In deciding which kinds of animal food are most healthful, several particulars are to be regarded. The flesh of young animals is more tender than that of the old ones, but yet they usually are not so easily digested. Beef, and Mutton, and Venison, when tender, are considered the meats which are most easily digested, and best for weak stomachs. Venison is more stimulating than Beef and Mutton. These meats, when tough, are not so easily digested as when tender.
All meats are made more tender and digestible by hanging.
Solid meats, properly cooked, are more easily digested than soups and broths. For it is found that these liquids are never digested till the water is absorbed, leaving a solid mass more undigestible than was the solid meat. When useful to invalids, it is because they supply the loss of the withdrawn fluids of the body, but not because more easily digested. The white meats, such as Chicken and Veal, are best for invalids, because less stimulating than dark meats.
Liver contains so much oil that it is not good for invalids or dyspeptics.
The digestibility and healthfulness of meat depends very much upon the mode of cooking. Boiled meats are most easily digested, when properly boiled. Roasting, broiling, and baking, are healthful modes of cooking, but frying is a very pernicious mode of preparing meats, the reason of which will be explained hereafter.
Though there is a disagreement of opinion among practitioners and physiologists, as to the propriety of using any animal food, they are all agreed in regard to certain general principles that should regulate its use. They are as follows:—Less animal food should be used in warm climates than in cold, and less, also, in summer than in winter. The reason of this is, that heat is stimulating to the system, and as meat diet is also stimulating, when heat increases, meat, as a diet, should decrease, or fevers may ensue.
Another principle is, that the proportions of meat diet should depend somewhat on the constitution and circumstances. When a person is of full habit, or inclined to inflammatory attacks of any kind, the proportion of animal food should be much less than in other cases.
On the contrary, when there is a state of the system that demands gentle stimulus, an increase of meat diet is sometimes useful.
Persons subject to cutaneous eruptions are sometimes entirely cured by long abstinence from animal food, and all kinds of oily substances.