Mr. Wilson himself ordered in the food, and was anxious that it should be
of good quality. But the cook, who had much of his confidence, and
against whom for a long time no one durst utter a complaint, was
careless, dirty, and wasteful. To some children oatmeal porridge is
distasteful, and consequently unwholesome, even when properly made; at
Cowan Bridge School it was too often sent up, not merely burnt, but with
offensive fragments of other substances discoverable in it. The beef,
that should have been carefully salted before it was dressed, had often
become tainted from neglect; and girls, who were school-fellows with the
Brontes, during the reign of the cook of whom I am speaking, tell me that
the house seemed to be pervaded, morning, noon, and night, by the odour
of rancid fat that steamed out of the oven in which much of their food
was prepared. There was the same carelessness in making the puddings;
one of those ordered was rice boiled in water, and eaten with a sauce of
treacle and sugar; but it was often uneatable, because the water had been
taken out of the rain tub, and was strongly impregnated with the dust
lodging on the roof, whence it had trickled down into the old wooden
cask, which also added its own flavour to that of the original rain
water. The milk, too, was often "bingy," to use a country expression for
a kind of taint that is far worse than sourness, and suggests the idea
that it is caused by want of cleanliness about the milk pans, rather than
by the heat of the weather.
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