Splendid, cooling summer foods, rich in the blood-purifying organic salts, are watermelons, muskmelons. cantaloupes, pumpkins, squashes and other members of the melon family.
The green vegetables are most beneficial when eaten raw, with a dressing of lemon juice and olive oil. Avoid the use of vinegar as much as possible. It is a product of fermentation and a powerful preservative which retards digestion as well as fermentation, both processes being very much of the same character.
Use neither pepper nor salt at the table. They may be used sparingly in cooking. Strong spices and condiments are more or less irritating to the mucous linings of the intestinal tract. They paralyze gradually the nerves of taste. At first they stimulate the digestive organs; but, like all other stimulants, in time they produce weakness and atrophy.
Cooking of Vegetables
While most vegetables are not improved by cooking, we do not mean that they should never be cooked. Many diet reformers go to extremes when they claim that all the organic salts in fruits and vegetables are rendered inorganic by cooking. This is an exaggera-tion. Cooking is merely a mechanical process of subdivision, not a chemical process of transformation. Mechanical processes of division do not dissolve or destroy organic molecules to any great extent.
Nevertheless, it remains true that the green leafy vegetables are not improved by cooking. It is different with the starchy tubers and roots like potatoes, turnips, etc., and with other starchy foods such as rice and grains. Here the cooking serves to break up and separate the hard starch granules and to make them more pervious to penetration by the digestive juices.
How to Cook Vegetables
After the vegetables are thoroughly washed and cut into pieces as desired, place them in the cooking vessel, adding only enough water to keep them from burning, cover the vessel closely with a lid and let them steam slowly in their own juices.
The leafy vegetables (cabbage, spinach, kale, etc.), usually contain enough water for their own steaming.
Cook all vegetables only as long as is required to make them soft enough for easy mastication. Do not throw away a drop of the water in which such vegetables as carrots, beets, asparagus, oyster plant, egg plant, etc., have been cooked. Use what is left for the making of soups and sauces.