Part 9

150. However, the patient that I have at this time under my hands wants nothing to cool his blood, but something to warm it, and, therefore, I will get back to the flitches of bacon, which are now to be _smoked_; for smoking is a great deal better than merely _drying_, as is the fashion in the dairy countries in the West of England. When there were plenty of _farm_-houses there were plenty of places to smoke bacon in; since farmers have lived in gentleman's houses, and the main part of the farm-houses have been knocked down, these places are not so plenty. However, there is scarcely any neighbourhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. Two precautions are necessary: first, to hang the flitches where no _rain_ comes down upon them: second, not to let them be so near the fire as to _melt_. These precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed from _wood_, not turf, peat, or coal. Stubble or litter might do; but the trouble would be great. _Fir_, or _deal_, smoke is not fit for the purpose. I take it, that the absence of wood, as fuel, in the dairy countries, and in the North, has led to the making of pork and dried bacon. As to the _time_ that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend a good deal upon whether there be a _constant fire beneath_, and whether the fire be large or small. A month may do, if the fire be pretty constant, and such as a farm-house fire usually is. But over smoking, or, rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon _rust_. Great attention should, therefore, be paid to this matter. The flitch ought not be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly dry. Before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh-side pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine saw-dust other than that of deal or fir. Rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. This keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would otherwise be.

151. To keep the bacon sweet and good, and free from nasty things that they call _hoppers_; that is to say, a sort of skipping maggots, engendered by a fly which has a great relish for bacon: to provide against this mischief, and also to keep the bacon from becoming rusty, the Americans, whose country is so hot in summer, have two methods. They smoke no part of the hog except the hams, or gammons. They cover these with coarse linen cloth such as the finest hop-bags are made of, which they sew neatly on. They then _white-wash_ the cloth all over with _lime_ white-wash, such as we put on walls, their lime being excellent stone-lime. They give the ham four or five washings, the one succeeding as the former gets dry; and in the sun, all these washings are put on in a few hours. The flies cannot get through this; and thus the meat is preserved from them. The _other_ mode, and that is the mode for you, is, to sift _fine_ some clean and dry _wood-ashes_. Put some at the bottom of a box, or chest, which is long enough to hold a flitch of bacon. Lay in one flitch; then put in more ashes; then the _other flitch_; and then cover this with six or eight inches of the ashes. This will effectually keep away all flies; and will keep the bacon as fresh and good as when it came out of the chimney, which it will not be for any great length of time, if put on a rack, or kept hung up in the open air. _Dust_, or even _sand_, very, very _dry_, would, perhaps, do as well. The object is not only to keep out the flies, but the _air_. The place where the chest, or box, is kept, ought to be _dry_; and, if the ashes should get damp (as they are apt to do from the salts they contain,) they should be put in the fire-place to dry, and then be put back again. Peat-ashes, or turf-ashes, might do very well for this purpose. With these precautions, the bacon will be as good at the end of the year as on the first day; and it will keep two, and even three years, perfectly good, for which, however, there can be no necessity.

152. Now, then, this hog is altogether a capital thing. The other parts will be meat for about four or five weeks. The _lard_, nicely put down, will last a long while for all the purposes for which it is wanted. To make it keep well there should be some salt put into it. Country children are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread, as we spread butter. Many a score hunches of this sort have I eaten, and I never knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently so hungry as I ought to be; but I should think it no hardship to eat _sweet_ lard instead of butter. But, now-a-days, the labourers, and especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of _niceness_ in food and _finery in dress_; a quarter of a bellyful and rags are the consequence. The food of their choice is high-priced, so that, for the greater part of their time, they are half-starved. The dress of their choice is _showy_ and _flimsy_, so that, to-day, they are _ladies_, and to-morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. But has not Nature made the country girls as pretty as ladies? Oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and white teeth!) and a great deal prettier too! But are they _less_ pretty, when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert Peel,[9] "where tawdry colours strive with dirty white," exciting violent suspicions that all is not as it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? Are they prettiest when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or when their draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? However, the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. It is _the system_ of managing the affairs of the nation. This system has made all _flashy_ and _false_, and has put all things out of their place. Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy, and obscurity, both in speaking and in writing; mock-delicacy in manners; mock-liberality, mock-humanity, and mock-religion. Pitt's false money, Peel's flimsy dresses, Wilberforce's potatoe diet, Castlereagh's and Mackintosh's oratory, Walter Scott's poems, Walter's and Stoddart's[10] paragraphs, with all the bad taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed, and borne together; and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, as the fat of the adder is, as is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the Son of the great worker of Spinning-Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors of Oxford, the author of that _Bill_, before which this false, this flashy, this flimsy, this rotten system will dissolve as one of his father's pasted calicoes does at the sight of the washing-tub.

