To make friends with cows and sheep you need salt. With a few handfuls of it in your pocket you can soon make them leave the richest grass and come crowding around you when you take your daily walk in the fields. We ourselves crave salt in food, but we do not lick it eagerly as some domestic as well as wild animals do. In Central Africa, however, where it is a luxury hard to get, men and women devour it with the same zest that our youngsters show for candy.
So far as I know, no animal likes sour things; plain water would be invariably preferred to lemonade. Cows and pigs, to be sure, eagerly eat apples, and other fruits, and so do horses; they eat them though they be sour; but if you give them a whole bushel, they pick out the sweet ones first.
The liking for sour things is a human attribute. School children are often more eager for a pickle than for a stick of candy; and adults as well as the young ones enjoy tart or sub-acid fruits of all kinds. What could be better than a pie or a tart made of green gooseberries or sour currants? I would give all the confectionery and sweet cakes in the world for a tree of sour cherries. Of the delights of sour salads I wrote at length in the chapter on French supremacy.
Bitter herbs are eaten sometimes by browsing animals, but I doubt if they would select them by choice. The liking for bitter foods and drinks is not only a human attribute; it is a specifically epicurean trait. How very much better Scotch marmalade made of bitter oranges is than marmalade made of ordinary oranges! Slightly bitter also is the best pomelo. Bitter almond is a favorite flavoring for cakes and candies. The best of all salads, escarole and the endive tribe in general, are bitter. Bottled "bitters" are widely used as appetizers.
Physicians of all periods have agreed that bitter substances increase the appetite. Professor Pawlow considers them the strongest of all stimulants to a jaded palate. He inclines to the belief that "bitters not only act directly on the gustatory nerves in the mouth, but that they also act on the mucous membrane of the stomach in such a way that sensations are generated which contribute to the passionate craving for food."
A COMEDY OF ERRORS.
While thus admitting the gastronomic and therapeutic value of bitters, I must nevertheless call attention to the fact that their allurements, as mere sensations of taste, are not considerable. We would not care so much for Scotch marmalade as we do were it not for the pungent fragrance of the Seville orange which accompanies its bitter taste; or for the bitter grapefruit were it not so highly perfumed. Hops are valued for their tonic bitter but still more for their agreeable odor, without which beer, for instance, is a flat failure. We never eat quinine for fun, because it has no fragrance to modify its intense bitter; nor, for the same reason, would we use strychnine as a condiment even though it were as harmless as sugar.
Now, what is true of bitter, is true also of all other sensations of taste—salt, sour, and sweet. Considered as mere sensations of taste they have no great gastronomic value—not great at any rate when compared with the sensations of smell. On this point I need not dwell, as I discussed it briefly in Chapter II under the headings of "An Amazing Blunder" and "A New Psychology of Eating," in which I pointed out that there is only one unvarying kind of sour and one unvarying kind of sweet and that all the varied and countless pleasures of the table are due chiefly to the sense of smell which enables us to enjoy them if we breathe out through the nose while munching our food.
To this day it seems almost incredible that it should have remained for me to make this extremely important discovery; yet all my researches have failed to bring to light a psychologist who anticipated me. My surprise abated somewhat at the time when the theory was first announced that mosquitoes are responsible for malaria. Having just read Humboldt's travels in South America and Stanley's "Darkest Africa," I remembered that both of these writers had come within an inch of the truth, yet missed it completely. The case of Stanley is really comic. Emin Pasha had informed him that he "always took a mosquito curtain with him, as he believed that it was an excellent protector against miasmatic exhalations of the night." Now, how in the world could these "miasmatic exhalations" (which were held responsible for malaria) have been kept out by a mosquito net when, as Stanley does not fail to note, the same air "enters by the doors of the house and under the flaps and through ventilators to poison the inmates"?