PART III.

THE DINNER.

At what time do you dine? Dinner is the chief physiological event in the day. Therefore the answer to the question “At what time do you dine?” is a very important one, although the true reason for the answer is not often understood.

There are really but two ways of arranging the day’s meals; the one, the more rational, we may call the French way; the other, the less rational, we may call the English labourer’s way. The first arrangement is carried out by nearly every nation except ourselves. It consists in a very light breakfast, a fair meal after noon, and the chief meal in the evening.

The second arrangement consists of a fair breakfast, the chief meal at about one o’clock, and a small meal in the evening.

And then there is our own, the irrational method of feeding—a big breakfast, a scrap for lunch, and the dinner in the evening.

But if this division of meals is not physiologically correct, why do we adhere to it?

The answer to this is that we choose the least harmful of several very wrong methods. The man in the middle class in England does not apportion out for himself any definite time for meals; if he did not dine in the evening, he would never properly digest any meal. Take a busy City man, for instance. He arranges his time in such a manner that he swallows down his last teaspoonful of tea at breakfast about a quarter of a second before he runs to catch his train. If it were not that he has to keep still while in the train, he would never digest his meal at all.

And then he rushes out of his office to snatch a bit of lunch between two items of business. He may play a game of chess over his lunch, but such a gross waste of time as sitting down for five minutes after his meal is never tolerated until he becomes a martyr to dyspepsia.

But after dinner he does rest, because he has nothing else to do. His business for the day is over, and he digests his meal in peace.

But with the working-classes the case is very different. They have certain hours given to them for their meals, during which time they are not allowed to work, and for such persons it is advisable to dine in the middle of the day.

It would be of little good for us to describe the few advantages and overwhelming abuses of a sumptuous banquet, for, most fortunately for themselves, extremely few of our readers are ever likely to be present at one. Nor would it suit our purpose to describe a one-course dinner, so we will take the chief meal of a well-to-do man of the upper middle-class as the subject of our remarks.

Here is the menu:—

We will first criticise the dinner as a whole and then dilate separately upon each item.

In the first place the meal is much too long. Dinner should never last more than half an hour, whereas this meal will take a full hour at least.

The second point is a most important one and one which is frequently overlooked, yet it is one of the most important causes of ill-health. It is this. There are six courses in this dinner, and every one of them contains animal food. Every item in the list is a concentrated food, rich in nourishment, and readily digestible. Consequently nearly the whole of what is eaten will get into the blood, and there, being greatly in excess of what is needed, it will irritate the organs by which it must be got rid of.

One word about the drinks. The stomach of man is made to digest solids, and one of the most fertile causes of indigestion is taking excess of fluids with meals. Drinking between meals or when the stomach is empty is not such an important cause of indigestion as is drinking largely with meals, because drinking large quantities dilutes the gastric secretion, which loses its digestive power if freely diluted.

At no meal should more than half a pint of fluid be taken, and that is best taken at the end of the repast.

The pernicious habit of serving different wines with each course is one of the most harmful customs of modern dieting. If you have wine at all, have light wines only, and never change the drinks with the various courses.

Of course, the dinner we are criticising is excellently served and there is no waiting between the courses. But when people whose purses are strictly limited give dinners, they are not content with an ordinary two-course meal, but must ape the doings of their more wealthy neighbours and give elaborate dinners, which for obvious reasons are badly served.

Waiting between the courses of a meal is very injurious to the stomach. A little wait after the soup does no harm at all. Soup is more a digestive stimulant than a food, and therefore it is advisable to wait a little between the soup and the next course. But after that there should be no delay, and the meal should be finished as soon as possible.

There are thirty persons sitting down to this dinner, and we notice that they have all washed their hands. Here is the first thing that we should all do well to copy. Everybody should wash her hands before sitting down to a meal. Don’t laugh and say that everybody does do so! We know such is not the case, and it is just those persons for whom it is most necessary to wash before eating who neglect this hygienic measure.

Workers in factories, especially those who have to work with lead or other poisonous materials, should be scrupulously careful never to touch food with dirty hands. Neglect of this precaution is the commonest method by which chronic poisoning is produced.

Legislation has been doing all in its power to limit the deleterious effects of poisons upon those who are compelled to work in them. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to get factory workers to wash their hands before eating, and many firms have been severely censured when cases of chronic poisoning have occurred in their works, when the sufferers themselves were entirely to blame because they would not wash their hands.

To return to the dinner. At the table, soups are divided into two groups—thick and clear. Dietetically, the division is extremely well marked, for the actions and uses of the two are totally different.

