PART I.

INTRODUCTORY.

The day has come in English social history when it is absolutely the bounden duty of every person at the head of a household—whether that household be large or small, rich or poor—to see that no waste is permitted in the preparation of food for the use of the family under his or her care. I am quite aware that such waste cannot be cured by theories, and that nothing except a practical acquaintance with the details of household management, supplemented by a conviction of the necessity of economy, can be expected to remedy the evil. At the same time, it is possible that ignorance of the fundamental principles of the chemical composition and of the relative nutritive value of the various sorts of food within our reach, added to the widespread ignorance of the most simple and wholesome modes of preparing such food, may be at the root of much of that waste.

Many excellent works have been written on household management and expenditure on both a large and a small scale, but I am not aware of any book so small as this, which exactly supplies the need I speak of, or which, laying other details aside, deals only with the subject of the preparation of food, and yet is not exactly a Cookery Book.

I shall attempt in this part to give in a condensed form the reasons why one sort of food is better than another, more nutritious, and therefore cheaper, and also why certain methods of preparing that food will cause it to be more easily digested, and render it more wholesome. It must be stated in this, the very beginning, that these “reasons why” are not the result of any crude theories of my own, but are drawn from a careful study of works upon the subject by practical chemists. Whenever the question is a vexed one, or learned doctors have agreed to differ upon it, I omit it altogether, confining myself entirely to the discussion of subjects upon which there is no doubt, and stating the results of years of patient study and incessant experiments as briefly and simply as I possibly can. Although it is perhaps somewhat alarming to come across scientific expressions in so unpretending a little book as this, still I must entreat my readers not to be scared away by words which are unfamiliar to them; and I may truthfully add my own experience to bear out the common assertion that the best and highest method of learning any subject will always prove the easiest in the long run.

Instead of helplessly wringing our hands and crying out about the high price of fuel and food, let us accept the present state of things as the inevitable and natural result of past years of extravagance and carelessness on our own part. The sooner we make up our minds that what we regretfully speak of as the “good old times” with their good old prices will never come again, the sooner we shall cease to look fondly back on a cheaper past, and brace ourselves up helpfully and bravely to face the increased cost of the necessaries of life. It is much more sensible to do this, instead of going on in our old ignorant way, buoying ourselves up with hopes of a shadowy millennium of butchers’ meat, of a future day when carcases of Australian or South American sheep and oxen shall dangle in English shops. Believe me, that time is a long way off, and even when it does come there will be many more thousands of hungry mouths to be filled, so that the supply will only keep pace—even then rather lagging behind, as it does now—with the demand of the coming years. If fuel and food cost nearly twice as much at present as they did ten years ago, then surely it becomes our imperative duty to see how we can, each of us, according to our possibilities, make the material for warmth and cooking go twice as far as they have done hitherto. Nor in making such an attempt are we blindly groping in the dark, feeling our way step by step along the unaccustomed paths of scientific experiment. It has all been done for us whilst we were stupidly spending our capital, by men whose clear sight could discern the dark days ahead; men who have, many of them, gone to their rest, before the dawn of these dark days, but who have left behind them clear instructions how to make the most of certain necessary substances whose increasing value they foresaw twenty or thirty years ago. If, therefore, we have the common sense to avail ourselves of the results of these researches and experiments, which are still carried on day after day by worthy successors of the great practical chemists I speak of, it is quite possible we may so utilize their information as to make our available material go a great deal further. At present we all confess that the balance is uncomfortably adjusted, and a great many people are throwing a great many remedies into the uneven scales. Let us try a few grains of science, and a few more of common sense, and see what the practical result will be.

Before we proceed to do this, however, I should like to endeavour to disabuse my readers’ minds of the idea that economy and stinginess are synonymous terms. In point of fact they are precisely opposite. An individual or a household habitually practising economy has a far wider margin for charity and hospitality than the shiftless people who never can keep a penny in their purses or a meal in their cupboards through sheer “waste-riff,” as the north-country people call it. “Take care of the scraps, and the joints will take care of themselves,” would be a very good motto in nine-tenths of our middle-class households, and the practical result of such a theory should be better food and more of it.

