Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 November 1879 — Cheap Food for Englishmen. [ARTICLE]

Cheap Food for Englishmen.

Of food, cheap food and good food, Englishmen are now eagerly writing and talking. The coming winter promises to be a wofully hard one amoßg the British laborers, and the starving agonies of India may, it is feared, be repeated in Ireland. Again the English journalist chants the praise of cornmeal, of the small American bean, cf cheap and delicious French stew and soup. He will probably have his song for his pains, for if there be anything as to which the ignorant Briton’s prejudice is immovable, it is food. The great ambition of his inner man is to have enormous chunks of meat thre e times a day, accompanied by plenty of beer. Cheese and miserable bread go to fill up the bill of fare. The awful •corn with which the English “navvy” contemplates hominy, or samp, or hasty pudding, or pork and beans, is calculated to scorch the beholder. The wife of an English laborer will live, day in and day out, upon bread, beer, a horrible decoction of stuff supposed to be tea, and once in a while an extensive cut of meat; the proposal to make a delicate, nourishing stew or soup out of cheap pieces of meat, or to make an occasional breakfast of hominy and milk, would rouse her deepest contempt. It will be sadly long before either starvation or cooking schools lead the English to feed well; their disgust for new articles of food to which they are unused is as intense as their adherence to the coarse and rude kitchen methods of their feudal ancestors.