Part 7 (1/2)
Dinner is served from ten in the morning until six in the afternoon to an average of 2,500 people daily. Some of them come twice. They take a cup of coffee and eat a piece of cheese and bread at their homes early in the morning. Then at ten or eleven, and again at four or five o'clock, they go to the ”kitchen” for a square meal. Thus it costs them not more than twenty-five cents a day, all told, for their food.
In the last ten years they have never served less than 1,500 people in a day.
The bill of fare varies from day to day, but we will take one day, Tuesday, for example. A large dish of barley soup is served, wholesome and nouris.h.i.+ng, a ball of hashed meat, with potatoes and rice, or boiled salmon, potatoes and turnips.
The nine-cent dinner is pretty much the same, with the exception of the soup; boiled potatoes and rice, or boiled salmon, potatoes and turnips. A plate of soup alone, which in itself would be more than a meal for most people, being filled with meat and vegetables, is served for three cents.
The same dinners are furnished to the public to be eaten at their homes for nine and seven cents respectively, and usually contain enough food for two or three women, although Norwegians have stalwart appet.i.tes. The outdoor service is conducted in another part of the building, upon another street. The patrons procure tickets at an office and then form in line--men, women and children, each with a bucket or a basket, or both, in hand. Many tickets are given gratuitously, but it is impossible to distinguish the paying from the charity customers. Benevolent people throughout the city purchase bunches of tickets, which they give to the poor, and sometimes in lieu of wages. If you hire a man to clean up the yard, you can give him so much cash and so many meal tickets, or if a person appeals to you for relief, it is always better to give a ticket to the ”Steam Kitchen”
rather than money. Many customers buy two portions which they take home and warm up at meal time for the whole family.
In the center of a large room are rows of immense caldrons with coils of steam pipe embracing them. The air is filled with pungent odors from the bubbling soup, and clouds of steam rise from the other cook-pots. On a long table are pyramids of bread, cut into cubes three or four inches square, usually rye or black bread, such as the natives of Norway prefer. Along the walls are deep cupboards containing the linens, the culinary supplies and utensils. In an adjoining but detached building is a furnace and boiler-room which furnishes the steam, and beside it a laundry and dish-was.h.i.+ng establishment. It requires a good many dishes to serve three thousand people even in a simple way. In an annex the finer qualities of beef, mutton, and other meats are cut off and sold to the public, thus utilizing all the supplies which are bought in large quant.i.ties, the beef by the carca.s.s and the vegetables by the carload. The sausage of the ”Steam Kitchen”
is said to be the best to be found in Christiania. All kinds of prepared meats are also sold in this annex butcher shop. During the fruit season the company runs a canning department upstairs, preserving all kinds of fruits, jellies, pickles, and that sort of thing. At the baking department bread is sold to the general public at wholesale or retail, and small retail establishments are supplied with all kinds of groceries as well as meats and other edibles. Thus the restaurant is only part of this large business from which the company derives its profits. There is naturally a good deal of jealousy among the competing small dealers against the ”Steam Kitchen,” but it serves a benevolent purpose, and there is no disposition among its customers to question its business methods or reduce its profits. It has succeeded in abolis.h.i.+ng the cheap restaurants such as are found in all large cities, at which wretched food, generally the sc.r.a.pings from high-cla.s.s hotels and eating-houses, is worked over and sold to the poor.
It is an interesting sight, this bucket brigade, that stands in line and pa.s.ses slowly by the serving windows, which are attended by half a dozen brawny Norwegian women with bare arms and broad, good-natured-looking faces. They wear neat white ap.r.o.ns and caps, and handle the food with a dexterity that shows long experience. They seem to know most of the customers and carry on a familiar conversation with them while falling their orders. When a bucket and a ticket pa.s.ses up, blue for a nine-cent and red for a seven-cent dinner, the waitress first plunges a huge ladle into the soup pot and empties its contents into the bucket; then pa.s.sing along the rows of kettles she harpoons a piece of meat with a long two-p.r.o.nged fork, scoops up a quart of rice with a wooden shovel, and then, adding a portion of potatoes, slams on the cover, and, grabbing a cube of bread, pa.s.ses it over to the purchaser with a joke or a few pleasant words.
Many of the customers are well dressed, according to the Norway standard, but no people in the world seem to care so little for their personal appearance, except on Sundays, when you can scarcely recognize men and women you have been familiar with during the week.
On the day I ate at the restaurant, my cicerone pointed out at the dining table two professors of the University faculty, a lawyer in good standing, a photographer, and a sub-editor of one of the daily papers, who were his personal acquaintances. The remainder of the customers appeared to be professional men, clerks, bookkeepers, and a good many laborers, many of them coming for their dinner without having removed the traces of toil from their faces and hands. At one of the tables was a group of students inclined to be boisterous and evidently enjoying themselves. The ”Steam Kitchen” is the favorite eating-place for the undergraduates, from four to five hundred being served every day.
Such an inst.i.tution as the ”Steam Kitchen” is especially suitable to a Norwegian city, where a portion of the population work for very small wages, the average income of the wage-earner being less than $100 a year--so small that, measured by the American standard, it would seem a difficult problem to find food, clothing, and shelter for a family.
