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From: Facts For Farmers: Also for The Family Circle. A Compost of Rich
Materials For All Land-owners, about Domestic Animals and Domestic
Economy; Farm Buildings; Gardens, Orchards, and Vineyards; and all Farm
Crops, Tools, Fences, Fertilization, Draining, and Irrigation - edited
by Solon Robinson - 1865. (Edited for content.) 375. Quality of Food
Suited to a Farmer's Family.––"As to the quality of the food, there is
no doubt that the more simply it is cooked the more easily it is digested.
"Chemical analysis should be the guide for the cookery
book.
"No one would think of eating raw potash, a substance
that dissolves metals, but we do not hesitate to eat saleratus, which is a
modified preparation of it, and has the same, though a more gradual
effect, upon the organic tissues and the blood. Soda, it is well
understood, rots cloth and takes the skin form the hands when it is put
into soap, or even when used to 'break hard water,' as the washerwomen
term it; yet we put it into bread and cakes. Our stomachs were not made to
digest metals, and when we powder them and eat them, we try to cheat
nature.
"Spices were undoubtedly made for use in those climates
where they grow, but the natives of those climates use them much more
sparingly than we do. We may reasonably suppose that they are more adapted
to the wants of hot climates than of cold ones, as nature has placed them
in the former, and yet we saturate our food with them, mix them together,
destroy the flavors of each by so doing, and make a stimulus to appetite
by a conglomeration, which is a most unnatural one, and gradually injures
the very power of digestion. We thus conceal, also, that fine aroma of
vegetables and meats which distinguishes one from the other, and deprive
ourselves of the pleasure God designed we should feel in partaking of
them. There is a delicate fruit of the tropics resembling a muskmelon,
which grows, however, not upon a vine, but upon a tree, the taste of which
is so finely delicate, that a foreigner can not even perceive it at first;
but if he does not cover it with pepper and salt, as we have seen many
foreigners do, to 'give it a taste,' he will, after partaking of it a few
days or weeks (according to the simplicity of his appetite), appreciate
its flavor, which is that of the most delicate aromatic nut. In our
climate we lose the flavor of many vegetables in the same way, by covering
them with pepper, and also by putting them into water below the
boiling-point when we cook them.* Every one who is so happy as to live in
the country, and can gather vegetables daily from his own garden, knows
the difference between them when gathered thus and properly cooked, and
those which have been picked and kept for market even one night.
"When substances like rice, corn-starch, and farina are
used, which have very little taste (rice, because it has been so long
exposed to the air after it is gathered, and corn-starch and farina,
because; from the mode of their preparation, they lose a great part of the
nutritious ingredients of the corn), a delicate flavoring of spice may be
used without injury to health.
"Science may at last bring us to the conclusion, that
each climate and region produces those articles of food which it is most
healthful to eat in their respective localities.
"It is not the most costly or most luxurious living
that we would advocate, but it is a variety of food. The difficulty is,
that we are tempted sometimes by a great variety of dishes at one meal to
eat too much. This is no argument against variety of food.
"It is important that we should study to increase
earth's products, and improve their quality, to produce the highest
condition of perfection in man. A man, it is true, may be a glutton, and
consume mountains of flesh and rich dishes, but that is not the point. It
is that we all should consume the best food possible to be produced, an in
sufficient variety to give healthy results."
*see How to Cook |
