34 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



agricultural laborers, the residents of our cities, and our factory 

 operatives, live better than tlic same classes in England. They 

 eat more meat ; their variety of vegetables is greater. With 

 almost our entire population, meat or fish constitutes a chief 

 part of at least one meal a day, and is eaten twice in perhaps 

 half of the whole number of families. And it is eaten in sub- 

 stantial pieces ; not in thin soups, where only occasional bits 

 may be fished up from capacious iloods of diluted liquor. 



If a comparison is instituted between our country and the 

 continent of Europe, it is even more to our advantage. 



It is alleged against us that we are far behind the rest of the 

 civilized world in our cookery ; that bad cookery is universal 

 with us ; that we misuse the bounties of Providence ; are waste- 

 ful and extravagant, losing a great part of the nutritive quali- 

 ties of our edibles by a wretched system of preparing them for 

 the table ; and that from our gross tastes, perverted by an 

 habitual system of bad cookery, we never experience the true 

 zest and keen enjoyment that good food, skilfully cooked, 

 should give. At one of our county agricultural fairs, it was 

 said by one of the speakers that though the farmers in our 

 State lived well, they almost universally had poor bread. 



The charges which have of late become common against us 

 for bad cookery are, for the most part, made by persons to 

 whom a sedentary life has given tender stomachs and poor 

 digestion, or who have indulged themselves in the refined deli- 

 cacies and artful sophistications of a foreign style of cooking, 

 until all true relish for food, in an undisguised state, is lost. I 

 venture to assert that the farmers of our State, in general, eat 

 good bread. True, the hot biscuit, baked in the cook-stove, 

 and indebted for its sponginess to the hasty action of chemical 

 ingredients, is far inferior to the loaf of raised bread of the 

 weekly baking in the brick oven. But the good old-fashioned 

 farmers' bread continues in general use — the wholesome, pala- 

 table, rye and Indian home-made brown bread — the truly 

 national bread of our country, and not found elsewhere. 



It is luidcniable that the Europeans understand the art of 

 cheap living better than we. We practice far less economy in 

 the use of food. Not only do they eat less meat than we, but 

 their common mode of cooking saves much that, witli us, is 

 refuse. During the French Revolution, the subject of cheap 



