I am, Sir,
Your faithful servant,
ERASMUS WILSON.
A. Soyer, Esq.
Extract from “Healthy Skin, a Popular Treatise on the Skin and Hair.”
By Erasmus Wilson, F.R.S.
There is another branch of dietetics that calls for an observation from me, I mean the diet of children. Children are growing animals; nutrition in them is active, and calls for good and plentiful material in the shape of nourishment. As far as period is concerned, the same law that applies to adults is equally suited to them, three meals a day, an interval of four hours between each. I speak of children out of arms, not of infants. The substance of their meals cannot be too nutritive, or too much varied.
That the diet of children cannot be too varied or extensive is a doctrine I have long held; and I was recently much charmed in finding the subject treated with such admirable sense and judgment by a high authority in the science of living—Soyer. His letter entitled “The Nursery Dinner,” in the “Modern Housewife,” I cannot too strongly commend to the perusal and attention of my readers, and to the study of those on whom the proper rearing of children in any way rests. Speaking of the diet of children for the day, this author writes:—“Bread and milk for breakfast at eight; the dinner at one, which was composed as follows throughout the week,—roast mutton and apple pudding, roast beef and currant pudding, baked apples; boiled mutton with turnips, after which rice or vermicelli pudding; occasionally a little salt beef, with suet dumplings, plain and with currants in them, or pease pudding; or if unwell, a little veal or chicken broth, or beef-tea.”
This scheme of diet is intended for the children of persons in very moderate circumstances; but for those who can afford it he prescribes, as the dinner of one day, roast mutton: “then the next day I would give them a small piece of mutton plain boiled, with turnips, and apple tart, or a few slices of roast beef, or a small piece roasted on purpose, after which a very plain currant pudding; or, occasionally, a little pickled pork, with pease pudding, or roast pork, with baked apples, and now and then a little salt beef, but very well boiled, with suet dumplings, and occasionally, for change, either bread, vermicelli, or tapioca puddings; in case of illness, and with the approbation of the doctor, veal, mutton, or chicken-broth, sago, gruel, panada, &c. Many people may perhaps imagine that there is too much variety of food for children, but it is quite the contrary, for change of food is to the stomach what change of air is to the general health; and of course, with children, these changes must be effected with judgment.”
Soyer is perfectly right with regard to the question of variety of food for children; and the intention is so rational, that it is difficult to conceive how a difference of opinion can exist with regard to its truth; and yet I have heard parents make a boast that their children were fed exclusively upon mutton, as though it were their intention to render the stomach incapable of supporting and digesting any other kind of food,—in which they generally succeed.
Sameness of food, improper food, defective ventilation, and insufficient exercise, are the causes of most of the diseases of children; and especially of cutaneous complaints. This is the secret of the ring-worms and scald-heads of public seminaries. In some of these institutions, as I have heard, there is a ceremony in which the children take a public meal in the presence of the governors and their friends. On these occasions, the platters eclipse in whiteness the envious snow; a suppressed burst of delight is heard from the spectators; the morsel of cheese, cut with mathematical precision, would not vary a grain in the thousand platters; the bread—what ingenuity!—each with his neighbour a very twin. And how many days in the year do the children enjoy this fattening collation?—365. For three hundred and sixty-five days, for a thousand children, is this “toujours perdrix” feast the very same; and yet there are people in the world who wonder that diseases should break out, that skin affections should be rife, that consumptions should prevail. Engraft a bud of Soyer on such an institution, and health and happiness, learning, ability, and talent will take the place of disease, melancholy, stupidity, and common-place intellect. What, now, in this intelligent country, if there were a college of cookery, with Soyer for its head?