Few Norwegians suffer from poverty or privation, even through the cold and gloomy winters that are eight months long. Our own people might die, or at least suffer seriously under the same circ.u.mstances, but the Norwegians are a hardy race. They have inherited the power of endurance and the ability to survive hunger and thirst and discomforts better than most races.
There are comparatively few poor in Sweden, probably fewer than in any other European country except Norway and Switzerland, because of the low cost of living, the spa.r.s.e population, and the ability of all men and women to find work if they are willing to earn their own subsistence. Able-bodied paupers are compelled to work upon poor farms, but the aged, decrepit and invalids who are dependent upon public charity are kindly taken care of by what is called outdoor and indoor relief. In the cities are asylums and almshouses similar to those in the United States, but in the parishes, as a rule, the care of the poor is a.s.signed to individual farmers and others who are willing to take care of them under contract, subject to the supervision of a board of guardians, of which the pastor is the chairman and the elders of the church are members. This has long been a practice in Sweden, but is not universal.
There are at present 5,277 relief establishments of all kinds in the kingdom, and the total contributions for the benefit of the poor amount to $3,000,000 annually, or on an average of 58 cents per capita of the entire population, an average of 44 cents in the country and $1.18 in the cities. This includes all poorhouses, asylums, hospitals, and other inst.i.tutions for adults and children who can not take care of themselves.
A large part of the relief work in the cities is looked after by the Salvation Army under contract with the munic.i.p.al authorities, but there are many inst.i.tutions, hospitals, asylums, homes for the friendless and aged and for orphan children, supported by private charity. The free hospital for children in Stockholm is famous as one of the best equipped and managed inst.i.tutions in the world.
The private charities in Stockholm are united for cooperation in an organization similar to those found in American cities, and all charitable inst.i.tutions are subject to government supervision.[l]
CHAPTER XIII
MATERIAL CONDITIONS
The chief occupation of the Scandinavian peninsula is agriculture, employing more men and yielding larger monetary returns than any other industry in either Norway or Sweden. This may seem strange when it is recalled that sixty per cent of the surface of Norway is occupied by bare mountains, twenty-one per cent by woodlands, eight per cent by grazing lands, four per cent by lakes, and two per cent by ice fields, leaving only seven-tenths of one per cent for meadows and cultivated fields. And yet, the products of the farm equal the combined returns from s.h.i.+pping, lumber, and fisheries.
In Sweden the proportion of land under cultivation is considerably larger, the arable lands consisting of about twelve per cent of the total area, and in Sweden as in Norway, the agricultural products are more than those from s.h.i.+pping, lumber, and fisheries combined.
Nine-tenths of the farms of Norway and Sweden are owned by small proprietors; and although the right to dispose of landed property is relatively free, the laws of the country favor the retention of the farms in the families possessing them. An old allodial right makes it possible to redeem at an appraised value a farm that has been sold.
This right is acquired after the property has belonged to the family for twenty years, but it is lost after the farm has been in the possession of strangers for three years. There are some farms that have been worked for a thousand years by the descendants of the same family. The best farms are about the banks of the lakes and in the narrow river valleys, and there are many fertile meadows which have never been plowed or put under cultivation, so that there are great future possibilities for tillage. And yet these meadows furnish fine hay-crops, and every blade of gra.s.s represents money in Scandinavia.
In a country extending through thirteen degrees of lat.i.tude, one might naturally expect a wide range of agricultural products. In the southeastern part of the peninsula most of the plants and orchard fruits of central Europe are found; whereas in the northern sections it is impossible to grow even the most hardy plants. Oats, barley, and rye are the chief cereals, but their production scarcely meets the needs of the country. Potatoes are the only root crops extensively cultivated. While the summers are short, vegetables and small fruit do excellently during the long, sun-lit hours. Scandinavians, however, do not seem habituated to a vegetable diet, and the cultivation of root plants seems very generally neglected. Pears, cherries, apples, raspberries, gooseberries, and currants may be grown under favorable conditions; but they play a minor role in Scandinavian horticulture.
The cow is a staple of wealth to the people of Scandinavia. They are diminutive in size, dun-colored, docile in habits, and excellent milk producers. It is said when they are well-fed they average from six to nine hundred gallons of milk a year. The mountain saeters, or dairies as we would call them, are the centers of the b.u.t.ter and cheese industry during the summer months.
The peninsula is also supplied with an excellent breed of small but hardy horses. The cream-colored fjord horses of Norway are only sixty inches high. They are active, hardy, and gentle; and in the mountainous parts of the country they are vastly more serviceable than mules would be. The Gudbrandsdalen breed, found chiefly in the mountain valleys, are larger than the fjord horses, and they are generally brown or black in color. Good horses bring surprisingly high prices. Working horses cost from $200 to $350 and the best stallions bring as much as $2,500.
The agricultural interests of Norway have suffered unmistakably by the enormous emigration to the United States. Two-thirds of the Norwegians of the world live in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.