by Tarquin O’Flaherty
Cottage Economy (by William Cobbett 1823) on brewing beer; ‘…Forty years ago [about 1780) there was not a labourer in this parish (Sussex area) who did not brew his own beer; and that now there is not one who does it….’…’the causes of this change have been the lowering of the wages of labour compared with the price of provisions, by means of the paper money; the enormous tax upon the barley when made into malt: and the increased tax upon hops. These have quite changed the customs of the English people as to their drink…’
Cobbett goes on to say that the ‘owners’ [the brewers] of ‘public houses, have now obtained a monopoly and that their brews are ‘poisonous stuffs…’. and not a patch on home brew.
With a chapter on “Making Bread’ Cobbett berates West Country folk for using spuds as a substitute for bread, the which, he considers, brings’ the English labourers down to the state of the Irish, whose mode of living is little more than one remove from that of the pig, and the ill-fed pig, too…’
The habit of growing spuds, which is spreading across England is frowned upon by Cobbett.
‘…the slovenly and beastly habits engendered amongst the labouring classes by constantly lifting their principal food (spuds) at once out of the earth to their mouths…without the necessity of implements…and dispensing with everything requiring skill in the preparation of the food….’ quite horrifies Cobbett. (and Eliabeth David too it seems!) The skill involved in preparing and baking bread, on the other hand, made this comestible much more acceptable. (and infinitely cleaner!)
Spuds and their regular consumption is associated with pauperism in Cobbett’s early 19th century world.
On the surface, it does seem that Elizabeth David is being just a bit selective with regard to Cobbett’s
the ‘…wasteful…’ and ‘…shameful…’ labourer’s wife who goes ‘ to the baker’s shop’. In the preceding paragraph, Cobbett points out that that commercial city bakers were notorious for adding ground up spuds to their bread mixes. This means that the wife is paying twice the price for spuds, and the baker is being paid wheat money for spud bread.
As an aside to all this, my mother in the 1950’s baked a round flattish loaf, on a metal plate or more conventionally in a tin. The oven was a venerable Rayburn stove and there was no shortage of homemade breads and cakes for all of us hungry devils. Cobbett says in his section on breadmaking that a brick oven, outside the city, could be heated for virtually no cost because of the easy availability of low cost offcuts.. he also says that a well practiced woman could, by placing her cheek close to the oven door, easily decide when an oven was ready for the risen dough.
Cobbett talks about both small scale cottage living and bigger holdings. I think Ms David was probably having a bit of fun. After all, what would a man know about baking bread?
And tomorrow we will look further at these competing claims.