Talking of vegetables, can the inhabited globe offer anything to vie with the English potato justly steamed?  I do not say that it is always—­or often—­to be seen on our tables, for the steaming of a potato is one of the great achievements of culinary art; but, when it is set before you, how flesh and spirit exult!  A modest palate will find more than simple comfort in your boiled potato of every day, as served in the decent household.  New or old, it is beyond challenge delectable.  Try to think that civilized nations exist to whom this food is unknown—­nay, who speak of it, on hearsay, with contempt!  Such critics, little as they suspect it, never ate a potato in their lives.  What they have swallowed under that name was the vegetable with all its exquisite characteristics vulgarized or destroyed.  Picture the “ball of flour” (as old-fashioned housewives call it) lying in the dish, diffusing the softest, subtlest aroma, ready to crumble, all but to melt, as soon as it is touched; recall its gust and its after-gust, blending so consummately with that of the joint, hot or cold.  Then think of the same potato cooked in any other way, and what sadness will come upon you!

XI.

It angers me to pass a grocer’s shop, and see in the window a display of foreign butter.  This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the prospects of England.  The deterioration of English butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people.  Naturally, this article of food would at once betray a decline in the virtues of its maker; butter must be a subject of the dairyman’s honest pride, or there is no hope of its goodness.  Begin to save your labour, to aim at dishonest profits, to feel disgust or contempt for your work—­and the churn declares every one of these vices.  They must be very prevalent, for it is getting to be a rare thing to eat English butter which is even tolerable.  What!  England dependent for dairy-produce upon France, Denmark, America?  Had we but one true statesman—­but one genuine leader of the people—­the ears of English landowners and farmers would ring and tingle with this proof of their imbecility.

Nobody cares.  Who cares for anything but the show and bluster which are threatening our ruin?  English food, not long ago the best in the world, is falling off in quality, and even our national genius for cooking shows a decline; to anyone who knows England, these are facts significant enough.  Foolish persons have prated about “our insular cuisine,” demanding its reform on Continental models, and they have found too many like unto themselves who were ready to listen; the result will be, before long, that our excellence will be forgotten, and paltry methods be universally introduced, together with the indifferent viands to which they are suited.  Yet, if any generality at all be true, it is a plain fact that English diet and English virtue—­in the largest sense of the word—­are inseparably bound together.