153. "What," says the cottager, "has all this to do with hogs and bacon?" Not directly with hogs and bacon, indeed; but it has a great deal to do, my good fellow with your affairs, as I shall, probably, hereafter more fully show, though I shall now leave you to the enjoyment of your flitches of bacon, which, as I before observed, will do ten thousand times more than any Methodist parson, or any other parson (except, of course, those of _our_ church) to make you happy, not only in this world, but in the world to come. _Meat in the house_ is a great source of _harmony_, a great preventer of the temptation to commit those things, which, from small beginnings, lead, finally, to the most fatal and atrocious results; and I hold that doctrine to be _truly damnable_, which teaches that God has made any selection, any condition relative to belief, which is to save from punishment those who violate the principles of _natural justice_.

154. _Some_ other meat you may have; but, bacon is the great thing. It is always ready; as good cold as hot; goes to the field or the coppice conveniently; in harvest, and other busy times, demands the pot to be boiled only on a Sunday; has twice as much strength in it as any other thing of the same weight; and in short, has in it every quality that tends to make a labourer's family able to work and well off. One pound of bacon, such as that which I have described, is, in a labourer's family, worth four or five of ordinary mutton or beef, which are great part _bone_, and which, in short, are gone in a moment. But always observe, it is _fat bacon_ that I am talking about. There will, in spite of all that can be done, be _some_ lean in the gammons, though comparatively very little; and therefore you ought to begin at that end of the flitches; for, _old lean bacon_ is not good.

155. Now, as to the _cost_. A pig (a _spayed sow_ is best) bought in March four months old, can be had now for fifteen shillings. The cost till fatting time is next to nothing to a Cottager; and then the cost, at the present price of corn, would, for a hog of twelve score, not exceed _three pounds_; in the whole _four pounds five_; a pot of poison a week bought at the public-house comes to _twenty-six shillings_ of the money; and more than _three times the remainder_ is generally flung away upon the miserable _tea_, as I have clearly shown in the First Number, at Paragraph 24. I have, indeed, there shown, that if the tea were laid aside, the labourer might supply his family well with beer all the year round, and have a fat hog of even _fifteen score_ for the _cost of the tea_, which does him and can do him _no good at all_.

156. The feet, the cheeks, and other bone, being considered, the _bacon and lard_, taken together, would not exceed _sixpence a pound_. Irish bacon is "_cheaper_." Yes, _lower-priced_. But, I will engage that a pound of mine, when it comes _out_ of the pot (to say nothing of the _taste_,) shall weigh as much as a _pound and a half_ of Irish, or any dairy or slop-fed bacon, when that comes out of the pot. No, no: the farmers joke when they say, that their bacon _costs them more than_ they could buy bacon for. They know well what it is they are doing; and besides, they always forget, or, rather, remember not to say, that the fatting of a large hog yields them three or four load of dung, really worth more than ten or fifteen of common yard dung. In short, without hogs, farming _could not go on_; and it never has gone on in any country in the world. The hogs are the great _stay_ of the whole concern. They are _much in small space_; they make no _show_, as flocks and herds do; but with out them, the cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern.

SALTING MUTTON AND BEEF.

157. _VERY FAT_ Mutton may be salted to great advantage, and also smoked, and may be kept thus a long while. Not the shoulders and legs, but the _back_ of the sheep. I have never made any flitch of _sheep-bacon_; but I will; for there is nothing like having a _store_ of meat in a house. The running to the butchers daily is a ridiculous thing. The very idea of being fed, of a _family_ being fed, by daily supplies, has something in it perfectly _tormenting_. One half of the time of a mistress of a house, the affairs of which are carried on in this way, is taken up in talking about what is to be got for dinner, and in negotiations with the butcher. One single moment spent at table beyond what is absolutely necessary, is a moment very shamefully spent; but, to suffer a system of domestic economy, which unnecessarily wastes daily an hour or two of the mistress's time in hunting for the provision for the repast, is a shame indeed; and when we consider how much time is generally spent in this and in equally absurd ways, it is no wonder that we see so little performed by numerous individuals as they do perform during the course of their lives.

158. _Very fat parts of Beef_ may be salted and smoked in a like manner. Not the _lean_; for that is a great waste, and is, in short, good for nothing. Poor fellows on board of ships are compelled to eat it, but it is a very bad thing.

No. VII.

