BREAKFAST.
BREAKFAST has been a good deal neglected in the literature of gastronomy. The little publication just issued by Mr. Bentley, and edited by some dreadful person who actually gives a receipt for dressed crab as a morning dish, is, we think, the first which has appeared in English devoted exclusively to the early meal. The true gourmand indeed we fancy rather despises break- fast as a mere arrangement for taking sustenance, lacking entirely that trace of science, and sub-flavour of art, and delicate aroma of conviviality which, by the consent of civilized mankind in all countries, attach themselies to dinner. The contempt is pro- bably instinctive, for the Australian black in his natural state eats his early handful of gum or fat insects standing, and squats at ease only when the half-raw opossum is ready for the afternoon enjoyment, but it has been deepened by civilization till breakfast has paced out of the hands of the gastronome into those of the doctor. One feeds oneself, and it is not on feeding that literary cooks can be tempted to display the full resources of their art. In France, indeed, where enjoyment is cultivated as a science, and the nasty com- promise between breakfast and dinner called lunch,—a meal where one has all the trouble of dining and none of its compensations, where a chop is considered meat, and housewives are not ashamed of hash, and fat porter is substituted for claret,—is unusual, break- fast has been the subject of some care. But then wine is taken at breakfast in France, and the faint odour of refined en- joyment which has always lingered around wine attaches
itself even to the breafast with which it is consumed. There is a possibility of art, of an awakening of the mind, even in some rare instances of a tepid good-fellowship. In India, where coolness is the one source of comfort, where sitting in a draught is Elysium, and ica.1 water raises your spirits, and coffee really stimulates, and the chance of cold meat is a separate and infrequent luxury, and breafast may be as elaborate as dinner without costing a farthing or an exertion, social breakfasting is a recognized habit. In England, however, the meal is eminently one of utility alone. In very good houses you eat it in solitude, or with your wife, at the hour which suits yourself—an arrangement spe- cially designed to make good-fellowship intrusive, and among the middle classes business begins too early. Half of us want to be doing something at ten, and a meal at half-past nine, to be eaten while you are still chilled through, cannot therefore receive much, attention. A cut of meat and a cup of coffee is considered suffi- cient, and often too much, for Englishmen rise too late really to enjoy eating before midday. Not that we mean to say anything in praise of early rising. The man who asserts in a climate like this that it is a virtue to get up at six, and looks at you suspi- ciously, as doubting your moral fibre, because you get up at ten, ought to be made to wear a hair shirt, or shave with cold water, or use " mottled" soap, or complete his theory of life by some other needless but self-exalting form of physical self-denial. But still the early riser, unpleasant person as he usually is, has the com- pensation of hunger, which his more self-indulgent friend has not- We have known houses where simplicity was carried much farther than this, where, though dinner was good, breakfast was utterly neg- lected, the women ate bread and butter, and the men were con- sidered well fed if they got fresh eggs and little scraps of red meat, supposed by courtesy to be bacon. Such contempt for humanity is, however, we are happy to say, becoming rare, and were the question of breakfast only studied with the keenness, ardour, and purity of purpose displayed on the greater question of dinner, would speedily be extinct. Of course any real reform on the point must arise from a development of the inward con- sciousness, a cultivation of the latent conscience of the stomach, but a good deal of external aid can be gained from Mr. Bentley's little brochure. Its editor has made that one huge mistake about crab —as if one should begin breakfast with soup —but we have not discovered a second impiety of the kind, and his views upon omelettes are at once orthodox and expansive. There is a little hint about the impropriety of turning omelettes in the frying pan which marks a refined mind, and he has the taste to place the true omelette before those over improved confections in which the first quality of the dish, its croquancy, is destroyed by the intrusion of foreign and comparatively gritty substances.
