PART II.
THE MIDDAY MEAL.
Englishmen fall into two classes as regards their diet; those that take a small lunch and their chief meal in the evening, and those who make the midday meal the chief and take a small supper before retiring.
Social position is the chief agent which determines to which class an individual belongs. The working classes usually dine in the middle of the day, and the professional and upper classes dine in the evening.
We will continue our remarks on the diet of the richer classes, not because it is better or more suitable than the plainer diet of the working classes, but because the rich naturally keep a more varied table, and so will give us more material to criticise.
Luncheon is a desultory sort of meal, and though most people eat something, many do so only because they think that it is the thing to do, and not because they are really hungry.
If you will accompany us, we will go to see the luncheon given by Lord X. at his Surrey home. But we cannot go as guests, for not only have we not been invited, but we are going to criticise many things about the table and the meal. We must, therefore, remain invisible and inaudible, for it is unpardonable to make remarks at the table, even if those remarks would save a whole company from indigestion and a sleepless night.
Before the meal is served, our eyes are offended by something on the sideboard which is sufficient to destroy the appetite of any extra delicately-minded person if she only knew its secrets.
The object is nothing less than a cold pheasant pie ornamented by the head or feathers of the bird whose flesh the pie is supposed to contain. We want you to examine that ornament, and we feel pretty certain that if you do, you will never again eat meat pies.
In order that the carcases of dead animals should not encumber the earth, it has been ordained that when an animal dies, its body rapidly decomposes and becomes dissolved into simple gases. The agents that bring about the dissolution of the body are various. The chief agents which cause the decomposition of organic matter are microbes. The majority of these do not produce diseases in man, but some of them do, and some of these you might find on that pheasant pie if you could see it through a microscope.
Similarly offensive, but to a less degree, is the practice of putting pigeons’ feet sticking outside a steak pie to suggest that the remainder of the birds is inside, and putting feathers into the tails of roast pheasants.
One of the chief values of cooking is to sterilise food, so why foul the food you have so carefully sterilised by sticking decaying matter into it?
The first item of the luncheon consists of oysters, and we notice that only three out of the company of twelve partake of them. As nearly everybody who can afford them likes oysters, there is probably some special reason why nine out of twelve persons refuse them. Doubtless it is the typhoid scare, and we are much pleased to see that some persons, at all events, do occasionally give a side thought to preventive medicine.
The question of the causation of typhoid fever by oysters is one of great importance, and one that should be clearly understood by everyone. That oysters are one of the means by which some recent epidemics of typhoid fever have been spread is undoubted, but the exact part that they have played is not so easy to understand, for the latest commission upon the question found that the typhoid bacillus is killed by immersion in sea-water, that it did not occur in any oysters that they opened, and when it was injected into the oyster, it was promptly killed.
This seems to say emphatically that oysters cannot harbour the typhoid bacillus, and therefore cannot produce typhoid fever. But medicine is not as easy as that. That the oysters they examined could not produce typhoid fever is certain, but their remarks do not by any means prove that typhoid is not spread by any oysters.
At one time there was very great excitement about this question, and a tremendous lot of nonsense was talked about it. Some persons maintained the typhoid bacillus only occurred in bad oysters. We suppose a bad oyster is eaten occasionally, but Lord X.’s guests are not likely to be troubled with bad oysters.
Oysters cannot cause typhoid fever unless they contain this bacillus, and they only obtain it from sewers opening into the sea. Therefore it is only those oysters which have come from places where sewers open into the sea that can cause typhoid fever.
Of course, as soon as the oyster scare was started, everybody who caught typhoid fever attributed it to oysters she had eaten the day, the week, month, or year before. But the incubation period of typhoid fever is from one to three weeks; that means that when the bacilli get into the body they do not produce the disease till from one to three weeks after infection. Therefore it is only oysters eaten from one to three weeks before the onset of the fever that could possibly have caused the disease. As a matter of fact, oysters are a real, but not very common, method by which typhoid is spread.
We notice that one of the three guests who have taken oysters discards one because it is green. He is quite right to do so, for though it may be quite wholesome, it may be coloured with copper. Doubtless it would do no harm, but he is quite right not to risk the possibility of sickness for an oyster!
Amongst the other items of the luncheon we notice cold beef and salad. These will furnish us with material for discussion, for there are several very important medical points in connection with both.
Cold meat is a very good food in its way, but like all meat it is a strong food, that is, it is readily digested and furnishes a very large amount of nourishment. If you make a meal entirely of beef, you will not suffer from indigestion, because beef is very digestible, but you will eat too much, you will throw too much nourishment into the blood, and you will give your organs, especially the liver and kidneys, great trouble to dispose of the superfluous nourishment.
