Menus.—Food taken at a stated time constitutes a meal. It may consist of a single food material, as bread, or a single dish, as soup; or it may contain many kinds of food and many dishes. When the day’s ration consists of a single food, there is no trouble in arranging the bill of fare, for all meals are alike. But as soon as we have two foods, we may consider whether they will digest better if eaten together or separately, and which way they will please the palate better. Balanced diets do not necessarily afford attractive menus. Macaroni and oatmeal would make a fairly well balanced meal except as regards ash constituents, but no one would call such a combination pleasing. By the substitution of a little cheese and an orange for the oatmeal, a meal containing about the same fuel value and proportion of protein could be arranged, and it would certainly appeal more to the appetite, and furnish better proportions of ash constituents.
In the construction of the menu for the day or meal, we must consider not only food values and time of day and combinations which shall be digestible, but flavor, color, texture, and temperature of our foods. The study of digestible combinations belongs to the science of nutrition. The harmonious blending of tastes, odors, colors, and the like is an art. Just as there are pleasing combinations of sound, so there are harmonies of flavor; certain dishes seem naturally to “go together.” Habit has a great deal to do with food combinations. A Chinaman would not eat sugar on rice; a Japanese would not cook beans with molasses as the Bostonian does. It is interesting to experiment with new combinations, and study to find out why old ones are pleasing. Why do we like crackers with soup? Butter on bread? Toast with eggs? Peas with lamb chops?
Digestible menus.—Some of our eating habits are worth preserving and cultivating. Fresh fruit for breakfast stimulates
the appetite and helps to prevent or overcome constipation. A mild-flavored food like cereal is better relished before we have had meats or other highly flavored food. Soup at the beginning of a meal puts the stomach in better condition to digest the food that follows. Ice cream at the end of a meal is less likely to chill the stomach than at the beginning. Bread and butter afford a good combination of fat and carbohydrate. Crackers help in the breaking up of cheese into particles easy to digest.
Not all of our eating habits are good, however. Griddlecakes, melted butter, and maple sirup taste good, but the cakes make a pasty mass difficult for digestive juices to penetrate. The sirup is likely to ferment, and the butter coating the whole delays digestion greatly. Chicken salad is popular, but combinations of protein with much fat (as in the mayonnaise dressing) always digest very slowly. Simple dishes, without rich sauces or gravies, and not excessively high in fat, are easiest of digestion. Pastries, fried foods, meats with much fat, like pork and sausage, are always more or less difficult and should be attempted only by the strong, or when the body is free from physical or nervous weariness, and not about to undertake mental work.
Attention to the art of menu making not only helps to make the diet easier to digest, but also better balanced. Foods which are similar in color, flavor, and texture, like potatoes and rice, are not artistic in combination, and it is better to substitute for one of them a green vegetable, or meat or butter, in which case we get a better balance, as more ash, protein, or fat would then be included with the starch of the rice or potato.
In making the bill of fare it is a great mistake to consider each meal by itself alone. If we do so, some days are likely to be very high in fuel, while others may be very low. Then,
too, the impression left from one meal carries over to the next. We do not care to see on the dinner table the same foods that we saw at luncheon. Our love of variety is one of nature’s ways of seeing to it that we get different kinds of foodstuffs in our diet. Variety stimulates appetite, but this does not mean a great variety at one meal. The truest variety is obtained by a few well-selected dishes at each meal. If we do not exhaust our resources on one meal, we shall be able to have a greater range of foods in the course of a week. A hotel may have fifty or sixty items on its bill of fare, but after a few days one feels as if there were a great sameness, because all of them are impressed on the mind at each meal and every day.
Dietaries.—A dietary, as we shall use the term here,[19] is a statement of the food requirements of a person or group of persons for a day or some other definite length of time, with a selection of foods to satisfy this requirement.