There are thirty persons sitting down to this dinner, and we notice that they have all washed their hands. Here is the first thing that we should all do well to copy. Everybody should wash her hands before sitting down to a meal. Don’t laugh and say that everybody does do so! We know such is not the case, and it is just those persons for whom it is most necessary to wash before eating who neglect this hygienic measure.
Workers in factories, especially those who have to work with lead or other poisonous materials, should be scrupulously careful never to touch food with dirty hands. Neglect of this precaution is the commonest method by which chronic poisoning is produced.
Legislation has been doing all in its power to limit the deleterious effects of poisons upon those who are compelled to work in them. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to get factory workers to wash their hands before eating, and many firms have been severely censured when cases of chronic poisoning have occurred in their works, when the sufferers themselves were entirely to blame because they would not wash their hands.
To return to the dinner. At the table, soups are divided into two groups—thick and clear. Dietetically, the division is extremely well marked, for the actions and uses of the two are totally different.
Clear soup—that is, soup which is quite free from floating particles—is not a food and contains no nourishment. This may seem a strong statement to make and you may disbelieve it; but still it is a fact. Clear soup is a solution of the débris of animal tissue. The nourishing part of animal flesh is insoluble in boiling water and therefore is not present in clear soup. The only fluid which contains nutritive animal matter after it has been boiled is milk.[2] But if it is not a food, clear soup is a powerful stimulant and is a good opening to a big meal. But it should only be taken in very small quantities, and by most persons beyond middle age it is better not taken at all!
Thick soup is a nutritious preparation owing its nourishing power entirely to the solid particles suspended in it. Like clear soup, however, it is chiefly a solution of animal débris—the waste products of life.
It used to be the rule to give beef-tea and other meat extractives in all illnesses, but fortunately the custom is dying out as our knowledge increases. There are many diseases—for instance, gout—which are due to excess of waste products in the blood; or, to put it in an intelligible form, they are due to substances identical with beef-tea circulating in the blood. And yet these people used to be fed on soup, when of all things in the world it is that which they should avoid.
Before we continue the dinner, we wish to say a few words about this custom of giving beef-teas, etc., to invalids. The ordinary soups, beef-teas, meat essences and suchlike, which are commonly given to the sick, are inappropriate for their purpose and are frequently exceedingly injurious. You cannot feed anybody on beef-tea. It is a fairly useful stimulant, but as a food it is worthless. But you can make a liquid food which contains a considerable part of the nourishment of meat and is, moreover, not indigestible.
Meat-juice is the fluid obtained by squeezing raw beef. If you hang up a large piece of raw meat, a reddish opalescent liquid will drop from it. This is raw meat-juice and is practically a solution of blood albumen. It is exceedingly nutritious and is very useful in many kinds of disease. It is frequently ordered nowadays by physicians. It must be made only from beef which you are perfectly certain is quite sound. There is really danger in giving this meat-juice or raw meat of any kind, and a girl must be pretty certain of her butcher before she attempts to give it to an invalid.
Another less unpleasant way of making the same or nearly the same preparation is the following. Take a pound of rump steak and shred it up with a knife. Put it into warm water and let it digest in a very cool oven for four hours. You must be certain that the oven never reaches a temperature above 160° F., for at about twenty degrees above this albumen coagulates, and instead of meat-juice you will only have beef-tea. After the preparation has been in the oven for four hours, take it out and strain it.