Although a cold joint of beef seems so much less rich and strong than the same joint hot, it is really very much the same in the amount of nourishment that it contains. People very rarely serve hot meat without vegetables and surroundings, but it is the fashion to serve cold meat by itself, with nothing but bread, and most persons eat very little bread indeed with their meals.
Meat should never be served alone. Vegetables of some sort must be served with both hot and cold meat, and far more vegetable and less meat than is usually served should be your aim.
Salad is of course a vegetable or vegetables, and if properly prepared and selected, it is not at all a bad form of food.
We do not suppose many of you know much of the mysteries of agriculture, for if you did, such a thing as an unwashed salad would never appear upon your tables. Salads are not washed half enough, and an unwashed salad is a most dangerous article of food. All vegetables are best when rapidly grown, and to grow vegetables rapidly it is necessary to supply them with strong manures.
You must thoroughly wash and dry any vegetables that you eat raw, for, excluding such harmless creatures as slugs and caterpillars, they may contain germs of disease. Typhoid fever is frequently caused by eating unwashed salads, especially watercress. This is a far more common method of getting typhoid than is eating infected oysters. Another disease almost invariably due to eating infected vegetables is hydatid disease, a somewhat uncommon affection in England, but one of the most formidable plagues in Iceland and Australia.
There are few salads which are not difficult to digest. Corn salad, French lettuce, endive, beetroot, and watercresses, are the least indigestible, then come in order, Cos lettuce, chicory, mustard and cress, cucumber, and radishes. Spring onions usually agree with most persons, but some people cannot stand onions in any form. Onions always produce the peculiar and decidedly unpleasant odour of the breath, and not, as is usually supposed, only in those who cannot digest them. For the smell is due to the excretion of the volatile oil of onions by the breath.
Two excellent salads are potato salad and cold vegetable salad. This morning we read a recipe for the latter in one of the back numbers of this paper, and it struck us as being a particularly inviting and desirable addition to a dinner of cold meat.
The lunch is finished off with a savoury of herrings’ roes on toast. These were probably tinned roes, or we will presume they were, so as to introduce the discussion of the values and dangers of tinned meat.
The dangers of eating tinned meats have been grossly exaggerated, and if you pay a reasonable price for tinned provisions, it is extremely unlikely that they will do you any harm. Unfortunately, many thousands of “blown” tins of putrid provisions are still sold in London yearly in spite of the care and close scrutiny of the law. But if you pay a reasonable sum for your tinned provisions, you will not get these bad tins. Of course, if you pay fourpence a dozen for tins of milk or sardines, you cannot expect to get good stuff, and you should always avoid tins reduced in price, for it usually means that they are very stale.
There are two ways in which tinned things may become poisonous, either the contents may become contaminated with the metal of the cans, or the meats themselves may undergo alkaloidal degeneration. The former, the lesser evil, can only occur in tinned meats. The latter, by far the greater evil, may occur in any preserved provisions, and is perhaps more common in stores preserved in skins or glasses than in those in tins.
Nowadays meats do not often become poisoned by the tins in which they have been kept. It used to be not uncommon for the solder of the tin to be dissolved by acid juices in the contents. This was especially frequent with tinned Morella cherries and other acid tart-fruits. But now acid fruits are nearly always sold in bottles, and only fruits which are sweet and not acid are sold in tins.
The tinned fruits that we get from California are most excellent, and we have never heard of ill-effects of any kind following their use. The canning is carried on entirely by girls on the Californian ranches. The tins are rather dear, but they are much the best things of the kind that have come beneath our notice.
The second method by which tinned meats may become poisoned is a degeneration, or decomposition if you like, by which the wholesome albumen of the contents is changed into intensely poisonous animal alkaloids. Alkaloids are very powerful bodies, and the vegetable alkaloids, such as strychnine, quinine, and morphine, are much used in medicine.
But these animal alkaloids are far more powerful for harm than even the most deadly of the vegetable poisons. So powerful are they that a quantity of one of them found in canned fish, which killed two adults who had partaken of it, was insufficient to demonstrate by our most delicate chemical tests. If these drugs are so powerful for harm, is it not possible that they may be equally powerful for good, when their actions and doses are worked out?
What causes this curious decomposition of preserved provisions is not known. In tinned meats, at all events, it cannot be ordinary putrefaction, for this cannot occur without air, and the tins are air-tight. It is probably due to organisms, but this is uncertain.
This form of decomposition of meat cannot be told by the flavour of the provisions; and its deleterious effects cannot be destroyed by boiling. There is no way to prevent it save by buying preserved provisions which have not been kept for long.