“That must be a funny arrangement—food cooked for a plant!”
“It is more wonderful than you can imagine. As the sprout pushes upward the flour in the grain is being turned to sugar, real sugar, very sweet and easily dissolved in water; so that the young plant has for its nourishment a sufficient supply of sweetened water or, to express it in another way, a sort of milk.”
“Oh, yes!” cried Emile. “Now I understand. [[370]]Last Christmas Mother Ambroisine put some wheat to sprout in a plate and kept it moist on the mantelpiece. When the little blades began to show, the wheat was all soft and would crush under your fingers; and it gave out a sort of very sweet milk.”
“This wonderful transformation of flour into sugar during germination is turned to account by man in making beer. He causes barley to germinate, and when he judges that all the flour substance it contains has turned to sugar he quickly kills the little plants, as otherwise the sweetened liquid would be taken up by them and would undergo another transformation by being turned into plant substance. Accordingly, the grain is promptly dried in an oven, after which it is ground in a mill, and this ground barley is called malt. By adding water and keeping it at a mild temperature we induce a fresh change: the sugar turns to alcohol, which is the essential element of beer and wine.”
“The flour of the grain, then,” said Jules, “turns to sugar or to plant substance or to alcohol, according to the way it is treated; is that it?”
“Yes, and it can be converted into many other things. Boiled with water it becomes paste. After entering into the composition of beer it can be turned into vinegar by being left exposed to the air and allowed to sour. But we will not now dwell on these various changes. Let us return to the subject of beer. In order to impart to that beverage the bitter taste and the aroma peculiar to it, we use hops. [[371]]Barley is the fundamental ingredient of the drink, hops are the flavoring.
“The hop-plant is a long, slender vine unable to hold itself up without supporting poles, around which it twines to the height of perhaps ten meters. Its leaves are lobed somewhat like those of the grape, and its fruit takes the shape of cones or catkins similar to those of the pine-tree, but much smaller and composed of thin scales coated with a sort of bitter resin. It is these cones that are used in making beer. Hops are extensively cultivated in Alsace and in Germany. The chief enemies of the hop-vine are two worms, one of which nibbles the roots and the other the inside of the stem or vine.
“The epialidæ are distinguished from all other moths by their very short antennæ. Their larvæ live in the ground and feed on roots. The most important member of this family is the hop-moth, of which the male has white wings touched with silver and edged with a reddish border, and the female has fore wings of bright yellow with tawny edges and two tawny oblique stripes. The grub is whitish, covered with little yellow tubercles overgrown with black hair. It does great damage to hop plantations by gnawing the roots. To destroy it the hop-grower is advised to spray the base of the vine with water in which hog-manure has been left to steep—an application that is said to kill the worms.
“Within the stem of the plant lives the grub of the pyralis that I show you here. The moth has [[372]]dark-yellow fore wings edged with a scalloped stripe of a lighter shade and marked with a number of red spots. The hind wings are white with purple spots and yellowish edges.”
“Alongside of that moth there are two more in your box,” Emile pointed out.