PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.

To most animals nature has designed a limited range of aliment, when compared to the extensive choice allotted to man. If we look into the history of the human race, inhabiting the different parts of the globe, as far as we are acquainted with it, we find, that man appears to be designed by nature to eat of all substances that are capable of nourishing him: fruits, grains, roots, herbs, flesh, fish, reptiles, and fowls, all contribute to his sustenance. He can even subsist on every variety of these substances, under every mode of preparation, dried, preserved in salt, hardened in smoke, pickled in vegetable acids, &c.

The Author of Nature has so constructed our organs of digestion, that we can accommodate ourselves to every species of aliment; no kind of food injures us; we are capable of being habituated to every species, and of converting into nutriment almost every production of nature.

When we enquire more minutely into the chemical constitution of the different alimentary materials, which promote the growth, support the strength, and renew the waste of our body, we find that animal substances are not suited to form the whole of our daily food; and that, in fact, if long and extensively used, their stimulating effects at length exhausts and debilitates the system, which it at first invigorated and supported. Those, accordingly, who have lived for any great length of time on a diet composed entirely of animal matter, become oppressed, heavy, and indolent, the tone and excitability of their frame are impaired, they are affected with indigestion, the breathing is hurried on the smallest exercise, the gums become spongy, the breath is fœtid, and the limbs swell. We recognize in this description the approach of scurvy, a disease familiar to sailors, to the inhabitants of besieged towns, and, in general, to all who are wholly deprived of a just proportion of vegetable aliment.

On the other hand, vegetable food being less stimulating is also less nourishing; besides, this kind of aliment is, upon the whole, of more difficult assimilation than the food derived from the animal kingdom. Hence it is, perhaps, that nature has provided a greater extent of digestive organs for animals wholly herbivorous. It is insufficient to raise the human system to all the strength and vigour of which it is susceptible. Flatulency of the stomach, muscular and nervous debility, and a long series of disorders, are not unfrequently the consequences of this too sparing diet. Some Eastern nations, indeed, live almost entirely on vegetable substances; but these, it is remarked, are seldom so robust, so active, or so brave, as men who live on a mixed diet of animal and vegetable food. Few, at least, in the countries of Europe can be sufficiently nourished by vegetable food alone; and even those nations, and individuals, who are said to live exclusively on vegetables, because they do not eat the flesh of animals, generally make use of milk at least, of eggs, and butter and cheese.

Food composed of animal and vegetable materials is, in truth, that which is best suited to the nature and condition of man. The proportions in which these should be used it is not easy to determine, but generally the quantity of vegetables should exceed that of animal food. “On this head,” says Dr. Fothergill, “I have only one short caution to give. Those who think it necessary to pay any attention to their health, at table, should take care that the quantity of bread, of meat, and of pudding, and of greens, should not compose, each of them, a meal, as if some only were thrown in to make weight, but carefully to observe that the sum of, altogether, do not exceed due bounds or incroach upon the first feeling of satiety.”

All the products of the vegetable kingdom, used as aliment, are not equally nutritious. When we contemplate with a chemical eye the nutritive principles contained in vegetable substances, we soon perceive that they are but few in number, namely, starch, gluten, mucilage, jelly, fixed oil, sugar, and acids; and the different vegetable parts of them are nutritious, wholesome, and digestible, according to the nature and proportion of their principles contained in them. The starch and gluten appear the most nutritious, and together with mucilage at the same time, the most abundant ingredients contained in those vegetables from which man derives his subsistence. Hence, from time immemorial, and in all parts of the earth, man has used farinaceous seeds as part of his food, for they contain the above-mentioned materials in the greatest abundance. Of these the most nutritive are the seeds of the Cerealia, under which title are commonly comprehended the Gramineæ, or Culminiferous plants. Whilst the seeds of the Gramineæ supply the most important part of food furnished by the vegetable kingdom, in almost every part of the world, their leaves and young shoots support that class of animals hence called graminivorous, whose flesh is most generally eaten.

These vegetables are distributed so universally over the face of the earth, and have become to such a degree the object of culture, that they are very generally made into bread, or are employed instead of it; and, upon the whole, it appears that they are nutritive merely in the proportion to the quantity of farinaceous matter contained in them; but this substance exists in different combinations in different cereal and leguminous seeds. It is combined with gluten in wheat, with a saccharine matter in oats, and in many leguminous seeds, such as Harricot beans and pease, and with viscous mucilage in rye and Windsor beans.

