A brief guide to the Food Collection

by Bethnal Green Museum

The most common as well as the most important form in which wheaten flour is consumed as food is bread. In Case 25, which may be called the “Bread Case,” the constituent ingredients, with their respective quantities used in making bread, are exhibited. There are three methods of making bread, the ordinary or fermented process, the unfermented process, and that employed in making aërated bread. Bread is either vesiculated or unvesiculated, the latter is called unleavened bread, and consists of bread, and of such preparations of flour as are known by the names of biscuits, cakes, &c. of which two cases of samples are shown by Messrs. Peek, Frean, and Co. of London, and J. W. Mackie and Sons of Edinburgh. For other details concerning bread the visitor is referred to the printed labels in the case.

Animal Food or Flesh.

According to the classification of the Food Collection, Flesh is placed next to Wheat and other cereals in Group 3, which includes nitrogenous substances capable of producing both flesh and force.

Animal food is composed of the same materials as vegetable food. It is formed of the same elements, and presents the same proximate principles. It contains water and mineral matters of the same kind as plants. Its force-producing substances appear in the form of fat, and its flesh and force-producing substances in the form of fibrin and albumen.

Milk.

Of all animal foods milk is the most important, as it may be regarded as the type of human food. Case 55 contains an analysis of cow’s milk, human milk, and asses milk, and is accompanied with explanatory labels.

Milk is preserved in various ways, so that it may be taken on long voyages or otherwise employed as a diet where living animals cannot be kept to produce it. It is preserved both in a liquid and solid state. The latter mode of preparation appears to have the advantage.

Butter is formed from cream by the process of “churning.” The casein is held in solution in the milk by the aid of certain salts; when these are removed by acids the casein coagulates, and forms “curds.” When the curd is removed with the butter and pressed it forms cheese. The best and highest-priced cheeses are those in which there is most butter. The casein without the butter is hard and indigestible.

The Flesh of Animals.

At the western end of the gallery over the upright cases containing wheat, barley, oats, maize, &c., are arranged some selected heads of oxen in illustration of the principal breeds in this country.