BEES, FOWLS, &C. &C.

159. I now proceed to treat of objects of less importance than the foregoing, but still such as may be worthy of great attention. If all of them cannot be expected to come within the scope of a labourer's family, some of them must, and others may: and it is always of great consequence, that children be brought up to set a just value upon all useful things, and especially upon all _living things_; to know the _utility_ of them: for, without this, they never, when grown up, are worthy of being entrusted with the _care_ of them. One of the greatest, and, perhaps, the very commonest, fault of servants, is their inadequate care of animals committed to their charge. It is a well-known saying that "the _master's eye_ makes the horse fat," and the remissness to which this alludes, is generally owing to the servant not having been brought up to feel _an interest_ in the well-being of animals.

BEES.

160. It is not my intention to enter into a history of this insect about which so much has been written, especially by the French naturalists. It is the _useful_ that I shall treat of, and that is done in not many words. The best _hives_ are those made of clean unblighted _rye-straw_. Boards are too cold in England. A swarm should always be put into a _new_ hive, and the sticks should be _new_ that are put into the hive for the bees to work on; for, if the hive be old, it is not so _wholesome_, and a thousand to one but it contain the embryos of _moths_ and other insects injurious to bees. Over the hive itself there should be a cap of thatch, made also of clean rye straw; and it should not only be _new_ when first put on the hive; but a new one should be made to supply the place of the former one every three or four months; for when the straw begins to get rotten, as it soon does, insects breed in it, its smell is bad, and its effect on the bees is dangerous.

161. The hive should be placed on a bench, the legs of which mice and rats cannot creep up. Tin round the legs is best. But even this will not keep down _ants_, which are mortal enemies of bees. To keep these away, if you find them infest the hive, take a green stick and twist it round in the shape of a ring to lay on the ground round the leg of the bench, and at a few inches from it; and cover this stick with _tar_. This will keep away the ants. If the ants come from one home, you may easily _trace them to it_; and when you have found it, pour _boiling water_ on it in the night, when all the family are at home.

This is the only effectual way of destroying ants, which are frequently so troublesome. It would be cruel to cause this destruction, if it were not necessary to do it, in order to preserve the honey, and indeed the bees too.

162. Besides the hive and its cap, there should be a sort of shed, with top, back, and ends, to give additional protection in winter; though in summer hives may be kept _too hot_, and in that case the bees become sickly and the produce becomes light. The _situation_ of the hive is to face the South-east; or, at any rate, to be sheltered from the _North_ and the _West_. From the North always, and from the West in winter. If it be a very dry season in summer, it contributes greatly to the success of the bees, to place clear water near their home, in a thing that they can conveniently drink out of; for if they have to go a great way for drink, they have not much time for work.

163. It is supposed that bees live only a year; at any rate it is best never to keep the same stall, or family, over two years, except you want to increase your number of hives. The swarm of _this summer_ should always be taken in the autumn of next year. It is whimsical to _save_ the bees when you take the honey. You must _feed_ them; and, if saved, they will die of old age before the next fall; and though young ones will supply the place of the dead, this is nothing like a good swarm put up during the summer.

164. As to the things that bees make their collections from, we do not, perhaps, know a thousandth part of them; but of all the blossoms that they seek eagerly that of the _Buck-wheat_ stands foremost. Go round a piece of this grain just towards sunset, when the buck-wheat is in bloom, and you will see the air filled with bees going home from it in all directions. The buck-wheat, too, continues in bloom a long while; for the grain is dead ripe on one part of the plant, while there are fresh blossoms coming out on the other part.

165. A good stall of bees, that is to say, the produce of one, is always worth about _two bushels of good wheat_. The _cost_ is nothing to the labourer. He must be a stupid countryman indeed who cannot make a bee-hive; and a lazy one indeed if he _will_ not, if he can. In short, there is nothing but _care_ demanded; and there are very few situations in the country, especially in the south of England, where a labouring man may not have half a dozen stalls of bees to take every year. The main things are to keep away insects, mice, and birds, and especially a little bird called the bee-bird; and to keep all clean and fresh as to the hives and coverings. Never put a swarm into an _old hive_. If wasps, or hornets, annoy you, watch them home in the day time; and in the night kill them by fire, or by boiling water. Fowls should not go where bees are, for they eat them.

166. Suppose a man get three stalls of bees in a year. Six bushels of wheat give him bread for an _eighth part of the year_. Scarcely any thing is a greater misfortune than _shiftlessness_. It is an evil little short of the loss of eyes or of limbs.

GEESE.

