The food in those days was chiefly porridge (made of oatmeal) and milk for breakfast, potatoes and fish, or salt herring in the winter, for dinner, and sometimes beef and broth made up of shelled barley and cabbage, and other things such as leeks, and onions, and potatoes, and parsnips, mashed up together to eat with, and sometimes potatoes and beans mashed up together—a kind of large bean that grew in the garden. I have sometimes seen potatoes and white cabbage mashed up for dinner, and fresh fish, but it was often groat porridge for supper, and sometimes potatoes in their jackets, and fish of some kind, with plenty of buttermilk. There was no tea in the evening, and only three meals each day. I have heard some of the old farmers say, if they had been in some house and saw the family at tea, that they would soon be in poverty. We used to catch as many hake fish and cods with our lines in the herring season, as made us a good store in the winter. When they were dried in the sun, and then kept in a dry place, they were very good when broiled before the fire. I would rather them than cheese, but the times have changed. There are no hakes to be got about the Island in these days.
The farmers in Cregneish, and all over the Island, used to steep the husk of the oats in water for some time, and some dust of oatmeal, and run the water through a sieve to get the husks out, and then it was like white water; and they filled the biggest pot in the house with
