Cottage Economy has remained
in print for 188 years, and is now
freely available, in digital facsimile,
from the Internet Archive and
Google Books.
good for nothing, has badness in it, because it is well
known to produce want of sleep in many cases, and
in all cases, to shake and weaken the nerves.”
With brewing out of the way, Cobbett proceeded
to demonstrate, in detail, “that a large part of the
food of even a large family may be raised, without
any diminution of the labourer’s earnings abroad,
from forty rods, or a quarter of an acre, of ground.”
He included a lengthy treatise on preparing native
grasses for weaving into straw hats, advice on milking
cows and goats, and a series of tips on raising (and
eating) rabbits and geese. He examined the advantages of barter, noting that the cottager “ought to
pay for nothing in money, which he can pay for in
any thing but money.” He explained (and illustrated)
the construction of large, circular, heavily insulated
icehouses, in which ice cut in the wintertime can be
kept for use during the hottest part of the year.
A mouthwatering chapter is devoted to the
preparation of bacon, covering every step along
the way, from the breeding to the fattening of hogs
to the best way to singe the hair off the freshly-slaughtered sides, and the best manner in which to
salt and then smoke-cure the resulting bacon.
“Meat in the house is a great source of harmony,”
noted Cobbett. “A couple of flitches of bacon are
worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends
more to keep a man from poaching and stealing
than whole volumes of penal statutes.”
To William Cobbett, who rose to become a member of Parliament in later life, cottage economy
remained the foundation upon which the health and
wealth of the nation rests. “There never yet was, and
never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable
families,” he wrote.
All of us, rich and poor, would do well to revisit his
advice.
He tackled the growing of cabbages, turnips, and
mustard (“Why buy this, when you can grow it in
your garden? The stuff you buy is half drugs, and is
injurious to health.”) as well as the raising of chickens, and the husbandry of goats, cows, and pigs.
He praised the compost heap: “Every thing of
animal or vegetable substance that comes into
a house, must go out of it again, in one shape or
another. The very emptying of vessels of various
kinds, on a heap of common earth, makes it a heap
of the best of manure.”
Imgaes courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London
Cobbett advised milling one’s own flour and gave
instructions for making bread, acknowledging that
“it would be shocking indeed if that had to be taught
by the means of books,” and adding that “many
women in England, who seem to know no more of
the constituent parts of a loaf than they know of
those of the moon ... appear to think that loaves are
made by the baker, as knights are made by the king.”
Potatoes are viewed as an evil almost as great
as tea, a food that forces the impoverished to live
like animals who “scratch them out of the earth
with their paws,” while the family that bakes its own
bread has “bread always for the table, bread to carry
afield; always a hunch of bread ready to put into the
hand of a hungry child.”
To counter the ruinous tax on candles, Cobbett
explained how to illuminate the cottage by burning
rushes soaked in grease, noting that “my grandmother, who lived to be pretty nearly ninety, never,
I believe, burnt a candle in her house in her life.”
WHY BUY? Radical DIY author Cobbett advised
making one’s own bread, bacon, cheese, vegetable
garden, and especially, beer.
George Dyson, a kayak designer and historian of technology,
is the author of Baidarka, Project Orion, and Darwin Among
the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence.
151 Make:
