FOOD AND HAPPINESS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4513, 7 September 1875, Page 3

FOOD AND HAPPINESS.

(National Food and Fuel Reformer.) It's a dull world we are making of it, and verily the once merry English people are being turned into a solemn, sight-seeing, dyspeptic, and grumbling nation, saddled with the nightmare of " money-making." Dame Fortune has played us an ugly trick ; she has for our perdition given us commercial prosperity, and we are pretty well riding our steed to death. Selling, selling, selling, is the constant cry of the nation. We should sell the land we live on if it brought a bag full of money big enough to console us for being left high and dry on some solitary rock. These mad commercial tendencies have warped the nation's judgement, and much that was grand and good in it has given way to superficial finery, which we can but characterise as modernised vulgarity. Every lady wants to be smart in dress, smart in appearance, stylish in living, disdaining the dear old home cares of seeing how the bread and butter tasted, and how the ale was brewed, whether the wine had rested long enough in the cellar, and the fruit trees yielded abundantly ; how the crops stood and the vegetables fared, and, in fact, how we should make the best use of Nature's gifts. That was a time of old hearty recognition of nationality which we are losing, for we desire all of us to have our "wants supplied without taking trouble about it, and think it mean to worry about such ordinary matters as meat and drink. A pretty pass we have come to through neglecting the daily means of good food ; our tables are so badly supplied and our women so ignorant that we are taking to alcohol or stimulants, in such a way as to spend the best portion of our national income on it. Instead of enjoying good, well-cooked food, we shall soon be walking tubs of wines, spirits, and beer ; we shall forget how to cook at home, and depute the whole affair to the eating-house or coffee-shop. It is all very well encouraging men's clubs and restaurants, dining-rooms and cafes ; but what of the women ? They are talcing to tea more and more, and are becoming less and less inclined to undertake the duties of. a housewife. We have so much to do with our personal appearance, that everything else has to be put into the shade. It is not ladylike to handle a saucepan, nor genteel to make- a pudding ; a girl may know decimal fractions, but she must not keep housekeeping accounts. She can play a waltz by Chopin, but could not tell you when lamb and salmon is in season ; she just knows that there are fruits and flowers in summer and autumn, and plum-puddings at Christmas, and that is the extent of her food knowledge. Naturally she comes under the sway of anybody who is inclined to lord it over her, and is all her lifetime at sea ; how is it possible to inake both ends meet ? She looks so pretty and saucy with the new ways of dressing, that John or James cannot withstand her charms, and off he goes to church with her to be united in holy matrimony. Then comes the trouble—there is no doubt about it, Angelina has red eyes the second week of the honeymoon, because dear Jack got up from the table and said the meat was hard, the potatoes were soapy, and the pudding horrible. He wouldn't be quite so hard as to go to the club or to his bachelor friends, or worse still to his mother and complain, but he .sulked for half an hour in the study or the parlor,. and only gave way.. when Angelina came gently to his side and said, that horrid girl should do the cooking no longer, she would do it herself. Jack brightens up and sees delightful visions of lamb cutlets with tomato sauce, fine minced spinach, mealy potatoes, fritters brown as berries, and such a salad with his bit of cheese and such a cup of coffee with his cigar, before him, dear Angelina with heated and proud face being all the time by his side, receiving his thanks in kisses. Well, the vision drives away dull care that night, for a man without a dinner shows his ungentle—we won't say brutish—nature a little bit, and the next day comes with expectations wonderful in a young husband, how the little wife would manage it all. The train puts him down at the station near his villa, he rushes to the door and opens it with the latch-key, to hear sobs and sobs and sobs in the parlor, Angelina is in hysterics ; the dinner wouldn't be got ready ; the chops are burnt to a cinder, the potatoes hard, there is no sauce, and the spinach is smoky. The fritters wouldn't be thought of, and the salad lies in native simplicity in the back kitchen—for the girl has run away, she wouldn't stand it any longer for mistress to interfere. Angelina has burnt her hand and is smarting with the pain, her curls are untidy, her dress full of grease spots, and Angelina wishes she were at home with mamma. Theyounghusband stands aghast at this new monster that has started up in his married life, but loving his little wife, he gently consoles her, wipes away her tears, smoothes her curls, makes up the fire himself, and gets a cosy tea ready. Angelina watches his orderly quiet ways and sighs, for she is quick-witted and she begins to see that there was something wrong about her education—that in fact something had been left out, better than all the finery she knew—the knowledge of the first wants of a home. She is very quite and demure, for she sees a black cloud in the horizon of her married life which she cannot avert, for next day dear Jack says, with a smile, "My darling, I shall dine in the city, for it is such a trouble for you to get the dinner done for me." A link is broken, Angelina knows it, but she complains not—she has just sense enough to know that it is best to gulp down the bitter regret at her helplessness and to reply, " Well, dear, I cannot quarrel about it, I am so awkward." Messrs. So-and-So have a new and a regular customer, and perhaps Jack takes a little more than he would at home and gets a littlo rough, but there are now no failures and no hysterics. Will Angelina ever turn the scale again in her favor ?