The Chemistry of CookeryWilliams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
The Chemistry of Cookery
Williams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Cooking
This absence of potash appears to me to be the one serious objection to
the free use of cheese diet. The Swiss peasant escapes the mischief by
his abundant salads, which eaten raw contain all their potash salts,
instead of leaving the greater part in the saucepan, as do cabbages,
&c., when cooked in boiling water. In Norway, where salads are scarce,
the bonder and his housemen have at times suffered greatly from scurvy,
especially in the far north, and would be severely victimised but for
special remedies that they use (the mottebeer, cranberry, &c., grown
and preserved especially for the purpose). The Laplanders make a broth
of scurvy-grass and similar herbs; I have watched them gathering these,
and observed that the wild celery was a leading ingredient.
Scurvy on board ship results from eating salt meat, the potash of which
has escaped by exosmosis into the brine or pickle. The sailor now
escapes it by drinking citrate of potash in the form of lime-juice, and
by alternating salt junk with rations of tinned meats.
I once lived for six days on bread and cheese only, tasting no other
food. I had, in company with C. M. Clayton (son of the Senator of
Delaware, who negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), taken a passage
from Malta to Athens in a little schooner, and expecting a three days’
journey we took no other rations than a lump of Cheshire cheese and a
supply of bread. Bad weather doubled the expected length of our journey.
We were both young, and proud of our hardihood in bearing privations,
were staunch disciples of Diogenes; but on the last day we succumbed,
and bartered the remainder of our bread and cheese for some of the
boiled horse-beans and cabbage-broth of the forecastle. The cheese,
highly relished at first, had become positively nauseous, and our
craving for the forecastle vegetable broth was absurd, considering the
full view we had of its constituents and of the dirtiness of its cooks.
I attribute this to the lack of potash salts in the cheese and bread.
It was similar to the craving for common salt by cattle that lack
necessary chlorides in their food. I am satisfied that cheese can never
take the place in an economic dietary, otherwise justified by its
nutritious composition, unless this deficiency of potash is somehow
supplied. My device of using it with milk as a solvent supplies it in a
simple and natural manner.
The milk is not necessary, though preferable. I find that a solution
of cheese may be made in water by simply grating or thinly slicing
the cheese, and adding it to about its own bulk of water in which the
bicarbonate of potash is dissolved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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