That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation
of food must soon have their effect on the percentage of drunkards no
one can question; but with them, save indirectly, this present paper
does not deal, its object being rather to show what "daily bread" means
to the lower classes of New York, the same showing applying with almost
equal force to the working poor of any large town throughout the
country. Knowledge of this sort must come from patient waiting and
watching as one can, rather than from any systematized observation. The
poor resent bitterly, and with justice, any apparent interference or
spying, and only as one comes to know them well can anything but the
most outside details of life be obtained. In the matter of food there
is an especial touchiness and testiness, every woman being convinced
that to cook well is the birthright of all women. I have found the same
conviction as solidly implanted in far higher grades of society, and it
may be classed as one of the most firmly-seated of popular delusions
that every woman keeps house as instinctively and surely when her time
comes as a duck takes to water.
Such was the faith of Norah Boylan, tenant of half the third floor in a
tenement-house whose location need not be given a "model
tenement-house," six stories high and swarming from basement to attic,
forty children making it hideous with the screaming and wrangling of
incessant fights, while in and over all rested the penetrating,
sickening "tenement-house smell," not to be drowned by steam of washing
or scent of food.
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