CHAPTER VIII

BUYING, STORING, AND CARING FOR FOOD

The place where food is bought is important. How it is bought and when are also important questions. The usual plan for a Lambeth housekeeper is to make her great purchase on Saturday evening when she gets her allowance. She probably buys the soap, wood, oil, tea, sugar, margarine, tinned milk, and perhaps jam, for the week. To these she adds the Sunday dinner, which means a joint or part of a joint, greens, and potatoes. The bread she gets daily, also the rasher, fish, or other relish, for her husband’s special use. Further purchases of meat are made, if they are made, about Wednesday, while potatoes and pot herbs, as well as fish, often come round on barrows, and are usually bought as required. When she has put aside the rent, the insurance, the boot club money, and spent the Saturday night’s five or six shillings, she keeps the pennies for the gas-meter and the money for the little extras in some kind of purse or private receptacle which lives within reach of her hand. A woman, during the time she is laid up at her confinement, will sleep with her purse in her hand or under the pillow, and during the daytime she doles out with an anxious heart the pennies for gas or the two-pences for father’s relish. She generally complains bitterly that the neighbour who is “doing” for her has a heavy hand with the margarine, and no conscience with the tea or sugar.

The regular shopping is monotonous. The order at the grocer’s shop is nearly always the same, as is also that at the oilman’s. The Sunday dinner requires thought, but tends to repeat itself with the more methodical housewife, who has perhaps a leaning towards neck of mutton as the most interesting of the cheaper joints, or towards a half-shoulder as cutting to better advantage. It is often the same dinner week after week—one course of meat with greens and potatoes. Some women indulge in flights of fancy, and treat the family to a few pounds of fat bacon at 6d. per pound, a quality which is not to be recommended, or even to the extravagance of a rabbit and onions for a change. These women would be likely to vary the vegetables too; and in their accounts tomatoes, when tomatoes are cheap, may appear. It is only in the budgets of the very small family, however, that such extravagant luxuries would creep in.

In households where there is but one room there may be no storage space at all. Coal may be kept in the one cupboard on the floor beside the fireplace; or there may be such hoards of mice in the walls that no place is safe for food but a basin with a plate over it. One woman when lying in bed early in the morning unravelled a mystery which had puzzled her for weeks. She had not been able to find out how the food she kept on a high shelf of the dresser was being got at by mice. On the morning in question her eye was caught by movements which appeared to her to be in the air above her head. To her surprise, she realized that a long procession of mice was making use of her clothes-line to cross the room and climb down the loose end on to the high dresser shelf. They would, when satisfied, doubtless have returned by the same route had she not roused her husband. “But ’e ony terrified ’em,” she said sadly, “’e never caught one.” In such cases it is necessary for the housekeeper to buy all provisions other than tinned milk, perhaps, day by day. She probably finds this more extravagant—even to the extent of paying more for the article. Tea, butter, and sugar, by the ounce may actually cost more, and they seldom go so far.

Another reason for buying all necessaries daily is that many men, though in a perfectly regular job (such as some kinds of carting), are paid daily, as though they were casuals. The amounts vary, moreover. One day they bring home 4s. 6d., another 3s. The housewife is never sure what she will have to spend, and as the family needs are, so must she supply necessaries out of the irregular daily sum handed to her.

The daily purchases of the wife of a dustsorter are given below. The husband was paid 3s. a day in cash, which he brought regularly to his wife. He collected out of the material he sorted, which came from the dustbins of Westminster, enough broken bread to sell as pig-food for a sum which paid both the rent and the burial insurance. He also collected and brought home each evening enough coal and cinders to supply the family needs, and, curiously enough, he collected and brought home a sufficiency of soap. After paying 5s. for rent and 1s. for insurance, he had enough left from these extra sources of income for his own pocket-money. With rent, insurance, coal, and soap, provided, the housekeeper would have been well off indeed, as Lambeth goes, could she have laid out her money to better advantage. She never had more than 3s. at a time, and was accustomed to buy everything day by day. There was but one room. There were four children, who looked stronger than they were. The mother suffered from anæmia, and was not a particularly good manager, though she fed her children fairly well and seemed to be a moderately good cook. She had no oven. An account of how she laid out her 18s. is given on pp. 108, 109.

It is obvious that this is an extravagant way of buying. Not only is the woman charged more for some items, such as sugar and butter, which she prefers to margarine even at the extra price, but the daily purchase leads to larger amounts being used. Her husband is a teetotaller, but likes strong tea, and that very sweet. Hence 12 ozs. of tea, 3 lbs. of sugar, and 3 tins of milk. The baby was very young and the mother anæmic, and the 8d. for a girl to take it out is money usefully spent. Otherwise the infant would hardly ever have left the room, as her mother does the daily marketing when the baby is asleep. Since this account was made out the authorities have advised the family to take two rooms at an advanced rental of 2s., of which the father and mother each pay half. So the weekly list of purchases has now to be made out of 17s. The baby is six months old instead of five weeks, and the mother’s milk has completely failed her. Thus the expenses increase, while the housekeeping allowance is less.

s. d. _Monday_, 3s.:

2 ozs. tea, 2d.; ½ lb. sugar, 1½d.; 4 ozs. butter, 3½d.; bread, 3d. 0 10 Potatoes, 2d.; onions, carrots, greens, 2½d. 0 4½ Gas 0 2 ----- 1 4½ ----- In hand 1 7½

_Tuesday_, 3s.:

