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Updated: June 8, 2025
Of 1696 Negroes at work in Philadelphia in 1856, some of the more important occupations numbered workers as follows: tailors, dressmakers, and shirtmakers, 615; barbers, 248; shoemakers, 66; brickmakers, 53; carpenters, 49; milliners, 45; tanners, 24; cake-bakers, pastry-cooks, or confectioners, 22; blacksmiths, 22.
Surely there should be a sumptuary law compelling pastry-cooks to deal in cellars or behind drawn blinds. Were it because of its mere material hardships that to this day I think of that period of my life with a shudder, I should not here confess to it. I was alone. I knew not a living soul to whom I dared to speak, who cared to speak to me.
The courtyards are, as usual, thronged, and pastry-cooks and story-tellers, soothsayers and musicians, provide refreshment and amusement to the ever-moving crowd of happy people, at whom we never tire of looking. And now, having seen something of the principal pagodas, with their crowds of worshippers or loiterers, let us take one glimpse of the ancient city of Pagan.
Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat seamstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silver-smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home drunk, if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of 'Fire! and 'Stop thief! inns of court with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges, old book-stalls, 'Jeremy Taylors, 'Burtons on Melancholy, and 'Religio Medicis, on every stall.
The lights also in the shops till eight or nine in the evening, especially in those of toymen and pastry-cooks, in the winter, make the night appear even brighter and more agreeable than the day itself. From the lights I come very naturally to speak of the night-guards or watch.
"It simply shows you!" says Dame Niafer, "and all I have to say is that now I hope you are satisfied." Manuel laughed without merriment. "Everything is in a conspiracy to satisfy me in these sleek times, and it is that which chiefly plagues me." He chucked Niafer under the chin, and told her she should be thinking of what a famous husband she had nowadays, instead of bothering about pastry-cooks.
Some of the Paris pastry-cooks make balls for vol-au-vent with a hash of rags allowed to soak in gravy; sham larks and partridges for pâtés are constructed out of chopped-up meat, neatly shaped to represent those birds; peddlers of sweet-meats sell marshmallow paste made out of Spanish white; the fish-merchant inserts the eyes of a fresh mackerel in a stale turbot, to trick his sharp customers; and as to drinks, one dyer boldly puts over his door "Burgundy Vintages!"
It evidently requires a considerable mental struggle to avoid investing part of the day’s dinner-money in the purchase of the stale tarts so temptingly exposed in dusty tins at the pastry-cooks’ doors; but a consciousness of their own importance and the receipt of seven shillings a-week, with the prospect of an early rise to eight, comes to their aid, and they accordingly put their hats a little more on one side, and look under the bonnets of all the milliners’ and stay-makers’ apprentices they meet—poor girls!—the hardest worked, the worst paid, and too often, the worst used class of the community.
It all looked like one of those gigantic feasts which children conjure up in dreamland a feast served with the solemnity that attends a repast of grown-up folks a fairy transformation of the table to which their own parents sat down, and on which the horns of plenty of innumerable pastry-cooks and toy dealers had been emptied.
A strikingly pessimistic tale, only less good than "Mr. Incoul." There is superb writing in these pages, many delightful passages. La Cenerentola and Lucrezia Borgia are mentioned in passing. The pictures which Gerome, Cabanel, Bouguereau, and the acolytes of these pastry-cooks exposed were stupid and sterile as church doors." This required courage in 1888.
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