‘Better not make rash promises. I’ll take a good big sample, and you shall have my report on it to-night.’
On his return home in the evening, he began: ‘I’ve been having a go-in at your bread. It’s not pure, of course; but there isn’t very much the matter with it. There’s a little potato, and a little rice, and a little alum; and with those additions, it takes up a good deal more water than it ought, so you don’t get your proper weight.’
‘Ahem!’ I said, ‘if that’s the case, we’ll change our baker. I’m not going to pay for a mixture of potatoes and water, and call it bread. But as for alum, that’s all nonsense. If they put that in, we should taste it.’
‘O no; you wouldn’t. When alum is put in bread, it decomposes and forms sulphate of potash, an aperient salt. It disagrees with you, of course, but you don’t taste it. As for changing your baker, the next fellow you tried might be a jolly sight worse; he might put in bone-dust, or plaster of Paris, or sulphate of copper. And besides, half the adulterations are in the flour already, before it reaches the baker. Of course, that doesn’t prevent his doing a little more on his own account.’
And with that the matter dropped, so far as the bread was concerned; but my confidence was rudely shaken.
A few days later, my analyst remarked: ‘I don’t think much of this milk;’ and he forthwith appropriated a sample for analytical purposes; but, happily, was compelled to own that it wasn’t quite so bad as he expected. It had more than its proper proportion of water; but that might arise—he charitably suggested—from the cow being unwell. To make up the deficiency, it had been fortified with treacle and coloured with arnatto, but these my analyst appeared to regard as quite every-day falsifications.
‘It’s a rascally shame,’ I said. ‘If one can’t put faith in the milk-jug, it’s a bad lookout for the Blue Ribbon gentlemen. However, let us hope that the tea and coffee are all right.’
‘Not likely!’ he rejoined. ‘Nearly all tea is “faced,” as they call it, more or less, and the facing is itself an adulteration. As for coffee, you don’t expect to get that pure, do you? It’s sure to be mixed with chicory, anyhow, and very probably with roasted acorns, beans, mahogany sawdust, or old tan. Baked horse-liver occasionally; but that’s an extreme case. If by any remote chance there wasn’t anything wrong in the original coffee, you get it in the chicory; and very often there are adulterations in both; so you get ’em twice over.’
‘If that’s the case, no more ground coffee for me. We’ll grind our own, and then we are sure to be safe.’
‘You mustn’t make too cocksure of that. Some years ago, an ingenious firm took out a patent for a machine to mould chicory into the shape of coffee-berries. Smart chaps those! And of course they can put anything they like into the chicory before they work it up.’