You must thoroughly wash and dry any vegetables that you eat raw, for, excluding such harmless creatures as slugs and caterpillars, they may contain germs of disease. Typhoid fever is frequently caused by eating unwashed salads, especially watercress. This is a far more common method of getting typhoid than is eating infected oysters. Another disease almost invariably due to eating infected vegetables is hydatid disease, a somewhat uncommon affection in England, but one of the most formidable plagues in Iceland and Australia.
There are few salads which are not difficult to digest. Corn salad, French lettuce, endive, beetroot, and watercresses, are the least indigestible, then come in order, Cos lettuce, chicory, mustard and cress, cucumber, and radishes. Spring onions usually agree with most persons, but some people cannot stand onions in any form. Onions always produce the peculiar and decidedly unpleasant odour of the breath, and not, as is usually supposed, only in those who cannot digest them. For the smell is due to the excretion of the volatile oil of onions by the breath.
Two excellent salads are potato salad and cold vegetable salad. This morning we read a recipe for the latter in one of the back numbers of this paper, and it struck us as being a particularly inviting and desirable addition to a dinner of cold meat.
The lunch is finished off with a savoury of herrings’ roes on toast. These were probably tinned roes, or we will presume they were, so as to introduce the discussion of the values and dangers of tinned meat.
The dangers of eating tinned meats have been grossly exaggerated, and if you pay a reasonable price for tinned provisions, it is extremely unlikely that they will do you any harm. Unfortunately, many thousands of “blown” tins of putrid provisions are still sold in London yearly in spite of the care and close scrutiny of the law. But if you pay a reasonable sum for your tinned provisions, you will not get these bad tins. Of course, if you pay fourpence a dozen for tins of milk or sardines, you cannot expect to get good stuff, and you should always avoid tins reduced in price, for it usually means that they are very stale.
There are two ways in which tinned things may become poisonous, either the contents may become contaminated with the metal of the cans, or the meats themselves may undergo alkaloidal degeneration. The former, the lesser evil, can only occur in tinned meats. The latter, by far the greater evil, may occur in any preserved provisions, and is perhaps more common in stores preserved in skins or glasses than in those in tins.
Nowadays meats do not often become poisoned by the tins in which they have been kept. It used to be not uncommon for the solder of the tin to be dissolved by acid juices in the contents. This was especially frequent with tinned Morella cherries and other acid tart-fruits. But now acid fruits are nearly always sold in bottles, and only fruits which are sweet and not acid are sold in tins.
The tinned fruits that we get from California are most excellent, and we have never heard of ill-effects of any kind following their use. The canning is carried on entirely by girls on the Californian ranches. The tins are rather dear, but they are much the best things of the kind that have come beneath our notice.
The second method by which tinned meats may become poisoned is a degeneration, or decomposition if you like, by which the wholesome albumen of the contents is changed into intensely poisonous animal alkaloids. Alkaloids are very powerful bodies, and the vegetable alkaloids, such as strychnine, quinine, and morphine, are much used in medicine.
But these animal alkaloids are far more powerful for harm than even the most deadly of the vegetable poisons. So powerful are they that a quantity of one of them found in canned fish, which killed two adults who had partaken of it, was insufficient to demonstrate by our most delicate chemical tests. If these drugs are so powerful for harm, is it not possible that they may be equally powerful for good, when their actions and doses are worked out?