Clear soup—that is, soup which is quite free from floating particles—is not a food and contains no nourishment. This may seem a strong statement to make and you may disbelieve it; but still it is a fact. Clear soup is a solution of the débris of animal tissue. The nourishing part of animal flesh is insoluble in boiling water and therefore is not present in clear soup. The only fluid which contains nutritive animal matter after it has been boiled is milk.[2] But if it is not a food, clear soup is a powerful stimulant and is a good opening to a big meal. But it should only be taken in very small quantities, and by most persons beyond middle age it is better not taken at all!

Thick soup is a nutritious preparation owing its nourishing power entirely to the solid particles suspended in it. Like clear soup, however, it is chiefly a solution of animal débris—the waste products of life.

It used to be the rule to give beef-tea and other meat extractives in all illnesses, but fortunately the custom is dying out as our knowledge increases. There are many diseases—for instance, gout—which are due to excess of waste products in the blood; or, to put it in an intelligible form, they are due to substances identical with beef-tea circulating in the blood. And yet these people used to be fed on soup, when of all things in the world it is that which they should avoid.

Before we continue the dinner, we wish to say a few words about this custom of giving beef-teas, etc., to invalids. The ordinary soups, beef-teas, meat essences and suchlike, which are commonly given to the sick, are inappropriate for their purpose and are frequently exceedingly injurious. You cannot feed anybody on beef-tea. It is a fairly useful stimulant, but as a food it is worthless. But you can make a liquid food which contains a considerable part of the nourishment of meat and is, moreover, not indigestible.

Meat-juice is the fluid obtained by squeezing raw beef. If you hang up a large piece of raw meat, a reddish opalescent liquid will drop from it. This is raw meat-juice and is practically a solution of blood albumen. It is exceedingly nutritious and is very useful in many kinds of disease. It is frequently ordered nowadays by physicians. It must be made only from beef which you are perfectly certain is quite sound. There is really danger in giving this meat-juice or raw meat of any kind, and a girl must be pretty certain of her butcher before she attempts to give it to an invalid.

Another less unpleasant way of making the same or nearly the same preparation is the following. Take a pound of rump steak and shred it up with a knife. Put it into warm water and let it digest in a very cool oven for four hours. You must be certain that the oven never reaches a temperature above 160° F., for at about twenty degrees above this albumen coagulates, and instead of meat-juice you will only have beef-tea. After the preparation has been in the oven for four hours, take it out and strain it.

When you are feeding an invalid, a time in convalescence arrives when the patient wants the nourishment of meat, but cannot digest so solid a substance as beef or mutton. Then you can give her the following broth—

Take half a pound of the best rump steak, and having shredded it up finely, boil it in a pint of water for four hours, and then press the whole through a sieve. If necessary or desirable, vegetables may be added, or chicken may be used in place of beef. The great point to remember in making this is to press everything through the sieve. This forms the most nourishing of all liquids; yet it is not liquid nourishment, for the nutritive portion exists in the solid particles which float about in the liquid.

The fish course is usually a very digestible one. On the whole, boiled fish is more digestible than fried fish, and may be given to invalids earlier in convalescence. Boiled sole is the most readily digested of all fish, but with the exception of herrings, mackerel, salmon, eel, and some other fresh-water fish, all fish is good wholesome food. The fish mentioned as being indigestible must never be given to anybody whose stomach is in any way delicate or readily upset.

Excepting oysters, all shellfish are indigestible. Mussels have always had an unfair amount of abuse. It is true that they cause more deaths than any other kind of shellfish, but then they are eaten in much larger quantities. No shellfish should ever be eaten raw, for they all feed on carrion and filth of very description, and so may contain large numbers of very virulent germs.

It is well to remember that fish is meat diet. People make absurd mistakes about this, and look upon fish as part of a milk diet. Fish has essentially the same composition as butcher’s meat, but it contains more water and fewer extractives.

It is well known to everybody that the medical profession has for ages urged upon the public the dangers of excessive flesh-eating, yet has it never clearly stated why eating too much meat is so far more injurious than eating too much bread or vegetables. But the explanation is really very simple.

Meat is more readily soluble and digestible than farinaceous foods. If you fill your stomach with meat, all of it will be digested; practically the whole of it will get into the blood, and there being in excess of what is needed, it gives the various organs of the body great trouble to get rid of it.

On the other hand, if you take a big meal of cabbage, only a very small proportion of it is digestible, and so very little will get into the blood. After eating excess of vegetables or farinaceous food you will probably be sick, and there is an end of the matter.

But besides nourishment, meat contains a large quantity of extractives—substances which are waste products of vital action; which are practically animal poisons, and which enter the blood without requiring digestion, but which are useless to the animal economy, and have to be got rid of at once.

