In an experiment made by Magendie, a dog
fed exclusively on fine wheaten bread died
after forty days; another dog, fed on brown
bread (made with the bran), " lived on without
any disturbance of his health." Boiled
with salt and water, dried, and ground to a
coarse meal, gluten is then easily preserved,
and makes, when mixed with abstract of
meat and kitchen vegetables, the strongest
and best-flavoured soup known. Lime-water
makes bread white. It does all that alum
and phosphate of copper do, without being
injurious as the one and poisonous as the
other. Bread "doctored" in this manner, as
most London bread is doctored, becomes positively
hurtful, instead of nutritious,— its
chemical properties being completely altered by
alum, and actual poison being introduced by
phosphate of copper. Oatmeal and rye are
both very little used in the south of England,
and even in the north are gradually passing
out of fashion. More's the pity! For
porridge is not a thing to be rejected unwarily,
if made well; and rye bread is much more
delicious than the uninitiated would believe.
Both kinds of grain are cheap too,— which is
perhaps one cause of their unpopularity in
our luxurious England.

We make little use of fish— partly because
we don't know how to prepare it. We know
only how to fry and boil. To stew or bake, or
make into soup, we have very little idea of.
The same law holds good with respect to
cut and crimped fish as with meat for boiling
and for stews. It ought to be boiled in hot
water, so as to set the gelatine and gluten it
contains; but if the skin is uncut, then it
must be boiled in cold water, and always
with a little salt. Fish baked in a deep dish,
with savoury herbs and oil or butter (seasoning,
of course, included), makes a capital dish.
Any small fry will do,— sprats and such like,
not generally of great repute among the
people; but we think injuriously slighted.
Fried fish should be managed with great
care. The fat in the fryingpan should be kept
at boiling heat, which prevents any fishy
flavour from escaping; and therefore, as M.
Soyer says, in the same fat in which we have
fried a sole you may fry an apple fritter, if
you are careful not to allow the fat to cool.
Fish mashed up with potatoes— the left
potatoes of yesterday— fish and rice, fish
boiled in soup, all these are excellent varieties
of cooking fish,— too much neglected by
the poor; but if learnt and attended to,
would increase their food and their enjoyment
to an infinite degree.

One of the saddest things to think of, in a
country where men are sometimes all but
starving for want of food, is the waste of
meat in some nations: Australia, for instance,
Buenos Ayres, and Mexico, where beef and
mutton are melted down for tallow, and only
the prime joints used at all. What paradises
these seem to us, in a country where meat
ranges from sixpence to tenpence the pound!
If the manufacture of extract of meat was
heartily carried out in these lands of beeves
and oxen, what a saving it would be to humanity
at large. Here in Europe it is found
too expensive to be popular. Near Giessen,
in Germany, where there is a large manufactory,
it is from six shillings to seven and sixpence
the pound, which price puts it out of
the reach of many most requiring it; as, for
example, in hospitals and public charities.
In a battle-field, as we have seen, a little
extract of meat dissolved in a glass of
wine would be of more service to the
wounded men than we can conceive— giving
them strength to be transported to the
rear; which very often, for want of a timely
stimulus, is impossible. Soup-tablets fell
into disrepute owing to the ignorance of the
manufacturers. They, seeing that all strong
soups and stocks gelatinised or formed into
a jelly, imagined that gelatine was the chief
constituent of good soup. And when they
found that white meat, tendons, feet, cartilage,
bones, ivory, and hartshorn, yielded the
most beautiful and most transparent jelly-
tablets, which were cheaply obtained and
sold at a high price, ignorance and the love of
gain exchanged the valuable constituents of
flesh for gelatine, only to be distinguished
from common joiner's glue by its high
price. No wonder, then, if the soup-tablets
fell in public estimation. Prepared scientifically,
from juicy meat— prepared so as to be
sold no higher than three shillings a pound—
this sort of portable soup would be both
invaluable to mankind as a discovery and
profitable to the manufacturer. Solidified milk
is also a recent discovery, and an invaluable
one; and in preserved fruits and vegetables
—with lime juice— we may foresee the time
when there shall be no more scurvy on board
ship.

One of the largest promises of science is,
that the sum of human happiness will be
increased, ignorance destroyed, and, with
ignorance, prejudice and superstition, and that
great truth taught to all, that this world and
all it contains were meant for our use and
service; and that where nature by her own
laws has defined the limits of original unfitness,
science may by extract so modify those
limits as to render wholesome that which
by natural wilduess was hurtful, and nutritious
that which by natural poverty was unnourishing.
We do not yet know half that chemistry
may do by way of increasing our food. Sawdust
bread may seem a very mythic kind of
diet, and acorns may be held fitter for the
pig-trough than the dining table: but in time
science will have reconciled greater anomalies
than even these, and have opened almost
as wide a natural larder as the whole of
nature herself. Who, on the mere surface
of things, would have dreamed of beetroot
containing sugar? And who would now
believe that in the famine of sixteen hundred
and thirty, good white, nutritious, and