Before breakfast can assume its proper place among the sub- jects of art it is necessary to decide what its central idea should be, and not only the central idea, but the central idea applicable to England. Bearing in mind that such of our countrymen as are capable of distinguishing between.eating and feeding, who would describe " skilley," for instance, as food, but not as breakfast, are people who will not waste morning time, the idea of breakfast should, we think, be the provision which best fortifies men for the labour of a long day. Women need not be considered, for they get a good mid-day meal, which is to them not unpleasant, for the children are about, and there is an interval between household supervision and visiting, and by a beneficent provision of nature they are exempt from the temptations of gourmandise. Few women worth a straw care a straw what they eat, and as few men do not care. To the last day of their lives the best and cleverest women will eat the horrid imitations of sponge called buns, and for those who can eat buns with a relish gastronomy is an impertinence. The object is to qualify men for work, and breakfast therefore must consist mainly of eatable solids cold. Not to speak of household convenience, hot meats, and in a less degree even hot fish, require wine, or they leave an upleasant film. upon the palate, and early wine is, on the whole, among - a race of industrials living in a chilly climate a mistake. If at all strong it slightly diminishes business keenness and activity., and if very weak leaves neither the warmth which comes of fully satisfied appetite, nor the keenness which slight hunger fosters in city-bred men. The French feel that, and qualify wine and water by a petit verre of brandy,—the most dangerous habit into which an Englishman can fall. For those who live habitually in the open air beer may possibly be healthy, and it certainly did not hurt our ancestors, but with the majority of their weakly descendants the habit either produces corpulence or a per- manent irritability and sense of unrest. The instinct which has led men to milder liquors swallowed hot is, we believe, sound, tea being injurious only to the sedentary, cocoa only to the fat, and though the primary idea of breakfast must always be the vulgar coffee in the morning to nobody, while the heat relieves the faint one of food, still due dignity may by art be secured to its position chill which in this climate a man who has not walked before among meals. If the alternatives seem too many, they can be breakfast is at breakfast sure to feel for nine months in the year. reduced without injury to the great principle, and a slice of the An instinct has in this matter come to the aid of science, joint, an egg, and a little potted meat or anchovy paste will yield but then people who respect their stomachs should draw the a breakfast sufficient to secure the last of the requisites we intend obvious deduction from their instincts, and taking mild liquors to suggest.
hot, should take their solids cold. Fried bacon under that rule This is the capacity for eating a considerable meal. There is stands prohibited, and eggs are only allowed hot because no no time at which the average Englishman really needs a good Englishman ever thinks of eating them cold—except when laid by supply of food so much as at breakfast. At dinner he is exhausted plovers—or has the faintest idea of the kind of " confection" into with the day, and wants succulent things and soups, and above all which the cold yolk of a hard-boiled egg could by a little art be wine—food which gets into the blood quickly, yet which will not turned. Of solids meat and bread are of course the best, vege- destroy his evening by sending him to sleep. But at breakfast tables being forbidden, first, because they ought to be eaten the he has not eaten for fourteen hours, and if he shares the antipathy moment they are ready, and punctuality at breakfast is an we have expressed to lunch, will not eat again for nine more, and abominable oppression; secondly, because the smell of all vegetables he has really to find fuel for the whole of his most active existence. haunts a house ; and thirdly, because, except the potato, they do He wants, or ought to want, a large meal, and we believe great not really strengthen, and breakfast is the doctor's meal. Every breakfast-eaters are invariably healthy men. Their frames are variety of cold meat, cold game, potted meat, potted game, potted never exhausted, or tempted to prey on themselves, and make the fish, and those things which though meats, are not usually called nerves do the duty of the tissues, like the bodies of those who con- meat, tongue, brawn, boar's heal, pickled poultry—a luxury eider it sound hygiene to fritter away an appetite on tea and toast. absurdly neglected—and ham, are good for the higher objects of They are incurable, for at heart they regard gastronomy as Dr. breakfast. The best are probably the potted things, and meats Colenso regards the Pentateuch, and must be given up, as Arch- which are not meat, because they tempt men to eat bread, bishops give up that unfortunate prelate ; but to the faithful we the best of all food, and for two reasons too much avoided may still suggest that the hygienic meal of the day—the one to be by the well-to-do. They learn to like flavour, and bread by based most strictly on scientific data, is the one which Englishmen itself is very flavourless, and it is the custom in England to hitherto have most neglected, and in which perhaps only Scotch- bake bread in the worst possible way, in such masses that the body men and Anglo-Indians perfectly succeed.
