[224]. Coconut Cream.
A nice addition to Trifles, Fruit Salads, etc., can be made by using Mapleton's Coconut Cream. Mix 2 ozs. of the cream with 1/8-pt. of boiling water; when softened beat for a minute or so with the egg-beater, then pour on a dish. In 2 hours it will have set and can be used to fill sponge sandwiches, or eaten with stewed fruit. To form a thick cream (less solid) beat up 2½ to 3 ozs. Coconut Cream with ¼-pt. of hot water.
THE BREAD PROBLEM.
Pure wholemeal bread, so made as to be light and well baked, is a virtual necessity for every abstainer from flesh-food. Food-Reform presents many difficulties, and every dietetic reformer has to grapple with them. Insufficient knowledge, defective sources of provision, digestive troubles, inherited organic weakness, and unfavourable environment, are only a few of these. I want, therefore to emphasize the importance of a perfect bread supply, which I am convinced is the key to the problem so far as many are concerned.
It is not sufficient merely to pray for "our daily bread," and then to leave its provision entirely to Providence. We need also to think and to take some personal trouble about it—remembering that Heaven helps those who help themselves. Yet this is what very few people do. One may safely affirm that four persons out of every five are content to use defective and innutritious bread every day of their lives. Yet this should be made a real staff of life.
The whole grain of wheat, if of good quality, contains nearly all that is needful for the perfect nutrition of the body. With the addition of a small amount of fat (easily found in nut or dairy butter, cheese or oil), and of grape sugar and purifying acids (obtainable in fruits), pure wheatmeal, if properly ground in stone mills, and well made into delicious home-baked bread, enables one to be almost independent of other foods, and therefore almost ensures one against a breakdown in health if there is difficulty in obtaining a varied and well proportioned dietary from other sources.
Instead of securing and using bread such as this, the majority of the community complacently eat white bread—emasculated, robbed of its gluten (which is equivalent to albumen) and of the phosphates and mineral salts that are stored in the inner part of the husk of the grain. It is composed almost entirely of starch, with the addition of such adulterants as the baker or miller feels inclined to introduce for commercial reasons, and is not conducive to the proper operation of the digestive and eliminative organs.
It is difficult for bakers or the public to buy really good wholemeal. The meal that is on the markets often consists of cheap roller-milled flour with some sweepings of bran or seconds thrown in. And even if the entire grain is supplied, the outer cuticle of the wheat, when rolled (in the modern steel-roller mills that for reasons of economy have superseded the good old-fashioned stone grinding mills), instead of being so reduced as to be capable of complete digestion, is left with rough edges called spiculae, which irritate the digestive tract, cause relaxation, and arouse prejudice against the 'brown' loaf. Such wholemeal cannot be perfectly assimilated because the bran is not properly broken up, and, in addition to this fact, the cerealine, which acts like diastase in the conversion of starch into sugar, is not liberated and rendered available as an aid to digestion.