Next to the Cerealia and Leguminosæ may be ranged the oily farinaceous seeds, such as almonds, walnuts, filberts, &c. These abound in starch and mucilage. The use of chocolate, which is prepared from the chocolate nut, growing in the West Indies, ground into a paste, with or without sugar, is in itself a nutritious substance, and to those with whom it agrees, it may be considered as a wholesome nutritious aliment. Yet the vegetable farina, in this state of existence, though highly nutritious, and to many palates very agreeable, is more difficult of digestion, and does not, upon the whole, afford a very wholesome alimentary substance. When too freely used, those kinds of seeds are sure to disagree, more especially if from age the oil has become rancid. They must be considered rather as a delicacy than as fitted to form a portion of our daily food, and with some particular stomachs they never agree.

Of the alimentary farinaceous roots, the potatoe, boiled or roasted, is one of the most useful, and perhaps after the Cerealia, one of the most wholesome and most nutritious vegetables in common use; its nourishing powers, there can be no doubt, depend upon the amylaceous fecula of which it is chiefly composed. The Jerusalem artichoke deserves likewise to be noticed here, as being a highly alimentary root, chiefly composed of farinaceous matter. Of the fruits rich in farinaceous and mucilaginous matter, few are indigenous. The chesnut, when roasted, affords an alimentary food, but in the East and West Indies the bread fruit, bananas, and the fruit of the plantain tree, are the substitutes for bread.

Scarcely any of the various alimentary substances employed by man are consumed in the raw and crude state in which they are presented to us by nature. Almost all of them are previously subjected to some kind of preparation, or change, by which for the most part they are rendered more wholesome and more digestible, and sometimes more nutritive. Accordingly, the observations we have made on the properties of different vegetable aliments, are to be considered as applied to them in the state in which they are commonly used among us.

When in the preparation of bread a baking heat is applied to the flour dough, a complete change is produced in the constitution of the mass. The new substance of bread differs materially from flour, it no longer forms a tenacious mass with water, nor can starch and gluten be any more separated from it.

By the application of heat to vegetables the more volatile and watery parts are in some cases dissipated. The different principles, according to their peculiar properties, are extracted, softened, dissolved, or coagulated; but most commonly they are changed into new combinations, so as to be no longer distinguishable by the forms and chemical properties which they originally possessed.

In like manner the leguminous seeds, and farinaceous roots are greatly altered by the chemical action of heat. The raw potatoe is ill-flavoured, extremely indigestible, and even unwholesome. By roasting, or boiling, it becomes farinaceous, sweet, and agreeable to the taste, wholesome, digestible, and highly nutritious. Little is lost, and nothing is added to the potatoe by this process, yet its properties are greatly changed; its principles, in short, have suffered very remarkable chemical changes.

Even in the simple boiling of the various leguminous seeds, pot-herbs, and esculent roots, the effect does not seem confined to the mere softening of the fibres, the solution of some, and coagulation of other of their juices and principles; not only their texture, but their flavour, and other sensible qualities have undergone a change, by which their alimentary properties have been improved; the farinaceous matter by boiling is rendered soluble, the vegetable fibre softened. Saccharine matter is often formed, mucilage and jelly extracted and combined, and the product is rendered more palatable, wholesome, and nourishing. And, although every country has its own favourite articles of food, and modes of preparing them, and there is perhaps no subject in regard to which local prejudices are so strong, yet there can be no reason why the farinaceous matter of cereal seeds should always be consumed in the state of bread; many of them are not less agreeable, and not less wholesome in other forms of food.

In Scotland nine-tenths of those in the more humble walks of life live upon barleybroth, and there are not more healthy people to be found any where.—Cullen’s Materia Medica, v. I. p. 287.

It is chiefly to save the trouble of dressing any other kind of food, and that bread, from its portability and convenience of always being ready, has become the principal sustenance, but it is far from being the most economical method of using farinaceous grain. There can be no doubt that the same quantity of farinaceous matter made into bread might, in other forms, be used to a much greater advantage; for the great art of preparing good and wholesome food is to convert the alimentary matter into such a substance as to fill up the stomach and alimentary canal without overcharging it with more nutritive matter than is requisite for the support of the animal, and this may be done either by bread, or by converting the mealy substance of which it is composed into other forms, of which there is a great variety.

Persons who have travelled much on the continent are well aware that our neighbours have the art of throwing much more variety and gratification of the palate into the article of subsistence which has been emphatically called the staff of life, than we possess. The French and Germans convert the farinaceous flour of vegetables into a variety of excellent articles of food, and not serving, like our own, as a mere companion to pair off with so many mouthfuls of meat.

In speaking thus of the use of bread, I do not mean to deny that bread is highly alimentary, its nourishing powers are undoubtedly very great.

The finest bread, says an eminent physician (Dr. Buchan), is not always the best adapted for answering the purposes of nutrition. Household bread, which is made by grinding the whole grain, and only separating the coarse bran, is, without doubt, the most wholesome.