of the loaf is a soft, spongy, white mass, very little more edible than a bun. Very good wives will let their husbands "peel the THE DORSETSHIRE LABOURER. loaf," but even they will not let anybody else, and so the poor men
who would eat crust, i. e., good wheat flour properly baked, are forced either to eat flour half raw or abandon the bread for solid THE interest excited by the committal of John Cross, a Dorset meat. Puddings of all kind are an abomination, and Mr. Bentley's labourer, to fourteen days in the county gaol for the theft editor ought to be ashamed of himself for inserting them in his of a hurdle, has given rise to various statements from different list. Indeed he is ashamed of them, for the chapter headed " Pud. quarters as to the actual condition of the labourers of the county. dings" is filled with receipts for meat, cheeses, and the peculiarly The system of labour varies considerably in different parts of th3 nasty agglomeration of chopped meat screwed in little bags of county. In some parts the farmer hires the man by the size of his entrail called sausages. Cheese is banished from English breakfast- family, and pays him accordingly. Thus advertisements are not tables, though retained in Holland and some parts of Italy, and its uncommon in the local papers :—" Wanted a carter, with two or exclusion seems to be based upon nothing more important than a three working boys," or, " A Shepherd wanted, with a working passing fashion. Of lighter things, the entrees of the breakfast, family." Should the boys, thinking to better themselves, obtain eggs are the commonest, prawns, sardines, pickled palates, ome- work elsewhere, the father would stand a chance of losing his letter, creases, and caviare are perhaps the best, and a great deal more place. In other parts of the county the truck system prevails to a might be done with the roes of different fish, the sounds of cod, considerable extent, and the men are paid a large portion of and fish pickled in oil, than has yet been attempted. People are so their earnings in kind, and not in coin.
unenterprising that we doubt if dried mango fish, the Indian deli- Lord Shaftesbury, in his letter to the Times entitled "The Dorset- cacy, are procurable in London, and American cranberries, the shire Labourers," makes statements which, however true as respects one " jam" a man may consider it no disgrace to like, never seem the village of St. Giles where his Lordship resides, the labourers to pass through Liverpool. Hot buttered toast, buttered rolls, even on other parts of his estate do not feel to be an accurate and soft buttered biscuits are all mistakes, partly for the reasons representation of their condition.
which should exclude hot meat, and partly from the fact that half- Lord Shaftesbury states that for 10 months in the year the hours baked flour heated and drowned in butter makes the eater heavy of labour are and for the remaining 2 months "he is paid for
for the day. Fruit is incomparably better at breakfast than at every hour beyond the 81 hours given in general, extra wages for any other time, though so rarely seen in England, where, having his extra work." The hours of labour on most parts of his Lord- the best fruit in the world, we studiously preserve it for the exact ship's estate, and throughout the neighbourhood generally, are moment when we do not want it, and when its flavour spoils that during the 4 winter months, i. e. (from November 8 to March 7) of the wine. We have seen human beings eat strawberries and from 7 a.m. to 5. p.m., which gives nine hours a day, an hour for cream with Lafitte. A little fresh fruit is at breakfast a perfect dinner being allowed. During the remaining 8 months of the digester, but in truth it is useless writing about fruit. English- year the hours are from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., a period of 91 hours, the men never will know anything about it, except how to grow the breakfast half-hour as well as the dinner hour being allowed. best fruits in the world. Nothing in the world comes near the These are the hours of regular labour, subject of course to the brown greengage, but between the perversity of public taste and variation which must arise from the occasional pressure of daily the indifference of the Duke of Bedford, who ought to be offered work —such for instance as when the steam thrashing-machine is the alternative of quadrupling Covent Garden or attending the used, which perhaps occurs twenty or more times in the course of House every night for a twelvemouth, a real dish of greengages, the year, on the large farms. Some of the masters give their men a heaped dish, with six or eight dozens of the fruit in it, costs as on these occasions a pint of beer, others a larger allowance, some much as half a dozen of champagne. Fruit should not be eaten none at all, but no payment is made in money for the extra time, in ones, but in masses, as the Americans eat it, and it would be, varying from 11 to 2 hours, which the men give.