For my own part I have little hope of any real progress being made in the right direction until it shall have become once more the custom for ladies to do as their grandmothers did before them, and make it their business to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the principles and details of household management. In many cases there may be no actual pecuniary necessity for such supervision, but it would at all events serve the good purpose of setting an example, besides teaching servants the real good and beauty of a wise economy, a liberal thrift. So long as the world lasts, so long will there be a Mrs. Grundy; but if Mrs. Grundy can only be induced to go down into her kitchen and insist on a good use being made of sundry scraps and bones, and odds and ends which at present may be said to benefit no one, then will she deserve a statue in the marketplace. If Mrs. A., whose husband’s income may be one or two thousand a year, is able and capable to show a new cook how such and such things should be done so as to combine economy with palatableness, then will Mrs. B., whose income is barely a quarter of that sum, not consider it beneath her dignity to do so. If this movement is to do any good, it will have to be inaugurated by people whose social and pecuniary position makes them, to a certain extent, unaffected by the pressure which weighs so heavily on their poorer neighbours. And I am going to attempt, so to speak, to kill two birds with one stone; to persuade even rich people to insist on a due economy in the consumption of the necessaries of life, and to assure poor people that it is possible to make a good deal more of the scanty materials within their reach than they do at present. When I speak of inducing rich people to be economical, I have no culinary Utopia in my mind’s eye, when millionaires will prefer to dine off cold mutton or to lunch on bone broth. What I mean is, that rich people can surely be made to understand that it is now-a-days absolutely a greater good to the commonwealth if their households are so managed that little or no material for human food can be wasted in them, than if they subscribed ever so liberally to all the great charities of London. It is just in proportion as people’s minds are enlarged and their field of mental vision extended by culture and true refinement, that they will be able to perceive the importance of the question. For that reason I hope and expect that the warmest supporters of the attempt now being made by the National School of Cookery to teach the mass of the English people how to make the most of the material around them, will be found in the higher ranks of our society, and that from them it will spread downwards until it reaches the cottage where the labouring man is fed from year’s end to year’s end on monotonous and often unwholesome food, as much from lack of invention as from shallowness of purse.

Before ending this preliminary lesson I feel it incumbent on me to state most emphatically that I do not wish or intend to organize a crusade against cooks! In the course of nearly twenty years’ experience of that class of servants, I can declare that I have found very little intentional dishonesty. Waste, extravagance, and bad management I have met with over and over again, but these evils have almost invariably arisen from want of opportunities of learning better, and I can scarcely remember an instance where there has not been an effort made to lay aside bad habits and acquire fresh ones. It is only too true, as dear Tom Hood says, that—

“Evil is wrought by want of thought, As well as by want of heart.”

So, if we can even teach our servants to think twice before they throw things into the pig-tub, it will be taking a step in the right direction.

If a cook and her mistress are at daggers drawn, each regarding the other as a foe to be distrusted, then, indeed, there is little real economy to be expected. But if a cook sees that her mistress is willing to give her fair wages for her services, and to consider her comforts in other ways, whilst at the same time the lady thoroughly understands _how_ the cook’s duties should be performed, the chances are that the servant will readily submit to be taught a thousand little helpful and comfortable ways. Such knowledge on the mistress’s part is not incompatible with accomplishments and refinement of taste and manner, but it is not to be learned from reading this book or any other book. It can only come from study and a possibility of acquiring practical experience on the subject whilst the future matron is still a young girl; and if the scheme of the Committee of the National School of Cookery can be carried out according to their views and intentions, it will be a woman’s own fault if in future her first visit to her kitchen be made as an inexperienced bride with a dozen years of apprenticeship before her ere she can venture even to make a suggestion to her cook, or dream of “tossing up” some little dainty dish with her own hands.

LESSON I. THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF OUR FOOD.

The old German poet who wound up each verse of his famous drinking song by the assertion that “four elements intimately mixed, form all nature and build up the world,” was not so far wrong after all. The jovial song-writer referred to his favourite formula for brewing punch; and according to him the world of conviviality was built up by lemon and sugar, rum and hot water.

