46 MAKING BREAD* [No. 



ful, for a labourer's wife to go to the baker's shop; and 

 how negligent, how criminally careless of the wel- 

 fare of his family, must the labourer be, who per- 

 mits so scandalous a use of the proceeds of his 

 labour ! But I have hitherto taken a view of the 

 matter the least possibly advantageous to the home- 

 baked bread. For, ninety-nine times out of a hun- 

 dred, the fuel for heating the oven costs very little. 

 The hedgers, the copsers, the woodmen of all de- 

 scriptions, have fuel for little or nothing. At any 

 rate, to heat the oven cannot, upon an average, take 

 the country through, cost the labourer more than 6d. 

 a bushel. Then, again, fine flour need not ever be 

 used, and ought not to be -used. This adds six 

 pounds of bread to the bushel, or nearly another quar- 

 tern loaf and a half, making nearly fifteen quartern 

 loaves but of the bushel of wheat. The finest flour 

 is by no means the most wholesome ; and, at any 

 rate, there is more nutritious matter in a pound of 

 household bread than in a pound of baker's bread. 

 Besides this, rye, and even barley, especially when 

 mixed with wheat, make very good bread. Few peo- 

 ple upon the face of the earth live better than the 

 Long Islanders. Yet nine families out of ten sel- 

 dom eat wheaten-bread. Rye is the flour that they 

 principally make use of. Now, rye is seldom more 

 than two-thirds the price of wheat, and barley is 

 seldom more than half the price of wheat. Half 

 rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the 

 offal, make very good bread. Half wheat, a quarter 

 rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third of each, 

 make bread that I could be very well content to live 

 upon all my lifetime; and, even barley alone, if the 

 barley be good, and none but the finest flour taken 

 out of it, has in it, measure for measure, ten times 

 the nutrition of potatoes. Indeed the fact is well 

 known, that our . forefathers used barley bread to a 

 very great extent. Its only fault, with those who 

 dislike it, is its sweetness, a fault which we certainly 

 have not to find with the baker's loaf, which has in 

 it little more of the sweetness of grain than is to be 



