"A slice of fresh pine-apple," writes Dr. Fernie, "is about as wise a thing as one can take by way of dessert after a substantial meal." This is because fresh pine-apple juice has been found to act upon animal food in very much the same way that the gastric juice acts within the stomach. But vegetarians should eat fresh fruit at the beginning of meals rather than at the end.
The pine-apple is useful in all ordinary cases of sore-throat.
One pine-apple of average size should yield half a pint of juice.
Tinned or cooked pine-apple is useless for curative purposes.
Pine Kernel.
Pine kernels are recommended to those who find other nuts difficult to digest. They are the most easily digested of all the nuts. They are often used for cooking in the place of suet, being very oily.
Plum, Prune.
The disfavour with which "stone fruits," especially plums, are generally regarded owes its being to the fact that they are too often eaten when unripe. When ripe, they are as wholesome as any other fruit. Unripe they provoke choleraic diarrhœa.
The prune, a variety of dried plum, has been recommended as a remedy against viciousness and irritability. An American doctor declares that there is a certain medicinal property in the prune which acts directly upon the nervous system, and that is where the evil passions have their seat. He reports that he tried the experiment of including prunes in the meals of the vicious, intractable youths of a reformatory, and that by the end of a week they were peaceable as lambs. Most writers who comment on this seem to suggest that any fruit which is mildly aperient would produce the same effect. But the mother of a large family tells me that she has observed that prunes seem to possess a soothing property that is all their own.