Now, it is perfectly true that four elements go a great way towards building up the world; but, setting aside the question of brewing punch, they are called carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. So universal is their presence in the living and growing parts of animals and plants, that they are always spoken of as “organic elements,” and science has ascertained exactly the proportion in which each should exist in a healthy condition of the human body. That body is incessantly, but imperceptibly, undergoing a process which cannot be better described than by the expression of perennial moulting, only that, whereas certain animals cast off certain parts of their body—their skin, their hair, or their feathers—every year, we lose a portion of our weight every day; that is to say, we should lose it if we did not absorb through our lungs, the pores of our skin, and our stomachs, sufficient oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, to supply the loss caused by the wear and tear of our daily life. There has even been an attempt made to prove that our vital organs are entirely renewed every forty days or so, but for this calculation there can be no really satisfactory data, although there certainly is constant loss and gain going on within us. The material for repairing this incessant waste which is the inevitable result of the activity of our nervous and muscular system, is not supplied alone by the starch, sugar, water, and fat, nor yet by the milk, meat, and vegetables we consume, but by a due combination of food-material which shall ensure the proper proportions of albumen, fibrine, and caseine absolutely required by our changing frames. These are rather hard words, but their meaning will be quite plain if we take as familiar examples of the three indispensable ingredients, the white of an egg, a piece of lean meat, and a bit of cheese. Everyone can understand that, although these things contain the largest proportion of one particular substance, still there may be many other substances in which they are present, all together, and it is just to teach us this, and to explain to us why we should rather give our attention to procuring one form of food than another, that a knowledge of the elements of Practical Chemistry is useful.

In reading the accounts of the hardships and sufferings of explorers and travellers, we are often surprised to learn that first one member and then another of the expedition dropped down and died long before the supplies were actually exhausted. This is particularly noticeable in the account of Burke and Wills’ attempt to explore the great plains of South Australia, where one by one the travellers died, not so much from sheer lack of some sort of food to eat, as from the unhappy circumstance of the only attainable food being utterly deficient in the ingredients without which the human body cannot be nourished. For instance, there was abundance of an alkaline plant on which the natives almost live at certain times of the year, and occasionally even a few fish were caught. But these materials taken by themselves were so weak in life-supporting properties, that they failed to repair sufficiently the waste caused by severe exercise and exposure to the weather. A man may be starved to death, and yet scarcely feel hungry; that is to say, he may be able to put food into his mouth which will allay the cravings of his appetite, but which may not have the least power to nourish his body, so that he will die as surely as though he had nothing to eat.

Men’s instincts are generally the surest guides, and however much we may have been disgusted to hear of such facts as of Esquimaux and Samoiedes living upon blubber and fat, and even eating 8 lbs. or 10 lbs. of flesh at a meal, Science teaches us that they were unconsciously adopting the very best means of keeping up the supply of carbon and oxygen, or internal warmth, which their cold climate rendered absolutely necessary. So in the same way we often see a sick person take a fancy to some curious kind of food, and perhaps begin to recover from the moment he was allowed to have it. The chances are that if we could bring all the practical chemists in the world into his sick-room, and they were to analyse the component parts of that particular food, and at the same time ascertain exactly which of the organic elements of human life was insufficiently represented in the patient’s system, the result of their researches would go to prove that the sick man knew exactly what he wanted to build him up in health, better than anyone else.

Nature is our surest guide after all, only unfortunately our civilization has blunted our instincts, and rendered us more or less artificial, so that we can hardly tell what _is_ Nature, and are obliged to call in the aid of Science to teach us. Those who live in hot countries do not require to provide their systems with internal warmth by means of food, and we shall generally find that they prefer a diet which will contain very little carbon. But it often happens that an Englishman travelling or living in such places will become terrified at his loss of relish for meat and heating food, and will fly either to his doctor for tonics, to his cook for pickles to incite his flagging appetite, or, still worse, to wine or brandy for stimulants to repair his imaginary weakness. Nature, thus thwarted in her arrangements, turns sulky, and the man falls ill, accusing the climate of the fault springing from his own ignorance and folly. In his own country he knows much better what is good for him; and in mixing bacon with his beans, or in taking, like the Irishman, cabbage with his potatoes, or, like the Italian, a strong kind of cheese with his maccaroni, he exhibits so many purely chemical ways of preparing mixtures nearly similar to each other in composition and nutritive value.

