In households of limited means it is often customary to use succory with coffee. We do not pretend to pronounce this, if taken in moderate quantity, hurtful; but we do say, that it is a poor substitute for coffee, and that there is nothing in it to recommend its use. A far better mixture is milk and sugar, and there is good reason for it; both milk and sugar are articles of food. Milk contains the same ingredients as blood, and sugar is changed in the body into fat, which is indispensable to us, especially to the process of breathing. Having taken no food through the night, the loss our blood has suffered during sleep by perspiration, and the fat which has been lost by respiration, must be compensated for in the morning. For this, milk and sugar in coffee are excellent. It is good for children to have a taste for sweetened milk, or milk-coffee, in the morning. We must not find fault with them if they like it. Nature very wisely gave them a liking for sugar; they need it, because their pulse must be quicker, their respiration stronger, in order to facilitate the assimilation of food in their bodies, and also to promote growth. Not that adults need no sugar; but the sugar necessary for them is formed from the starch contained in their food. For this purpose the digestive apparatus must be strongly developed; with children this is not the case; therefore they are given sugar, instead of the starch to make it from. Many diseases, particularly rickets—prevailing mostly among the children of the poor—are the consequence of feeding the child with bread and potatoes; these contain starch it is true, but the digestive apparatus of children being yet too weak to change them into fat, the result is that the flesh falls away, and the bones grow soft and crooked.
But he who, to promote digestion, takes coffee immediately after dinner, does best not to use sugar or milk; for both, so far from helping digestion, are an additional burden to the full stomach, and disturb its labor more than the coffee can facilitate it.
It is very good to take wheat bread for breakfast. Wheat has nearly twice the quantity of sugar and starch that rye contains, and it is besides easier to digest. And as it is our principal duty in the morning to replace as quickly as possible what we have lost during the night, it is a matter of importance to give the stomach such food as is both nutritive and quickly digested.
CHAPTER VI.
BREAKFAST.
Workmen, even those who must perform hard labor, are sufficiently strengthened by coffee and wheat bread in the morning to begin their work. But to be able to continue it, a more substantial breakfast is necessary, since coffee and bread alone would only replace what was lost during the night. On the continent of Europe it is therefore the custom to take coffee, or milk, and bread very early, and, at about nine or ten o'clock a more substantial meal, a kind of lunch.
Breakfast is with but few the principal meal of the day; for those, however, who rise early it is the one taken with the best appetite. This fact ought to induce all to give attention to this meal; especially those who early in the morning have worked hard already, and those who, mindful of the old saying,
"Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,"
intend not to idle away the precious morning hours.