Hello friends.
In my search for the voices of working-class people I found some familiar classism, but also a lovely recipe…
It’s tricky to find the voices of working-class people in the 1800s. There were growing political and educational movements, especially around the ever expanding urban and industrial areas, like the Welsh Miners’ Libraries, the Mutual Aid Societies and Cooperative Guilds. Some of these were set up by benevolent middle class reformers and business owners, but they thrived due to the motivation and collective organising of their working-class members.1 But it was still a relatively small pool of working-class people who had the time to write about their lives.
There’s the working-class autobiography collection and oral histories, which helps. But some lives remain more hidden - especially the lives of working-class women and children. Cookery books can help. The recipes can shine a light on the homes of working-class women and children, particularly the food they cooked - or had to make do with. The recipes also show us that middle class people were often concerned with the lives of the working class, and not necessarily in good ways. Interference and judgement about the lifestyles of the poor was all too common - proving some things don’t change! When gas cookers first appeared in working-class homes, teams of middle class ‘lady demonstrators’ would visit the homes of poor women to teach them how to cook with the new stoves, although many were suspicious that they were there to snoop and judge any lack of morality they found.2
'A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes,’ was written by Charles Elme Francatelli in 1852. I don’t know much about him or his motives - he was appointed maitre-d'hotel and chief cook to the Queen, so moved in high places. Perhaps his motives for writing his Plain Cookery Book were merely to be helpful, rather than to pass judgement on people who were often struggling. He was apparently concerned with food waste, although waste is often used as a stick to beat poor people with, as if their problem is lack of planning rather than lack of money and time. However, the book is full of interesting recipes that tell us that tripe was a treat, curry spices were a regular feature and as I was flicking through the pages, I found a timely recipe for pancakes.
Ingredients:
12oz of flour
3 eggs
1 pint of milk
A teaspoon of salt
A little grated nutmeg
Chopped lemon peel
Method:
Put the flour into a basin, hollow out the centre, add the salt, nutmeg and chopped lemon peel and a drop of milk to dissolve it all. Break in the eggs, mix it all together and add the rest of the milk. Mix till it forms a smooth batter.
Set up a frying pan on the fire and when it gets hot wipe it with a clean cloth and run a teaspoon of lard over the bottom of the pan. Pour in half a tea cup of the batter, place over the fire and in about a minute or two the pancakes should be firm enough to turn over and baked on the other side. Sprinkle some sugar over it before serving.
Happy Victorian pancake day.
Rose, Jonathan. The intellectual life of the British working classes. Yale University Press, 2021.
Clendinning, Anne. Demons of domesticity: women and the English gas industry, 1889–1939. Routledge, 2017.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution