Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical IndustriesSlosson, Edwin E. (Edwin Emery)
Science
Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries
Slosson, Edwin E. (Edwin Emery)
Chemistry, Technical
This is not the composition of any particular brand but the average of
them all. The use of a certain amount of the oil of the sesame seed is
required by the laws of Germany and Denmark because it can be easily
detected by a chemical color test and so serves to prevent the margarin
containing it from being sold as butter. "Open sesame!" is the password
to these markets. Remembering that margarin originally was made up
entirely of animal fats, soft and hard, we can see from the above
figures how rapidly they are being displaced by the vegetable fats. The
cottonseed and peanut oils have replaced the original oleo oil and the
tropical oils from the coconut (copra) and African palm are crowding out
the animal hard fats. Since now we can harden at will any of the
vegetable oils it is possible to get along altogether without animal
fats. Such vegetable margarins were originally prepared for sale in
India, but proved unexpectedly popular in Europe, and are now being
introduced into America. They are sold under various trade names
suggesting their origin, such as "palmira," "palmona," "milkonut,"
"cocose," "coconut oleomargarin" and "nucoa nut margarin." The last
named is stated to be made of coconut oil (for the hard fat) and peanut
oil (for the soft fat), churned up with a culture of pasteurized milk
(to impart the butter flavor). The law requires such a product to be
branded "oleomargarine" although it is not. Such cases of compulsory
mislabeling are not rare. You remember the "Pigs is Pigs" story.
Peanut butter has won its way into the American menu without any
camouflage whatever, and as a salad oil it is almost equally frank about
its lowly origin. This nut, which grows on a vine instead of a tree,
and is dug from the ground like potatoes instead of being picked with a
pole, goes by various names according to locality, peanuts, ground-nuts,
monkey-nuts, arachides and goobers. As it takes the place of cotton oil
in some of its products so it takes its place in the fields and oilmills
of Texas left vacant by the bollweevil. The once despised peanut added
some $56,000,000 to the wealth of the South in 1916. The peanut is rich
in the richest of foods, some 50 per cent. of oil and 30 per cent. of
protein. The latter can be worked up into meat substitutes that will
make the vegetarian cease to envy his omnivorous neighbor. Thanks
largely to the chemist who has opened these new fields of usefulness,
the peanut-raiser got $1.25 a bushel in 1917 instead of the 30 cents
that he got four years before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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