste of food and detriment to health, but the further consequent waste of the use of spirits, with its injury to the habits and the health."
On the other hand, people who eat well, drink moderately; the satisfaction of the appetite dispensing with the necessity for resorting to stimulants. Good humour too, and good health, follow a good meal; and by a good meal we mean anything, however simple, well dressed in its way. A rich man may live very expensively and very ill; and a poor man may live frugally and very well, if it be his good fortune to have a good cook in his wife or in his servant.
The most worthless unit in a family is an ill-managing wife, or an indolent woman of any sort. The fair sex are sometimes very acute in what concerns themselves. They keep a tight hand over their dressmakers and milliners. They can tell to a thread when a flounce is too narrow or a tuck too deep. But if their knowledge only extends to their own dress, they are not help-meets, but incumbrances. If they know nothing of their kitchen, and are at the mercy of the cook, their table will soon become intolerable. Bad soup, soft and flabby fish, meat burnt outside and raw within. The husband will soon fly from the Barmecide feast, and take refuge in his club, where he will not only find food that he can digest, but at the same time fly from the domestic discord that usually accompanies ill-cooked victuals at home.
Mr. Smee says that "diseases of the digestive organs greatly exceed in England the relative number found in other countries." The reason is, that in no other country do men eat so much ill-cooked food. The least observant of travellers must have been struck with admiration at the readiness with which a dinner of eight or ten dishes of various eatables makes its appearance in foreign inns; particularly when he remembers the perpetual mutton chop and mashed potatoes of the English road. The author remembers arriving at a roadside inn, in a remote part of Dauphiny, immediately under the foot of the Pic du Midi. On looking at the clay floor, and the worn state of the furniture, he remarked to his friend, "Surely we can get no dinner here." "Wait till you see," was his answer. In about half-an-hour, the table (though propped up) was spread with a clean table-cloth; and successive dishes of soup, fowl, "ros-bif," pomme-de-terre frite, French beans, with wholesome bread and butter, made their appearance. In the principal inns of most provincial towns in England, it would not have been possible to obtain such a dinner.
Great would be the gain to the community if cookery were made an ordinary branch of female education. To the poor, the gain would be incalculable. "Among the prizes which the Bountifuls of both sexes are fond of bestowing in the country, we should like to see some offered for the best boiled potato, the best grilled mutton chop, and the best seasoned hotch-potch, soup, or broth. In writing of a well-boiled potato, we are aware that we shall incur the contempt of many for attaching importance to a thing they suppose to be so common. But the fact is, that their contempt arises, as is often the origin of contempt, from their ignorance—there being not one person in a hundred who has ever seen and tasted that great rarity—a well-boiled potato."[1]