In the rudest diet, and in the luxuries of the most refined table, the main cravings of animal nature are never lost sight of. Besides the first taste in the mouth, there is an after-taste of the digestive organs, which requires to be satisfied if we want to arrange a perfect diet. It is not necessary that a food should yield every kind of material which the body requires to nourish it, for then one sort of food might be sufficient for the wants of man. Each sort must fulfil one or more of the body’s requirements, so that by a wise combination the whole of its wants may be supplied. It is also to be borne in mind that our nourishment is not only the solid food which we actually take into our stomachs, according to the popular idea on the subject, but comprises the water we drink and the air we breathe. But as these pages should treat simply of the nourishment for our bodies, which nourishment must needs be submitted to the action of fire, it is only with the cooking of food we have to deal.

In considering the question of the best and cheapest food, and the most wholesome mode of cooking it, we must keep steadily before us the principle, that it is not the quantity of food received into the human body which nourishes it, but the proportion which can be digested of such food. All else is sheer waste—an encumbrance worse than useless—whose presence clogs and throws out of gear the delicate mechanism appointed to deal with it.

It is generally agreed by scientific chemists, that in casting around for something like a form of food which could be taken as a type of all others, there is none so perfect as milk. During the period when the young of animals as well as of human beings are fed entirely on milk, they grow very rapidly in the size of every part of their bodies. From this we infer that milk must contain _all_ the essentials which go to build up muscle, nerve, bone, and every other tissue. The first lesson we learn from taking milk as an example of perfect natural food, is that there should be a certain proportion of liquid mixed with the substances we consume as food, though, as the animal attains its full size and there is only waste to be made up, not growth to be provided for, the necessity for the liquid form of food diminishes.

Of the flesh-forming substances contained in milk, caseine is the most important, and in the largest proportions; therefore it is with milk in the form of cheese that it can best be dealt with as human food in this place. Now, there is a popular theory that cheese is unwholesome, and it certainly is an indigestible substance, but still it need only be avoided by those who suffer from weak digestions. The hardworking man who labours with his muscles in the open air, and whose stomach is in the best possible condition to digest his food, does wisely to spend, as he generally does, what little money he may possess in cheese, for cheese contains nearly twice the quantity of nutritive matter he would get in the same weight of cooked meat. Even with delicate feeders, a small quantity of cheese taken with other food facilitates digestion, for caseine is easily decomposed or put in a condition which causes other things to change. When, therefore, we eat a piece of cheese after a meal, it acts like yeast in bread, and starts a change in the food; for the chances are that the stomach in trying to digest the cheese will digest the rest of its contents at the same time. The mouldy cheese which some people’s instinct leads them to prefer, acts more quickly in this way than fresh cheese. When cheese is spoken of as a nourishing article of food, especially to those who labour in the open air, it is only cheese in which the cream has not been previously separated from the milk, for the actual nutritive value will depend on the amount of butter material left in it. The cheap skimmilk cheeses of South Wales yield so little nourishment in this respect, that they are of but slight value as flesh-formers, whereas the rich cheeses from Cheddar, Stilton, and Ayrshire are not only infinitely cheaper than meat, but are also very nourishing.

It will perhaps only be necessary to take bread and beef as samples of food which contain in themselves every element required to build up the human frame, to repair the daily waste, and to preserve all the conditions of perfect health. The generality of mankind have found out the value of these substances for themselves without the aid of science; but it may be as well to learn something about bread and beef, for the simple reason that as we cannot always, under all circumstances, make sure of having them as food, we may be able to select those substances which come nearest to them in nutritive value, if we understand the component parts which make them so important.

LESSON II. BREAD AND BEEF.