The people of South Britain generally prefer bread made of the finest wheat flour, while those of the Northern countries eat a mixture of flour and oatmeal, or rye bread. The common people of Scotland also eat a mixed bread, but more frequently bread made of oatmeal only.

In Germany the common bread is made of rye. The flour of millet is made in France, Spain, and Italy, into wholesome and nourishing pastry and puddings. The American and West Indian labourer thinks no bread so strengthening as that which is made of Indian corn.

The inhabitants of Westphalia, who are a hardy and robust people, capable of enduring the greatest fatigues, live on a coarse brown rye bread, which still retains the opprobrious name once given to it by a French traveller, “Bon pour Nicole—good for his horse Nichol.”

The great advantage of eating pure and genuine bread must be obvious; but bread is often spoiled to please the eye. I have elsewhere[[1]] shewn, that in the making of bread, more especially in London, various ingredients are occasionally mingled with the dough. The baker is obliged to suit the caprice of his customers, to have his bread light and porous, and of a pure white colour. It is impossible to produce this sort of bread from flour alone, unless it be of the finest quality. The best flour, however, being mostly used by the biscuit bakers and pastry cooks, it is only from the inferior sorts that bread is made; and it becomes necessary, in order to have it of that light and porous quality, and of a fine white, to mix alum with the dough. Without this ingredient the flour used by the London bakers would not yield so white a bread as that sold in this metropolis, and herein consists the fraud, that the baker is enabled by the use of this ingredient to produce, from bad materials, bread that is light, white, and porous, but of which the quality does not correspond to the appearance, and thus to impose upon the public.

[1]. Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, 2nd Edit. 1820, p. 130.

In the following pages I have enumerated the methods by which all the different kinds of farinaceous substances are made into good and wholesome bread, and are used in different countries as articles of daily sustenance.

Art of making Bread.

HISTORICAL SKETCH
OF
THE ART OF MAKING BREAD.

Nothing appears so easy at first sight, as to grind corn, or other farinaceous substances, to knead the flour with water into dough, and to convert it, by baking, into porous bread. But, simple as these operations may now appear to us, the art of making loaf-bread was by no means one of the earliest among human inventions.

For, however essential this species of food may be considered among us as an article of primary subsistence, it is perfectly certain, that men had long existed in a state of civilization, before bread was known among them.

It is evident that every species of corn must have been originally the spontaneous production of the earth; but as the grain, previous to cultivation, would grow but scantily, its importance as food might long escape observation, and mankind would naturally derive a more obvious, though less nutritive subsistence, from acorns, berries, and other fruits which were within their reach. Ages elapsed ere Ceres, according to the Grecian mythology, descended from heaven to teach mankind the use of agriculture.

In the early ages of society, according to some historians, men were satisfied with parching their corn for immediate use as food. The next advance appears to have been, to pulverize the grain in a mortar or handmill, and to form it, by the addition of water or milk, into a kind of porridge; or to make the bruised grain into dough, which was rendered eatable by baking on embers.

Even after the method of grinding corn into meal, and separating the bran by sifting, had become known, it was long before the art of fermenting the dough, in order to produce bread full of eyes and of a soft consistence, was discovered.

Like most other operations of primary importance, the origin of the art of making bread is lost in the darkness of ages past.

We are, however, certain that the Jews practised this art in the time of Moses; for we find in the Book of Exodus, chap. xii. v. 18, a prohibition to make use of leavened, that is, fermented bread, during the celebration of the Passover. But it does not appear that loaf-bread was known to Abraham, for in his history we read frequently of cakes, but not of fermented bread. It is, therefore, very probable, that the art of making fermented bread took its rise in the East, and that the Jews learned it from the Egyptians.

The Greeks attribute the art of making bread to the god Pan.

Bakers were unknown in Rome till the year of the city 850, or about 200 years before the Christian era. The Roman bakers, according to Pliny, came from Greece with the Macedonian army. Before this period, the Romans were often distinguished by the appellation of eaters of pap.

At the time of Augustus, there were upwards of 300 baking houses in Rome, almost the whole of which were occupied by Greeks. The bakers enjoyed in ancient Rome great privileges. The public granaries were entrusted to their care; they formed a corporation, or kind of college, from which neither they nor their children were permitted to withdraw. They were exempted from guardianships and public services, which might interfere with their occupation. They were eligible to become Senators; and those who married the daughters of bakers, became members of the college.

From the establishment of bakers in Rome, the art of making loaf, or fermented bread, spread amongst the ancient Gauls; but its progress in the northern countries of Europe was slow, and in some northern districts, the luxury of eating fermented, or loaf-bread, is at this day not in general use. Some of the modern Italians consume the greatest part of their bread-flour in the state of macaroni and vermicelli, and in other forms of polenta, or soft pudding; and even at present millions of people neither sow nor reap, but content themselves with enjoying the spontaneous productions of the earth.