upposing
their bread to be as good as yours in quality, you have, allowing a
shilling for the heating of the oven, a clear 4_s._ saved upon every
bushel of bread. If you consume half a bushel a week, that is to say about
a quartern loaf a day, this is a saving of 5_l._ 4_s._ a year, or full a
sixth part, if not a fifth part, of the earnings of a labourer in
husbandry.

82. How wasteful, then, and, indeed, how shameful, for a labourer's wife
to go to the baker's shop; and how negligent, how criminally careless of
the welfare of his family, must the labourer be, who permits so scandalous
a use of the proceeds of his labour! But I have hitherto taken a view of
the matter the least possibly advantageous to the home-baked bread. For,
ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the fuel for heating the oven costs
very little. The hedgers, the copsers, the woodmen of all descriptions,
have fuel for little or nothing. At any rate, to heat the oven cannot,
upon an average, take the country through, cost the labourer more than
6_d._ a bushel. Then, again, fine flour need not ever be used, and ought
not to be used. This adds six pounds of bread to the bushel, or nearly
another quartern loaf and a half, making nearly fifteen quartern loaves
out of the bushel of wheat. The finest flour is by no means the most
wholesome; and, at any rate, there is more nutritious matter in a pound of
household bread than in a pound of baker's bread. Besides this, rye, and
even barley, especially when mixed with wheat, make very good bread. Few
people upon the face of the earth live better than the Long Islanders. Yet
nine families out of ten seldom eat wheaten-bread. Rye is the flour that
they principally make use of. Now, rye is seldom more than two-thirds the
price of wheat, and barley is seldom more than half the price of wheat.
Half rye and half wheat, taking out a little more of the offal, make very
good bread. Half wheat, a quarter rye and a quarter barley, nay, one-third
of each, make bread that I could be very well content to live upon all my
lifetime; and, even barley alone, if the barley be good, and none but the
finest flour taken out of it, has in it, measure for measure, ten times
the nutrition of potatoes. Indeed the fact is well known, that our
forefathers used barley bread to a very great extent. Its only fault, with
those who dislike it, is its sweetness, a fault which we certainly have
not to find with the baker's loaf, which has in it littl