If a cottage, where the occupants are steady like this, be visited in the evening, say towards seven o’clock, when dinner is on the table (labourers dining or supping after the conclusion of the day’s work), the fare will often be found of a substantial character.  There may be a piece of mutton—­not, of course, the prime cut, but wholesome meat—­cabbages, parsnips, carrots (labourers like a profusion of vegetables), all laid out in a decent manner.  The food is plain, but solid and plentiful.  If the sister out in service wishes to change her situation, she has a home to go to meanwhile.  Should any dispute occur with the employer the cottage is still there, and affords a shelter till the difficulty is settled or other work obtained.  In towns the workman who has been earning six or even ten shillings a day, and paying a high rent (carefully collected every week), no sooner gets his discharge than he receives notice to quit his lodgings, because the owner knows he will not be paid.  But when the agricultural labourer has a quit-rent cottage, or one of his own, he has a permanent resource, and can look round for another engagement.

The cooking in the best cottages would not commend itself to the student of that art:  in those where the woman is shiftless it would be deemed simply intolerable.  Evidence of this is only too apparent on approaching cottages, especially towards the evening.  Coming from the fresh air of the fields, perhaps from the sweet scent of clover or of new-mown grass, the odour which arises from the cottages is peculiarly offensive.  It is not that they are dirty inside—­the floor may be scrubbed, the walls brushed, the chairs clean, and the beds tidy; it is from outside that all the noisome exhalations taint the breeze.  The refuse vegetables, the washings, the liquid and solid rubbish generally is cast out into the ditch, often open to the highway road, and there festers till the first storm sweeps it away.  The cleanest woman indoors thinks nothing disgusting out of doors, and hardly goes a step from her threshold to cast away indescribable filth.  Now, a good deal of this refuse is the remains of imperfect cooking—­masses of soddened cabbage, part of which only is eaten, and the rest stored for the pig or thrown into the ditch.  The place smells of soaking, saturated cabbage for yards and yards round about.

But it is much easier to condemn the cottage cook than to show her how to do better.  It is even doubtful whether professed scientific cooks could tell her what to do.  The difficulty arises from the rough, coarse taste of the labourer, and the fact, which it is useless to ignore, that he must have something solid, and indeed, bulky.  Thin clear soups—­though proved to abound with nourishment and of delicious flavour—­are utterly beside his wants.  Give him the finest soup; give him pates, or even more meaty entrees, and his remark will be that it is very nice, but he wants ‘summat