167. They can be kept to advantage only where there are _green commons_, and there they are easily kept; live to a very great age; and are amongst the hardiest animals in the world. If _well kept_, a goose will lay a hundred eggs in a year. The French put their eggs under large hens of common fowls, to each of which they give four or five eggs; or under turkies, to which they give nine or ten goose-eggs. If the goose herself sit, she must be well and _regularly fed_, at, or near to, her nest. When the young ones are hatched, they should be kept in a warm place for about four days, and fed on barley-meal, mixed, if possible, with milk; and then they will begin to _graze_. Water for them, or for the old ones to _swim_ in, is by no means _necessary_, nor, perhaps, ever even _useful_. Or, how is it, that you see such fine flocks of fine geese all over Long Island (in America) where there is scarcely such a thing as a pond or a run of water?

168. Geese are raised by _grazing_; but to _fat_ them something more is required. Corn of some sort, or boiled Swedish turnips. Some corn and some raw Swedish turnips, or carrots, or white cabbages, or lettuces, make the best fatting. The modes that are resorted to by the French for fatting geese, _nailing_ them down by their webs, and other acts of cruelty, are, I hope, such as Englishmen will never think of. They will get fat enough without the use of any of these unfeeling means being employed. He who can deliberately inflict _torture_ upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, is an abuser of the authority which God has given him, and is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart. Who would think himself safe, if at the _mercy_ of such a man? Since the first edition of this work was published, I have had a good deal of experience with regard to geese. It is a very great error to suppose that what is called a Michaelmas goose is _the thing_. Geese are, in general, eaten at the age when they are called green geese; or after they have got their full and entire growth, which is not until the latter part of October. Green geese are tasteless squabs; loose flabby things; no rich taste in them; and, in short, a very indifferent sort of dish. The full-grown goose has solidity in it; but it is _hard_, as well as solid; and in place of being _rich_, it is strong. Now, there is a middle course to take; and if you take this course, you produce the finest birds of which we can know any thing in England. For three years, including the present year, I have had the finest geese that I ever saw, or ever heard of. I have bought from twenty to thirty every one of these years. I buy them off the common late in June, or very early in July. They have cost me from two shillings to three shillings each, first purchase. I bring the flock home, and put them in a pen, about twenty feet square, where I keep them well littered with straw, so as for them not to get filthy. They have one trough in which I give them dry oats, and they have another trough where they have constantly plenty of clean water. Besides these, we give them, two or three times a day, a parcel of lettuces out of the garden. We give them such as are going to seed generally; but the better the lettuces are, the better the geese. If we have no lettuces to spare, we give them cabbages, either loaved or not loaved; though, observe, the white cabbage as well as the white lettuce, that is to say, the loaved cabbage and lettuce, are a great deal better than those that are not loaved. This is the food of my geese. They thrive exceedingly upon this food. After we have had the flock about ten days, we begin to kill, and we proceed once or twice a week till about the middle of October, sometimes later. A great number of persons who have eaten of these geese have all declared that they did not imagine that a goose could be brought to be so good a bird. These geese are altogether different from the hard, strong things that come out of the stubble fields, and equally different from the flabby things called a green goose. I should think that the cabbages or lettuces perform half the work of keeping and fatting my geese; and these are things that really cost nothing. I should think that the geese, upon an average, do not consume more than a shilling's worth of oats each. So that we have these beautiful geese for about four shillings each. No money will buy me such a goose in London; but the thing that I can get nearest to it, will cost me _seven_ shillings. Every gentleman has a garden. That garden has, in the month of July, a wagon-load, at least, of lettuces and cabbages to throw away. Nothing is attended with so little trouble as these geese. There is hardly any body near London that has not room for the purposes here mentioned. The reader will be apt to exclaim, as my friends very often do, "Cobbett's Geese are all _Swans_." Well, better that way than not to be pleased with what one has. However, let gentlemen try this method of fatting geese. It saves money, mind, at the same time. Let them try it; and if any one, who shall try it, shall find the effect not to be that which I say it is, let him reproach me publicly with being a deceiver. The thing is no _invention_ of mine. While I could buy a goose off the common for half-a-crown, I did not like to give seven shillings for one in London, and yet I wished that geese should not be excluded from my house. Therefore I bought a flock of geese, and brought them home to Kensington. They could not be eaten all at once. It was necessary, therefore, to fix upon a mode of feeding them. The above mode was adopted by my servant, as far as I know, without any knowledge of mine; but the very agreeable result made me look into the matter; and my opinion, that the information will be useful to many persons, at any rate, is sufficient to induce me to communicate it to my readers.

DUCKS.