Nature is always busy cooking inside us. She is ever separating, arranging, and making the best of the heterogeneous substances we give her to deal with, and it is as well to find out what materials are the easiest for her to manage, and so learn to economize her forces to the utmost. Of all the food used to repair the incessant waste caused by muscular exertion in the open air, bread and beef, as we have already remarked, best fulfil the needs of the human system under those conditions; and we will first look at the chemical composition of bread.

It is needless to trace the growth of wheat before it arrives at the mill to be converted into flour, but when it reaches that stage it comes within the limits of the inquiry which we propose to ourselves. Wheat is practically divided into two parts: the bran or outer covering, and the central grain or fecula; and the object of the miller in the preparation of flour is to mix the qualities as above mentioned so as to suit his market, and either to separate the bran entirely or partially from the grain, or to leave the whole in flour. According to the quality of the grain and the amount of the husk left in it, the value of the flour varies, and it is divided into four classes: the “fine households” or best, “households” or “seconds,” brown meal, and biscuit flour; and the value must chiefly depend on the estimate which is formed of the nutritive proportions of the different parts of the bran.

Many people say, vaguely, “Oh, brown bread is more wholesome than white”; but it is impossible it can be more nutritious, though it may be more palatable; for the outer part of the bran is glazed over with a layer of flint which is quite indigestible. At the same time it must be acknowledged that our practical experience teaches us that, although the stomach may find it impossible to assimilate bran itself, yet the presence of bran in bread stimulates the juices of the stomach to greater activity, and therefore, like cheese, promotes the digestion of other things. To a delicate organization it would probably act as an irritant, and therefore its use should not be persisted in unless there is absolutely no disarrangement of the digestive system. However finely the _outer_ bran may be ground, it still remains innutritious, but the _inner_ husk possesses great value from the large proportion of nitrogenous matter which it contains. The whiteness of the flour is not always a test of its purity or nourishing powers, as in cases where the flour from red wheat has been most thoroughly sifted or “bolted,” it will still keep a darker tinge than even “seconds” flour obtained from white wheat, though the red wheat remains the most nutritious.

It is an instance of what I have before remarked about the instinct which guides our choice of food, that the navvies, who work perhaps harder than any other men in the world, make it a point to procure the very best and purest and most expensive wheaten bread. It is always the first thing thought of in settling to a job of work in a new place, that these men should be able to get the finest wheaten bread to eat. In making this proviso they are really guided by principles of true economy, for in their case the necessary waste of tissue is so great that they cannot afford to take into their stomachs any superfluous matter which will not nourish their bodies. And we will presently see _why_ pure wheaten bread is the most nourishing of all the cereals, although there are other forms in which wheaten flour might be used with advantage, such as when made into maccaroni or sifted into semolina.

In other countries, where wheaten bread is not the staple article of food, it is curious to notice how those who have to work hard in the open air have struck out substitutes for themselves which contain ingredients as near to wheaten bread in chemical value as can be procured. Thus the miners of Chili, whose lives are very laborious, feed on beans and roasted grain; whilst some Hindoo navvies found their physical powers too low to do a good day’s work when engaged in boring a tunnel, until they left off eating rice and took to wheaten bread and flesh. But the wheat grown in a tropical country is never of much value for nutritive purposes, nor yet that grown in a cold one. A hot summer in a sunny clime lying within the temperate zone produces the best grain—that is, grain with the least proportion of water and the greatest of nitrogen. Rice flour possesses so much less nitrogen than does wheaten flour that its nutritive value is a good deal lessened, and in countries where it is the staple food, a very great deal has to be produced and consumed to afford the inhabitants anything like a sufficiency of nourishment. The innutritive quality of rice is naturally the reason why a scarcity of that food causes such fatal results in an apparently short time. The people who habitually eat it have already brought their vital powers to so low an ebb, that a very small diminution of nourishment suffices to lower the life-supporting standard beneath the possibility of existence. The chief reason why wheat, and indeed all the cereals, are of such primary importance as food, is, that whilst nitrogen is absolutely indispensable to the animal body, it cannot be produced out of substances which do not contain it. The same is true of carbon, but we must look to flesh to produce that. The chief ingredients of our blood contain nearly 17 per cent. of nitrogen, according to Liebig, and he was also convinced that no part of an organ contains less than the same proportion of that elementary body. The nitrogenous principle in wheat is called gluten; but it is the _cerealin_ which acts as a ferment and assists in the digestion of the other substances.

