The meat from which soup is made, allowed to become cold, should be compounded to a paste in a mortar, and then returned to the soup. Veal, pigeon, and rabbit are especially adapted to this procedure. “French” cooks prefer to make “chicken broth” from rabbit.
Notwithstanding its capacity to digest, there is, invariably, something repulsive to an insensible stomach in what are conventionally called “roasted joints.” This antipathy, together with considerations of convenience as regards the size of portions to be cooked, makes it almost imperative, for protesting but frequent eaters, that meats should be either broiled or stewed; and steaks of various kinds, chops, cutlets, chicken, game, some kinds of fish, and shell-fish become, therefore, the only really available resources of the caterer of an ill-ordered appetite. And yet no more difficult undertaking can be given non-hungry patients than that of eating beefsteak. Apart from its somewhat uncertain quality, nothing requires more mastication, and the class named always declare that there is no item of food of which they are already more “tired.” Any other variety of meat—mutton, veal, venison, &c.—cooked in the form of steak is more readily eaten. The short, compact fibre of mutton chops, especially those from the loin, makes them less likely than beefsteak to be badly cooked, and far easier to be consumed. Well-selected, carefully-cut lamb chops, in their proper season, are a delicacy of the highest order, and rarely fail to be appreciated by the most benumbed eater.
Meats stewed, or semi-stewed, and then partially browned in the oven (braised, as it is called in the language of cookery), are attractive and submissive preparations, and this method of cooking is an excellent one for purveying small portions of animal food. In the various forms and denominations of stewing and braising, the cordon bleu finds scope for the highest aspirations of culinary art.
They impart an appetising flavour to viands cooked to extreme tenderness, the perfection of these methods being found in their application to sweetbread—a costly luxury, but an article which, by its slight demand for mastication and its nutritious qualities, is peculiarly adapted to the requirements of an invalid eater. Others of the viscera, besides the pancreas, and the thymus gland—namely, the brains, the liver, the kidneys, the testicles of lambs, successfully lend themselves to this process of cookery, and like calves’ heads, pigs’ feet, and sheep’s tongues, are converted into delicate and easily-assimilated nutriment for those who are ignorant of, or can overcome, the associations which they suggest.
Of various mechanical processes available for rendering food easily eaten, preparatory mincing offers great advantages, and is particularly applicable to chicken and veal. A common and attractive method of serving both in the form of minced meat is that of croquettes, which are most easily prepared by the aid of Lovelock’s mincing machine.
Dr. Hodges does not hesitate to assert that of all the modes in which minced meat may be presented, the calumniated and much-libelled sausage is, in winter time, one of the most useful and successful articles for frequent feeding. Lean and fat meats, more digestible together than separately, are discriminately mixed in the compact and appetising form of this ubiquitous and popular comestible, the sole secret of whose easy digestion is that it should not be eaten except when it has become thoroughly cold after cooking. Bread and butter can be tolerated with complete immunity when hot buttered toast would provoke exasperating dyspepsia, and it is exactly thus that sausage cold stands in relation to that which is served hot. Presenting the albuminates and fat in an economical, savoury form, easily obtained and made ready for consumption, sausage, in some countries, might almost be said to have become a national food, and it offers to the fastidious or indifferent eater an article of diet from which great benefit may be derived. A trial of this stigmatised edible will be followed by a ready recognition of its alimentary value in the class of cases under consideration.
As has been remarked already, food, to be taken outside the conventional meal hours, must be of a kind easily obtained anywhere, readily “kept in the house,” and which does not demand preparation or delay. Few persons can command the services of a “professed cook,” or of a good “plain” cook, or have either at their disposal every two hours in the day. The practical articles of diet which meet these restricted requirements of convenience are few, and of these the chief in importance are eggs, milk, cream, butter, and bread.
“Raw albumen is one of the most digestible of foods; coagulated, it is comparatively indigestible.” Eggs, to be easily digested, must be eaten uncooked, since albumen under prolonged heat acquires progressive degrees of toughness. Eggs should not be cooked by boiling, but by placing them in hot water, and allowing them to remain there for 7-10 minutes.
When cooked, buttered, salted, and peppered, they are soon tired of as articles of food, and alleged to be “bilious.” Cooking, moreover, involves waiting and preparation. An uncooked egg is always ready and at hand, is clean to be kept anywhere, and scarcely needs to be broken into a glass. With a little knack it may be swallowed direct from the shell, as most persons know if in childhood they have had access to country barns. A raw egg weighs 2-2¼ oz., and is said to contain about the same flesh-forming and heat-giving material as an equal amount of butcher’s meat. It offers in perfection the quickest and neatest mode of taking a large equivalent of substantial and nutritious food at a swallow. Beaten-up eggs are a certain provocative of dyspepsia. When subjected to this process, an inviting draught of creamy froth is brought to the unfortunate recipient—a tumblerful of air, which has been introduced in the largest possible amount to a given quantity of egg, milk, wine, sugar, and nutmeg—than which nothing could be better devised to promote indigestion, abominable eructations, and the most uncomfortable flatulence or acidity. Every beer drinker has the good sense to blow off the “head” of his mug of beer, or to wait patiently for the froth to subside, before he imbibes the draught; and if crotchety persons will not learn the trick of swallowing an egg whole, they can compromise the difficulty by slowly stirring the white and the yolk, which may be thus mixed together, and made to seem a less revolting dose without the incorporation of air by beating. Taken as a medicine, and looked upon as such, eggs are at least equally palatable with cod-liver oil, for which they offer an equivalent substitute, adapted to winter or summer, as the latter hardly is, and far more rapidly digested. There is no limit to the number which may be taken with advantage continuously and for months at a time. Eighteen eggs are required to furnish the flesh-forming materials and other nutrients sufficient for the various needs of an adult man in one day.
Milk and cream are convenient, and therefore important and desirable articles of food. It is a common assertion of patients that milk “always disagrees with them”—that they have “never been able to take it.” This statement, which, as a rule, may safely be attributed to mere prejudice, is also in some cases a true one, simply for the reason that the milk is drunk too rapidly, or because it is not rich enough, an easy remedy being to take the given quantity more slowly, or to increase by addition the amount of cream which the milk naturally possesses, the trouble being due, in the first instance, to the fact that a large and solid cheese curd is suddenly formed in the stomach by the rapidity with which the milk is deposited in that organ, and in the second, to the hardness of the casein derived from milk with an insufficient percentage of cream, which is always inconstant in amount (varying between 10 and 15 per cent.) or in composition, the water alone ranging from 45 to 65 per cent. Milk is often too poor, but never too rich, for purposes of enforced nutrition, and the fact is incontrovertible that it is the model food for digestibility.