Next to grain, pulse, and nuts, we may place the farinaceous roots, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and Jerusalem artichokes. Of these, the first, contains the most nourishment, which depends on the great proportion of starch with which it abounds. Other pot-herbs possess little nourishment. Cabbage and greens, for example, are chiefly composed of fibre, mucilage, and water, and the same is true of onions, leeks, celery, lettuce, and broccoli.
Of fruits, those which are most farinaceous and mucilaginous, and which are sweet from the sugar contained in them, are the most nutritious. The pear should seem to answer this description the nearest, but experience proves that this fruit is of less easy digestion than the apple, whose greater acidity corrects the heavy quality of the saccharine matter with which the pear abounds.
GENERAL OPERATIONS OF COOKERY.
Few of the substances which we use for food are consumed in the state in which they are originally produced by nature. With the exception of some fruits and salads, all of them undergo some preparation. In most cases, indeed, this is indispensable; for, otherwise, they would not only be less wholesome and nutritive, but less digestible. The preceding observations, therefore, are only applicable to the materials when cooked, and not to the crude vegetables and raw flesh in the undressed state.
The general processes of cookery resolve themselves into the various modes of applying heat under different circumstances. They are the following—roasting, frying, broiling, baking, stewing, and boiling. These operations not only soften the raw materials, and render them alimentary, but the chemical constitution of the cooked substance suffers also such alterations, that its constituent parts can often no longer be recognised.
ROASTING ON A SPIT
Appears to be the most ancient process of rendering animal food eatable by means of the action of heat.
Spits were used very anciently in all parts of the world, and perhaps, before the plain practice of hanging the meat to a string before the fire. Ere the iron age had taught men the use of metals, these roasting instruments were made of wood; and as we find it in Virgil,[20] slender branches of the hazel tree were particularly chosen—
————“Stabit sacer hircus ad aram
“Pinguiaque in verubus torrebimus extra colurnis.”
The altar let the guilty goat approach,
And roast his fat limbs on the hazel broach.”
[20] Georgics II. 545.