Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable CookeryAlcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Science
Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery
Alcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Food; Vegetarianism
All these things are a departure, greater or less, from the true idea
of a bread; and bread made with any of these changes, is so much the
less perfectly adapted to the promotion of health, happiness, and
longevity.
Bolting is objectionable, because bread made from bolted meal,
especially when eaten hot, is more apt, when the digestive powers are
not very vigorous, to form a paste, which none but very strong stomachs
can entirely overcome. Besides, it takes out a part of the sweetness, or
life, as it is termed, of the flour. They who say fine flour bread is
sweetest, are led into this mistake by the force of habit, and by the
fact that the latter comes in contact, more readily than coarse bread,
with the papillæ of the tongue, and seems to have more taste to it
because it touches at more points.
Raising bread by inducing fermentation, wastes a part of the saccharine
matter; and the more it is raised, the greater is the waste. By
lessening the attraction of cohesion, it makes it more easy of
digestion, it is true; but the loss of nutriment and of pleasure to the
true appetite more than counterbalances this. Bakers, in striving to get
a large loaf, rob the bread of most of its sweetness.
Salt is objectionable, because it hardens the bread, and renders it more
difficult of digestion. Our ancestors, in this country, did not use it
at all; and many are the families that will not use it now.
Those who use salt in bread, tell us how _flat_ it would taste without
it. This idea of flatness has two sources. 1. We have so long given our
bread the taste of salt, as we have most other things, that it seems
tasteless without it. 2. The flatness spoken of in an article of food is
oftentimes the true taste of the article, unaltered by any stimulus. If
any two articles need to be stimulated with salt, however, it is rice
and beans--bread never.
If saleratus is used in bread where no acidity is present, it is a
medicine; or, if you please, a poison both to the stomach and
intestines. If it meets and neutralizes an acid either in the bread-tray
or the stomach, the residuum is a new chemical compound diffused through
the bread, which is more or less injurious, according to its nature and
quantity.
Milk is objectionable on the score of its tendency to render the bread
more indigestible than when it was wet with water, and perhaps by
rendering it too nutritious. For good bread without the milk is already
too nutritious for health, if eaten exclusively, for a long time. That
man should not live on bread alone, is as true physically as it is
morally.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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