2 ozs. tea, 2d.; ½ lb. sugar, 1½d.; 4 ozs. butter, 3½d.; bread, 3d. 0 10 One tin of milk, 3½d.; relish for husband’s tea, 2d. 0 5½ Potatoes, 2d.; greens and pot herbs, 3½d.; meat, 7d. 1 0½ Gas 0 2 ----- 2 6 ----- In hand 2 1½

_Wednesday_, 3s.:

2 ozs. tea, 2d.; ½ lb. sugar, 1½d.; 4 ozs. butter, 3½d.; bread, 3d. 0 10 1 lb. pieces, 4½d.; potatoes, 2d.; vegetables, 1½d.; rice, ½d. 0 8½ Clothing club 1 0 Gas 0 1 ----- 2 7½ ----- In hand 2 6

_Thursday_, 3s.:

½ lb. sugar, 1½d.; 4 ozs. butter, 3½d.; bread, 3d 0 8 One tin of milk, 3½d.; meat, 6d.; potatoes, 2d; Quaker oats, 2½d.; rice, ½d. 1 2½ Boot club 1 0 Gas 0 1 ----- 2 11½ ----- In hand 2 6½

_Friday_, 3s.:

2 ozs. tea, 2d.; ½ lb. sugar, 1½d.; 4 ozs. butter, 3½d.; bread, 3d. 0 10 Suet, 2d.; flour, 2½d.; treacle, 1½d. 0 6 Gas 0 2 Five days’ pay for neighbour’s girl to take out the baby 0 6 ----- 2 0 ----- In hand 3 6½

_Saturday_, 3s. + 3s. 6½d. = 6s. 6½d.:

2 ozs. tea, 2d.; ½ lb. sugar, 1½d.; 4 ozs. butter, 3½d.; bread, 6d. 1 1 One tin of milk, 3½d.; bacon, 6d.; eggs, 2d.; potatoes, 2d.; greens, 2d. 1 3½ Gas 0 1 Sunday’s joint 2 0 Bakehouse 0 2 Blacklead, hearthstone, matches, soda 0 4 Husband’s shirt 1 0 Baby’s birth certificate 0 3 Girl to mind baby 0 2 ----- 6 6½

In the case of women who handle the whole week’s wage at once, there is generally great need of more cupboard space. Occasionally a scullery helps to solve the problem, and there is often a very shallow cupboard beside the chimney, high enough from the floor to be clear of mice and beetles, and out of reach of children. A kitchen with the copper in it is a bad place for keeping food; a kitchen infested with any kind of vermin is also a bad place to keep food; a kitchen which is plagued with flies is equally impossible. The women whose lives are passed in such kitchens may feel that, in spite of the extra expense and waste, daily buying of perishable food is a necessity.

A woman with a sick child—one of six—living in one room, was allowed milk for the use of the child, who was extremely ill. The only place where she could keep the milk was a basin with an old piece of wet rag thrown over it. The visitor found seven flies in the milk, and many others crawling on the inner side of the rag. The weather was stifling. The room, though untidy, was tolerably clean. But over the senseless child on the one bed in the room hovered a great cloud of flies. The mother stood hour after hour brushing them away. On the advice of the visitor the sick child was carried off there and then to the infirmary, where it ultimately recovered. Once the child was removed, the flies ceased to swarm into the room.

Cooking, which has already been mentioned in connection with old and burnt saucepans and utensils, is necessarily very perfunctory and rudimentary. To boil a neck with pot herbs on Sunday, and make a stew of “pieces” on Wednesday, often finishes all that has to be done with meat. The intermediate dinners will ring the changes on cold neck, suet pudding, perhaps fried fish or cheap sausages, and rice or potatoes. Breakfast and tea, with the exception of the husband’s relishes, consist of tea, and bread spread with butter, jam, or margarine. In houses where no gas is laid on, the gas-stove cannot take the place of a missing oven, and it is extraordinary how many one-roomed dwellings are without an oven. Two pots, both burned, a frying-pan, and a kettle, do not make an equipment with which it is easy to manage the delicacies of cooking. Boiling can be done in a burnt saucepan, provided there is water enough in the can which stands behind the door to fill the pot sufficiently. Frying is held to be easy, but fat is not plentiful, and frying in Lambeth usually means frizzling in a very tiny amount of half-boiling grease. The great panful of fat which would be used by a good cook is impossible of attainment. To stand by and watch the cooking is difficult when so many things have to be done at once. The pot, once placed on the fire or the gas-stove, has to look after itself, while the mother nurses a baby, or does a bit of washing, or tidies the room and gets out the few plates which she calls “laying the dinner.” The children all come trooping in from school before she has finished, and have to be scolded a little and told to get out of the way, and when she has got them arranged sitting or standing round the table she helps each one as quickly and fairly as she can. If her husband is not there, she may put aside his portion to be warmed up and eaten later. She does not attempt to eat with the family. She is server and provider, and her work is to see that everyone gets a fair share, according to his or her deserts and the merits of the case. She may or may not sit down, but perhaps with the baby in her arms she feeds the youngest but one with potato and gravy or suet pudding, whichever is the dinner of the day, for fear it shall waste its food and spoil its clothes. When the family have finished what she sets before them, she sees to washing of hands where the age of the washer is tender, and thankfully packs them all off again to afternoon school, having as likely as not called back the one who banged the door to tell him to go out again and “do it prop’ly.” The husband may not like his dinner put aside for him, in which case a second cooking is necessary. So much has to be done each day. The Lambeth woman has no joy in cooking for its own sake.