In wheat this is what we find—water, gluten, albumen, starch, sugar, gum, fat, woody fibre, and mineral matter, all in certain proportions, but there is a great deal more starch than anything else. Next to starch comes gluten, and we must remember it is in that ingredient the nitrogenous principle lurks. If these component parts are again classed, the result will be that wheat stands first as a “force-producer,” and second as a “flesh-producer;” so, as strength is of more importance to the navvies than flesh, they may well be excused for being so particular about their bread. In another place we will speak of the simplest and best modes of making wheaten flour into bread. Now we must pass on to beef, and try to show why our national love of this particular form of flesh-food has had its origin in an instinct of what was best to keep ourselves in good working or fighting condition.

Although bread actually produces fibrine, still it is best if we need only look to it for gluten, albumen, and so forth, and depend upon flesh for fibrine, where we shall find it ready-made to our hand (or, should I say to our mouth?) in the fibres of the meat. Of all the forms of meat used for human food, the flesh of the ox is that generally preferred where there is any choice in the matter, and it is certainly both nourishing and easily digested. In comparing the nutritive value of different kinds of meat, we must distinguish between fat and lean, and the amount of nourishment is in proportion to the fat or lean of the meat. Fat (that is, carbon) generates heat, but lean generates heat and forms flesh as well, for in lean flesh all four “organic elements” are well represented. In both mutton and pork we get so much fat that the actual nourishment contained in the same amount of beef (unless exceptionally fattened) is greater, and it is also the fullest of the red blood juices. Besides this, the loss in cooking beef is much less than in cooking mutton, owing to the greater solidity of the flesh and the smaller proportion of fat. “It is quite certain,” says Liebig, “that a nation of animal feeders is always a nation of hunters, for the use of a rich nitrogenous diet demands an expenditure of power and a large amount of physical exertion, as is seen in the restless disposition of all the carnivora of our menageries.” Hence it follows that for those whose daily toil necessitates an expenditure of power, it would be the truest economy if they were to endeavour to supply the waste of their muscular system by ever so small a quantity of true flesh-forming food, instead of being contented with a larger meal of a less nourishing description, washed down by beer or spirit, which contains no real nutritive worth. Malt and alcohol possess narcotic and stimulating properties, and do no harm in moderation—indeed, to the weak or aged they are of incalculable value. But a strong, healthy labouring man would keep himself in much better working order if he economized his beer and increased his animal food.

I have seen with my own eyes a very forcible illustration of this truth in the working man of New Zealand as he existed some years ago. In those days beer and spirit used to be almost unknown except in the young colonial towns, and the early settlers up the country lived entirely on bread and mutton, for even potatoes were a rare and precious delicacy for the first half-dozen years. Such a splendid physical condition of the human frame it had never before been my good fortune to behold. Everyone looked in the perfection of health: clear complexions, bright eyes, and active limbs which seemed not to know fatigue, were the result of many years of a compulsory and much-abused diet of bread, tea, and mutton. When I say tea, it was really only used as a stimulant or for warmth, for cold water was the universal beverage. People might grumble, but they throve, and the generation whom I saw growing on that diet from childhood towards man’s estate might challenge the world over to produce their equals for vigour and strength.

Perhaps it is rather “bull”-ish of me to insist in one page upon beef, like motley, being “your only wear,” and then in the next going near to show that mutton does just as well; but, seriously, one has only to turn to Sir Francis Head’s account of his ride across the Pampas, to learn how much exertion can be supported upon dried lean beef. It is not only, as Sir Francis says, that he endured enormous and incessant fatigue solely on this beef diet, but that months of such fatigue left him in splendid physical condition, able to do anything or go anywhere. To reconcile the two theories, however, I must add that the gallant veteran confesses his beef diet rendered him somewhat lean and ill-favoured, and that he did not look so handsome and well as my mutton-fed New Zealand colonists used to do.

