Science in the Kitchen: A Scientific Treatise On Food Substances and Their Dietetic Properties, Together with a Practical Explanation of the Principles of Healthful Cookery, and a Large Number of Original, Palatable, and Wholesome RecipesKellogg, E. E. (Ella Ervilla)
Science
Science in the Kitchen: A Scientific Treatise On Food Substances and Their Dietetic Properties, Together with a Practical Explanation of the Principles of Healthful Cookery, and a Large Number of Original, Palatable, and Wholesome Recipes
Kellogg, E. E. (Ella Ervilla)
Cooking, American; Diet; Vegetarianism
Bread, to answer the requirements of a good, wholesome article of food,
beside being palatable, must be light, porous, and friable, so that it
can be easily insalivated and digested. It should not contain
ingredients which will in any way be injurious if taken into the system,
but should contain as many as possible of the elements of nutrition.
Wheat, the substance from which bread is most generally made, contains
all the necessary food elements in proper proportions to meet the
requirements of nutrition, and bread should also contain them. The
flour, however, must be made from the whole grain of the wheat, with the
exception of the outer husk.
What is ordinarily termed fine flour has a large part of the most
nutritive properties of the grain left out, and unless this deficiency
is made up by other foods, the use of bread made from such material will
leave the most vital tissues of the body poorly nourished, and tend to
produce innumerable bad results. People who eat bread made from fine
white flour naturally crave the food elements which have been eliminated
from the wheat, and are thus led to an excessive consumption of meat,
and the nerve-starvation and consequent irritability thus induced may
also lead to the use of alcoholic drinks. We believe that one of the
strongest barriers women could erect against the inroads of intemperance
would be to supply the tables of the land with good bread made from
flour of the entire wheat.
The superiority of bread made from the entire wheat or unbolted meal has
been attested by many notable examples in history. In England, under the
administration of William Pitt, there was for several years such a
scarcity of wheat that to make it hold out longer, a law was passed by
Parliament that the army should be supplied with bread made of unbolted
flour. This occasioned much murmuring on the part of the soldiers, but
nevertheless the health of the army improved so greatly as to be a
subject of surprise. The officers and the physicians at last publicly
declared that the soldiers had never before been so robust and healthy.
According to the eminent Prof. Liebig, whole-wheat bread contains 60 per
cent more of the phosphate or bone forming material than does meat, and
200 per cent more gluten than white bread. To the lack of these elements
in a food so generally used as white flour bread, is undoubtedly due the
great prevalence of early decaying teeth, rickets, and other bone
diseases. Indeed, so many are the evils attendant upon a continued use
of fine flour bread that we can in a great measure agree with a writer
of the last century who says, in a quaint essay still to be seen at the
British Museum, that "fine flour, spirituous liquors, and strong
ale-house beer are the foundations of almost all the poverty and all the
evils that affect the labouring part of mankind."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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