Our farmers often feed the outside leaves of cabbage to their cattle. All very well if they do not give them to their milch cows. Many of our dairymen will not believe that cabbage or turnips injure the flavor of milk or butter, but we think their taste must be greatly perverted if they fail to detect the flavor at once.
LVI.
PULSE.
MANY of the most useful and important of farinaceous or mealy kinds of vegetables are known under the name of pulse. All the large varieties of the bean, pea, lentil, tare, and vetch belong to this family.
The Vetch and Tare are chiefly used for cattle; very seldom in this country or England are they seen on our tables, even among the poorest class of people; but the lentil, a kind of bean, is greatly esteemed among the French and Germans, and, when properly and carefully prepared and seasoned, is more highly esteemed by them than the common pea and bean. They consider the flavor better, and the vegetable itself more nourishing. In France it is extensively used for seasoning soups, but in England and America is not much known except as food for cattle.
Next to nuts and fruits, all kinds of pulse were important articles of food in the earlier ages, for it required little labor and skill to produce or raise them. When fresh and tender, many kinds of pulse can be employed in cooking, particularly for soups, and many that we know nothing of except through books, would flourish in our climate, both North and South, and might be profitably cultivated. Year by year we find something new in our agricultural catalogues, as well as in the horticultural and floral.
Peas and Beans when dried are less digestible and healthful than when eaten green, as the skin becomes hard, and unless removed, as it can be by rubbing through a sieve for soups, will, with many people, produce flatulency, constipation, and often severe colic. But green or dried, almost every sort of pulse will furnish excellent food for most of our domestic animals, and is also considered very desirable to alternate with other crops, for, if corn or grain is raised year after year, on the same piece of land, it will in a short time wear out the soil; but pulse does not impoverish the land, and therefore may be grown on fields that require rest from more exhausting crops.
We learn that the time of the discovery of peas and beans has not been satisfactorily ascertained, but they were in early times extensively cultivated, especially the pea, in India, China and Japan, although evidently not a native of any of the extreme warm climates. When the English were besieging a castle in Lathian, in 1299, they were well pleased to supply their exhausted stores with this kind of pulse, which grew in that vicinity abundantly, and doubtless, on learning its nutritious properties, gladly introduced it into their own country. During Queen Elizabeth’s reign, her table was supplied with peas from Holland; fit food, says one of the writers of that time, for royal ladies, because “it was brought so far and cost so dear.”
Now, under careful and more enlightened culture, the varieties of peas raised in this country and throughout Europe are numerous. To speak of them all and of the whole family of pulse would require a volume. But much depends on the section in which the different varieties are raised, for, as with most kinds of produce, that which in one locality would prove most excellent, when transferred to another will become quite inferior.
The Chick-pea is small and not very digestible. It will not boil soft, but, like some of the lentils, is parched, and in Egypt and Syria sold in the shops to travellers, by whom it is greatly esteemed, because while passing through the deserts it occupies little room and needs no preparation. Youmans says that it will sustain more life, weight for weight, than any other kind of food, and that peas and beans are ranked first among the concentrated, strength-imparting food; but although strength-giving, we do not think it easily digested, unless eaten while fresh and tender, and cooked with care. Some kinds of peas are prepared by the Chinese as a vegetable cheese.
It would be useless to attempt to mention the best varieties of either peas or beans. Some seek for the earliest, some the largest or most prolific. In selecting, it is always wise to go to some intelligent seedsman, keeping a large assortment of all kinds of seeds, and learn his opinion; then, from the information thus obtained, decide which variety will best meet your wishes and locality. Some kinds of peas, like the string bean, have the pod and seed cut up and cooked together.