LESSON III. FISH.

In many parts of the coast of our sea-surrounded home, fish is, from necessity, the staple food of the inhabitants; and although whole districts in other parts of the world, such as Dacca, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, &c., are fed almost entirely on fish, our business lies only with our own people. There is no doubt that fish, even the red-blooded salmon, should not be the sole nitrogenous animal food of any nation; and even if milk and eggs be added, the vigour of such people will not equal that of a flesh-eating community. But of all kinds of animal food, the fresh herring offers the largest amount of nutriment for the smallest amount of money, and this statement is the more curious when we think of the turtle, which is produced in such enormous quantities on the shores of the West Indian islands, as well as the estuaries of the Indian coast. Although the flesh of the turtle is palatable and wholesome, it possesses a cloying peculiarity, insomuch that, after a year or two, Europeans will suffer hunger to the verge of starvation rather than touch it. Perhaps this repugnance may be an instinct arising from the fact that the phosphoric fat of the turtle renders it difficult of solution in the digestive juices, and therefore its really nutritious properties are counteracted by this superabundant richness.

So we see that the balance has to be very nicely adjusted: the old proverb, “If a little of a thing is good, a great deal is better,” does not hold good at all with our food. We have to take great care that, according to the means within our reach, that supply of the proper proportions of the organic elements which are as necessary to our bodies as fuel to a fire, should be kept up. In fact, food is to our body exactly what fuel is to a fire. If we choke up the range or stove with dust and bricks, the fire will go out; and so, if we persist in supplying the furnace of our life with materials which it cannot possibly assimilate, or use as fuel, the fire of our lives will die out. If people understood, or would even try to understand—and it is not so difficult as many things uneducated people learn quite easily—why certain kinds of food produce certain conditions of the human frame, there would be far less disease.

The great mistake is to think that actual want of money is at the root of the bad food of English labourers. It is not so at all. I do not deny the poverty nor the toil requisite, alas! to obtain even the scantiest meal; but anyone with any practical experience of the very poor of our own country will agree in the assertion that perhaps half of that pressure is removable by education in the art of making the most of things. I have often seen a poor woman who had been complaining to me of the scarcity of fuel, or the want of food, prepare to light her fire, cook her husband’s dinner, or bake her bread, in the most recklessly extravagant manner. So with fish. How often at the time of the Irish famine were the charitable English public startled by hearing that people were starving on a coast swarming with fish? If it had been possible to teach the poor ignorant sufferers, that although there was not quite so much nourishment in fish as in meat, still it would have made a palatable and wholesome addition to their starvation diet of Indian maize, much distress would have been warded off.

The flesh of fish contains fibrine, albumen, and gelatine in small proportions, and fat, water, and mineral matter go to make up the rest of the component parts. It is curious to find the difference of fat in some fishes, especially mackerel, which possesses a very large proportion, herrings coming next (some people say first), but at all events they both should be cooked in such a way as to get rid of as much of this fat as possible. Enough will remain to make the fish nourishing, but if there be too much fat it renders fish indigestible. This danger needs to be particularly guarded against with eels. Haddocks, whiting, smelts, cod, soles, and turbot are all less fatty, and consequently more digestible, than such fish as salmon, pilchards, sprats, and mackerel. Raw oysters are more digestible than cooked ones, because the heat coagulates and hardens the albumen at once, besides making the fibrine too solid, and rendering it less easy for the gastric juices to dissolve.

We must bear in mind that the flesh of all fish _out of season_ is unwholesome, and often makes people ill. I am afraid Mr. Frank Buckland and other true lovers of pisciculture would view the sufferings of such depraved _gourmets_ with great indifference, and it is, indeed, most shocking to the food-economist to read of the shoals of baby soles an inch or two long, of diminutive oysters, of the ova of the cod, the roe of the salmon, and of the fry of the herring, which are brought to our markets and readily sold in spite of vigilant bye-laws.

It is not possible in this place to deal with the subject of cooking fish: cooking it in such a manner that the fat which renders it often unwholesome shall be eliminated, and the nourishing and gelatinous portions of the fleshy substance made the most of.

