I say baked potatoes rather than boiled, and perhaps should explain my reasons, though in doing so I anticipate what I shall explain more fully when on the subject of vegetable food.
Raw potatoes contain potash salts which are easily soluble in water. I find that when the potato is boiled some of the potash comes out into the water, and thus the vegetable is robbed of a very valuable constituent. The baked potato contains all its original saline constituents which, as I have already stated, are specially demanded as an addition to cheese-food.
Hasty pudding made, as usual, of wheat flour, may be converted from an insipid to a savoury and highly nutritious porridge by the addition of cheese in like manner.
The same with boiled rice, whether whole or ground, also sago, tapioca, and other forms of edible starch. Supposing whole rice is used—and I think this is the best—the cheese may be sprinkled among the grains of rice and well stirred or mashed up with them. The addition of a little brown gravy to this, with or without chicken giblets, gives us an Italian risotto. The Indian-corn stirabout of the poor Irish cottier would be much improved both in flavour and nutritive value by the addition of a little grated cheese.
Pease pudding is not improved by cheese. The chemistry of this will come out when I explain the composition of peas, beans, &c. The same applies to pea soup.
I might enumerate other methods of cooking cheese by thus adding it in a finely-divided state to other kinds of food, but if I were to express my own convictions on the subject I should stir up prejudice by naming some mixtures which many people would denounce. As an example I may refer to a dish which I invented more than twenty years ago—viz. fish and cheese pudding, made by taking the remains from a dish of boiled codfish, haddock, or other white fish, mashing it with bread-crumbs, grated cheese, and ketchup, then warming in an oven and serving after the usual manner of scalloped fish. Any remains of oyster sauce may be advantageously included.
I find this delicious, but others may not. I frequently add grated cheese to boiled fish as ordinarily served, and have lately made a fish sauce by dissolving grated cheese in milk with the aid of a little bicarbonate of potash, and adding this to ordinary melted butter. I suggest these cheese mixtures to others with some misgivings as regards palatability, after learning the revelations of Darwin on the persistence of heredity. It is quite possible that, being a compound of the Swiss Mattieu with the Welsh Williams (cheese on both sides), I may inherit an abnormal fondness for this staple food of the mountaineers.
Be this as it may, so far as the mere palate is concerned; but in the chemistry of all my advocacy of cheese and its cookery I have full confidence. Rendered digestible by simple and suitable cookery, and added with a little potash salt to farinaceous food of all kinds, it affords exactly what is required to supply a theoretically complete and a most economical dietary, without the aid of any other kind of animal food. The potash salts may be advantageously supplied by a liberal second course of fruit or salad.
One more of my heretical applications of grated cheese must be specified. It is that of sprinkling it freely over ordinary stewed tripe, which thus becomes extraordinary stewed tripe. Or a solution of cheese may be mixed with liquor of the stew. It may not be generally known that stewed tripe is the most easily digestible of all solid animal food. This was shown by the experiments of Dr. Beaumont on his patient, Alexis St. Martin, who was so obliging (from a scientific point of view) as to discharge a gun in such a manner that it shot away the front of his own stomach and left there, after the healing of the wound, a valved window through which, with the aid of a simple optical contrivance, the work of digestion could be watched. Dr. Beaumont found that while beef and mutton required three hours for digestion, tripe was digested in one hour.[14]