did not London set the fashion, while labouring under a mo- The opportunities of piece work which many of the labourers nopoly which absolutely forbids even reasonable competition. have, but by no means all, extend through the months of June, The idea of breakfast in fact should be cold solids and bread July, August, and part of September. During the month of hay- flavoured with prepared meat, and within these limits it is pos- making the mowers, as they work by the acre, of course take their Bible, as Mr. Bentley's book shows, to secure an almost infinite own time, their usual hours being from 5 a.m., sometimes earlier, variety, and to compose a breakfast almost as carefully as a dinner. to 8 p.m. When the grass is being carried the labourers work as With three or four alternatives—say ham, cold chicken, potted long as daylight permits, and no extra money payment is made to fish, brawn, sardines, and perhaps mushrooms alone hot, the the ordinary daysman. The allowance of ale or cider is, on the joint cold, tea, coffee, and cocoa—the last injuriously neglected, average, a gallon per day. The average price of grass-mowing is owing chiefly to an idea current among cooks that it can be made 2s. 3d. per acre. being injurious only to the sedentary, cocoa only to the fat, and though the primary idea of breakfast must always be the vulgar coffee in the morning to nobody, while the heat relieves the faint one of food, still due dignity may by art be secured to its position chill which in this climate a man who has not walked before among meals. If the alternatives seem too many, they can be breakfast is at breakfast sure to feel for nine months in the year. reduced without injury to the great principle, and a slice of the An instinct has in this matter come to the aid of science, joint, an egg, and a little potted meat or anchovy paste will yield but then people who respect their stomachs should draw the a breakfast sufficient to secure the last of the requisites we intend obvious deduction from their instincts, and taking mild liquors to suggest.
hot, should take their solids cold. Fried bacon under that rule This is the capacity for eating a considerable meal. There is stands prohibited, and eggs are only allowed hot because no no time at which the average Englishman really needs a good Englishman ever thinks of eating them cold—except when laid by supply of food so much as at breakfast. At dinner he is exhausted plovers—or has the faintest idea of the kind of " confection" into with the day, and wants succulent things and soups, and above all which the cold yolk of a hard-boiled egg could by a little art be wine—food which gets into the blood quickly, yet which will not turned. Of solids meat and bread are of course the best, vege- destroy his evening by sending him to sleep. But at breakfast tables being forbidden, first, because they ought to be eaten the he has not eaten for fourteen hours, and if he shares the antipathy moment they are ready, and punctuality at breakfast is an we have expressed to lunch, will not eat again for nine more, and abominable oppression; secondly, because the smell of all vegetables he has really to find fuel for the whole of his most active existence. haunts a house ; and thirdly, because, except the potato, they do He wants, or ought to want, a large meal, and we believe great not really strengthen, and breakfast is the doctor's meal. Every breakfast-eaters are invariably healthy men. Their frames are variety of cold meat, cold game, potted meat, potted game, potted never exhausted, or tempted to prey on themselves, and make the fish, and those things which though meats, are not usually called nerves do the duty of the tissues, like the bodies of those who con- meat, tongue, brawn, boar's heal, pickled poultry—a luxury eider it sound hygiene to fritter away an appetite on tea and toast. absurdly neglected—and ham, are good for the higher objects of They are incurable, for at heart they regard gastronomy as Dr. breakfast. The best are probably the potted things, and meats Colenso regards the Pentateuch, and must be given up, as Arch- which are not meat, because they tempt men to eat bread, bishops give up that unfortunate prelate ; but to the faithful we the best of all food, and for two reasons too much avoided may still suggest that the hygienic meal of the day—the one to be by the well-to-do. They learn to like flavour, and bread by based most strictly on scientific data, is the one which Englishmen itself is very flavourless, and it is the custom in England to hitherto have most neglected, and in which perhaps only Scotch- bake bread in the worst possible way, in such masses that the body men and Anglo-Indians perfectly succeed.
Previous page
