“The ear of maize is very large and is composed of full, rounded kernels, yellow and shiny, closely packed in regular rows. Like rice, maize furnishes a fine flour of pleasing appearance but lacking in one essential: it contains no gluten. Hence the utter impossibility of using either rice or maize for making bread, despite the good appearance of the flour made from them.
“Nevertheless maize is a very wholesome article of food, and one of great value in the country, where the appetite is sharpened by open air and hard work. Only it is not in the form of bread that it best yields its nourishment, but rather in that of porridge, or boiled meal and water.” [[11]]
[1] Laundry starch is now obtained chiefly from rice and from pulse.—Translator. [↑]
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY OF TOBACCO
“Before taking the form of the powder which the user of snuff pushes up into his nose to tickle his nostrils and promote sneezing, before being rolled into the cigar or reduced to that crisp, moss-like substance which the smoker stuffs into his pipe, tobacco has had a previous existence as a plant bearing this same name. A stalk about one meter in height, large, clammy leaves of a strong odor, bright red flowers each shaped like a narrow funnel and expanding into the five points of a star at the orifice, dry capsules filled with innumerable little seeds—there you have the tobacco plant.
Tobacco Plant