LESSON IV. VEGETABLES.

I feel that I cannot begin this chapter better than by quoting what Dr. Letheby says on the subject:

“Primarily, _all_ our foods are derived from the vegetable kingdom, for no animal has the physiological power of associating mineral elements and forming them into food. Within our own bodies there is no faculty for such conversion; our province is to pull down what the vegetable has built up, and to let loose the affinities which the plant has brought into bondage, and thus to restore to inanimate nature the matter and force which the growing plant had taken from it.”

It is thus plain that the beef and mutton we eat derive their fibrine, gluten, and all other necessary ingredients from the vegetables on which the oxen and sheep have fed, though such food does not apparently contain any of these substances. It is a curious suggestion which I have often met with, that if a vegetarian family lived in accordance with the rules of one of their own peculiar cookery books, each member would actually consume half an ounce more animal food a day than a man would do who lived according to the usual scale of diet.

Vegetables are aliments which dilute the blood, and contain more salts than albumen. They convey very little nutriment to the blood, as we may see in the feeble muscles of tropic-dwellers who feed almost entirely on vegetables. On the other hand, they are of great service, first in the digestive canal, where they dissolve the albuminous substances of the meat, and afterwards in the blood itself, where, if they do not actually nourish, they yet keep the albumen and fibrine in a liquid state, and enable those substances to perform their proper functions more vigorously. Of course the cereals would naturally stand first in a chapter on vegetables, as they, of all the products of the vegetable kingdom, are the most depended upon by man for food. As, however, wheat, which is the principal cereal of England, has been noticed in another chapter, we may as well proceed to examine the nutritive properties of other vegetables. In such an inquiry the potato comes first, for, owing to its large proportion of starch, it is the most actually nourishing of all vegetables. This starch is transformed into fat by the digestive process, and if potatoes could be eaten with a sufficiency of white of egg, their nutritive value would be brought very near the meat standard. Other roots and tubers contain a larger proportion of sugar, and there is even fat present in some of them, but none are so rich in this nourishing starch as the potato. A man may, and probably will, look fat and rosy on a potato diet, yet his muscle will not be in first-rate condition, nor will he be able to endure prolonged fatigue. In spite, therefore, of the comparative low price of potatoes, they are not the most economical food for a labourer, nor can he depend on their nourishing starch alone to provide him with the requisite bodily strength. All succulent vegetables are anti-scorbutic, and since the potato was brought into use as a daily ration in the fleet (not a hundred years ago), scurvy has gradually died out. If there is any difficulty in providing potatoes—for during long voyages, when crossing the tropics, the potatoes will begin to grow, and so become unfit for food—lime-juice is the next best substitute, for it contains most of the chemical ingredients which go to make the salts of potash found in all fresh vegetables, but which is specially present in the potato. It has often been pointed out that there is really no excuse for scurvy now-a-days, for potatoes, cabbages, turnips, and carrots can be pressed into a very small space, and yet carry their potash about with them. Indeed, this process has lately been carried to great perfection. Other vegetables are less actually nutritious than the potato, and the palate grows sooner tired of them, but yet one hundred pounds of potatoes contain barely as much nitrogenous matter,—that is to say, positive nourishment,—as thirteen pounds of wheat.

As the wholesomeness and digestibility of vegetables depend much on how they are cooked, it is perhaps useless to enter here into a longer explanation why vegetables, though they constitute the entire food of animals whose flesh contains the highest forms of nourishment, will not, of themselves, supply man with the food he requires to keep his muscles strong and vigorous. In the countries where the inhabitants are compelled by the necessities of the climate to live chiefly on them, Nature is so bountiful that she does not call upon man to cultivate the ground as we are obliged to do. Therefore, it stands to reason that in a climate where severe manual labour is necessary to produce food, a diet of a muscle-relaxing, fat-forming nature is a very poor economy.

_THE BEST MODES OF PREPARING SOME SORTS OF FOOD FOR USE, WITH A SIMPLE EXPLANATION OF THEIR RESPECTIVE ACTIONS._