It is to extractives that meats owe their flavour, and the more tasty and succulent your dishes are, the greater is the amount of extractives that they contain.

It is in the entrée that meat flavourings are carried to their highest pitch, and it is the entrée which is usually the most harmful course at the dinner.

If the entrée were discarded in favour of a vegetable course, it would indeed be a blessing. If you have entrées at all, let them be absolutely simple, such as the one which has been chosen for our specimen dinner.

You may be surprised when we say that meat is more digestible than farinaceous food, and yet that when treating dyspepsia we avoid meat as far as possible. But the apparent contradiction is readily dispelled.

Indigestion is usually due to disease of the stomach, and failure of its power for digestion. Meat is digested practically only in the stomach; farinaceous foods are not digested in the stomach, but lower down in the alimentary canal. It is only when indigestion is due to failure of the stomach that it is benefited by the avoidance of meat. In many forms of dyspepsia a farinaceous diet gives the greatest trouble of all.

Of the joint we will say nothing at present. Horse-radish is a good aromatic digestive stimulant. It used to be used much more frequently than it is, because of its anti-scorbutic properties.

Not many years ago a whole dinner-party was poisoned by eating aconite root in mistake for horse-radish. Nor has this accident happened but once; many cases of poisoning in this way have been recorded. And it is a very terrible thing, for a little aconite root may kill a dozen persons at a time. Aconite root is the root of the blue monk’s-hood (Aconitum Napellus), one of our native English plants. It is rare in the wild state, but is frequently grown in gardens for the sake of its fine spikes of dark blue blossoms. How the aconite root can be mistaken for horse-radish we cannot quite see, for the poisonous root is carrot-shaped, rarely more than three inches long, almost scentless, and with a bitter “mawkish” taste. The smallest quantity of the root produces, when chewed, tingling, followed by prolonged numbness of the tongue and cheeks. All parts of the monk’s-hood are extremely poisonous, but the root is the most deadly part.

And now for a few words about vegetables, the most neglected, yet one of the most important food-stuffs.

It is impossible to over-estimate the value of the potato as an article of diet. Alone it is not a good food, but it is the ideal vegetable to have with meat.

An Irishman asked a companion to dinner, and in answer to the question as to the fare, replied, “Just an illigant pace of corned bafe and pertaters.” To which his friend replied, “My own dinner to a tay, barring the bafe.” Let us hope that he accepted the invitation, for corned beef and potatoes make a good, if rough, meal, but potatoes alone are not sufficient.

It has been questioned by many persons if the introduction of the potato has proved an advantage, for it has driven out the older vegetables, such as salsify and celeriac. But if we look upon the potato merely in the light of a usurper of the place formerly occupied by other vegetables, we must still consider it as an immense boon to mankind.

That the potato is not very easily digested we grant, and it should be avoided by the subjects of dyspepsia. But in the dietary of perfectly healthy persons, the digestibility of the food is of secondary importance to that of over-strong and rich food. For as we have over and over again said, the great fault in modern diet is not that we eat too much, but that we take our food too strong.

All vegetables, especially spinach and Brussels sprouts, have lately been shown to produce marked improvement in gouty conditions; and experimental evidence has proved that their action upon gout is a definite chemical one. That gout is often in some way connected with an excessive meat diet has long been known, but it is not even now certain what it is in meat which tends to cause gout. But that the condition is markedly benefited by a vegetable diet, there is no question. The only difficulty in applying this observation to practice—and it is a real difficulty, although enthusiasts will persist in shutting their eyes to it—is that a vegetable diet is far more difficult to digest than a meat diet, and gouty persons are frequently dyspeptic.

Sweets served after dinner should always be simple. Stewed fruit, cabinet puddings, farinaceous or milk puddings, or pancakes, etc.; but not rich plum puddings or highly flavoured concoctions of any kind. Rich sweets are worse than rich entrées, for besides being equally rich in extractives, they are exceedingly indigestible.

The question as to whether ices and iced water are good to take with dinner is worth a moment’s consideration.

In very small quantities iced water is the best of all fluids to take with dinner, but the quantity taken should be very small. And the same is true of ices. A very little ice after dinner helps digestion, but a large quantity seriously injures the stomach.

Coffee in small quantities is a digestive stimulant. If taken it should be drunk immediately the dinner is completed.

Having thoroughly considered the subject, we have come to the decided conclusion that by far the best dinner for those who can afford it, with very few exceptions, is one of two courses. The first course to consist of light fish with vegetables, or a very simple entrée with vegetables; and the second to consist of a joint of meat or some equivalent also with vegetables. This may be followed by a simple sweet or savoury.

Also, we believe that the average person does not eat too much, but that she takes too much meat, far too much extractives, and too little vegetable.

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