The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1877-10-30 00:00:00

FARM LABORERS' FARE.

Every agricultural labourer's house should contain
within its resources a very large proportion of the
daily food of the family. There should be no necessity
for spending money on vegetables ; a garden is as
necessary to the well-being and comfort of the
labourer as a clean and well-kept home, and in fact
often goes far in providing and maintaining the
latter. With a sufficently large and carefully culti-
vated piece of ground, the housewife should be
independent of those daily visits to the village shop
which entail not only a waste of means but a waste
of time, and be in a position to provide her family
with a maximum of good food at a minimun of expense.
Unfortunately for the judicious expenditure of
working men's wages few Englishwomen base any
clear ideas as to the relative value of different articles
of food. This want of knowledge is as apparent in
females brought up in the country as in those who
inhabit large towns. Were this not the case there
would not be so much indifference as to whether
young children get milk or not, at least for one meal
an the clay, nor would there be so much preference
shown for baker's bread.
Anent this latter subject we have heard it whispered
that idleness on the part of the housemother is the
cause why poor unnutritious, often adulterated
expensive shop bread is bought, instead of sweet,
wholesome, nourishing, pure wheaten bread, being
made at home ; however this may be, it is a fact that
the " Staff of life " in &lomat every labourer's family
—at any rate in the Southern counties—is bought by
the quartern loaf, and a very poor and insufficient
support it proves. It has, to use the labourers' own
words, "no stay in it; it may satisfy the appetite
for the moment, but does not feed the body ; it does
not impart strength and aid endurance; it is, in
truth, deficient in all, or almost all, those good
properties which first obtained for bread its proud,
distinctive title—' the staff of life."
Thus we see that to get the best value for money
expended, bread shoals! be made at home, of pure flour
purchased from the fanner or miller—flour which is
ground from whole wheat, without having its most
nourishing and wholesome qualities eliminated, under
the abeured notion that the finer and whiter the flour
the better it must be.• We have said bread made at
home because although, where it is possible, it is much
better to have it baked there, some difficulty in regard
to the oven often prevents the latter desirable object
being accomplished; but there is the resource of the
village bakehouse, if not too far away.
A good brick oven, such as is to be seen built on the
sides of old cottages, is most desirable; but the
practice of erecting such structures to labourers'
dwellings seems to have ceased. Very good bread may
be baked in the iron oven of an ordinary kitchen, but
it tastes mkey, and IS extravagant in use. In places
where the public bakehouse is too distant to be avail.
able, and where there is neither brick nor iron oven
suitable for baking bread, we seen no reason why the
method pursued m Devonshire should not be as
successfully followed in other places. The plan is
simple, and if age be a te-t of its worth, should be
perfect. We may well believe that the Devonshire
folk derive their present fashion of baking from the
Ifficenicians, who visited
.our south-western shores so
many hundreds of years since in search of tin, for the
plan now followed is exactly similar to the method
by the ancient Greeks. However, setting

employed