Koumiss.—Dissolve one fourth of a two-cent cake of compressed yeast, and two teaspoonfuls of white sugar, in three tablespoonfuls of lukewarm water. Pour this into a quart bottle and add sufficient fresh, sweet milk to nearly fill. Shake well, and place in a room of the temperature of 70° to 80° F., and allow it to ferment about six hours. Cork tightly and tie the cork in. Put in a cool place, act above 60° and let it remain a week, when it will be ready for use. In making koumiss be sure that the milk is pure, the bottle sound, and the yeast fresh. Open the bottle with a champagne tap. If there is any curd or thickening resembling cheese, the fermentation has been prolonged beyond the proper point, and the koumiss should not be used.
Milk and Lime Water.—In cases where milk forms large curds, or sours in the stomach, lime water prepared in the following manner may be added to the milk before using:—
Into a gallon jar of water, put a piece of lime the size of one's fist. Cover the jar and let the lime settle over night. In the morning, draw the water off the top with a syphon, being careful not to move the jar so as to mix again the particles of lime with the water.
Two tablespoonfuls of the lime water is usually sufficient for a pint of milk.
Peptonized Milk for Infants.—One gill of cows' milk, fresh and unskimmed; one gill of pure water; two tablespoonfuls of rich, sweet cream; two hundred grains of milk sugar, one and one fourth grains of extractum pancreatis; four grains of sodium bicarbonate. Put the above in a clean nursing bottle, and place the bottle in water so warm that the whole hand cannot be held in it longer for one minute without pain. Keep the milk at this temperature for exactly twenty minutes. Prepare fresh just before using.
BEEF-TEA, BROTHS, ETC.
Beef tea and meat broths are by no means so useful as foods for the sick as is generally supposed. The late Dr. Austin Flint used to say of these foods, that "the valuation by most persons outside of the medical profession, and by many within it, of beef tea or its analogues, the various solutions, most of the extracts, and the expressed juice of meat, is a delusion and a snare which has led to the loss of many lives by starvation.
"The quantity of nutritive material in these preparations is insignificant or nil, and it is vastly important that they should be reckoned as of little or no value, except as indirectly conducive to nutrition by acting as stimulants for the secretion of the digestive fluids, or as vehicles for the introduction of the nutritive substances. Furthermore, it is to be considered that water and pressure not only fail to extract the alimentary principles of meat, but that the excrementitious principles, or the products of destructive assimilation, are thereby extracted."
Vegetable broths prepared from grains and legumes possess a much higher nutritive value, while they lack the objectionable features of meat broths.