Our vegetarian friends will be interested in learning that at first he used meat in the soup provided for the beggars, but gradually omitted it, and the change was unnoticed by those who ate, and no difference was observable as regards its nutritive value.
In 1790, little, or rather nothing, was known of the chemistry of food. Oxygen had been discovered only sixteen years before, and chemical analysis, as now understood, was an unknown art. In spite of this Rumford selected as the basis of his soup just that proximate element which we now know to be one of the most nutritious that he could have obtained from either the animal or vegetable kingdom—viz. casein. He not only selected this, but he combined it with those other constituents of food which our highest refinements of modern practical chemistry and physiology have proved to be exactly what are required to supplement the casein and constitute a complete dietary. By selecting the cheapest form of casein and the cheapest sources of the other constituents, he succeeded in supplying the beggars with good hot dinners daily at the cost of less than one halfpenny each. The cost of the mess for the Bavarian soldiers under his command was rather more, viz. twopence daily, three farthings of this being devoted to pure luxuries, such as beer, &c.
Some of his chemical speculations, however, have not been confirmed. The composition of water had just been discovered, and he found by experience that a given quantity of solid food was more satisfying to the appetite and more effective in nutrition when made into soup by long boiling with water. This led him to suppose that the water itself was decomposed by cookery, and its elements recombined or united with other elements, and thus became nutritious by being converted into the tissues of plants and animals.
Thus, speaking of the barley which formed an important constituent of his soup, he says: ‘It requires, it is true, a great deal of boiling; but when it is properly managed, it thickens a vast quantity of water, and, as I suppose, prepares it for decomposition’ (the italics are his own).
We now know that this idea of decomposing water by such means is a mistake; but, in my own opinion, there is something behind it which still remains to be learned by modern chemists. In my endeavours to fathom the rationale of the changes which occur in cookery, I have been (as my readers will remember) continually driven into hypotheses of hydration, i.e. of supposing that some of the water used in cookery unites to form true chemical compounds with certain of the constituents of the food. As already stated, when I commenced this subject I had no idea of its suggestiveness, of the wide field of research which it has opened out. One of these lines of research is the determination of the nature of this hydration of cooked gelatin, fibrin, cellulose, casein, starch, legumin, &c. That water is with them when they are cooked is evident enough, but whether that water is brought into actual chemical combination with them in such wise as to form new compounds of additional nutritive value proportionate to the chemical addition of water, demands so much investigation that I have been driven to merely theorise where I ought to have demonstrated.
The fact that the living body which our food is building up and renewing contains about 80 per cent. of water, some of it combined, and some of it uncombined, has a notable bearing on the question. We may yet learn that hydration and dehydration have more to do with the vital functions than has hitherto been supposed.
The following are the ingredients used by Rumford in ‘Soup No. 1’:
| Weight Avoirdupois. | Cost. | ||||
| lbs. | oz. | £ | s. | d. | |
| 4 viertels of pearl barley, equal to about 20⅓ gallons | 141 | 2 | 0 | 11 | 7½ |
| 4 viertels of peas | 131 | 4 | 0 | 7 | 3¼ |
| Cuttings of fine wheaten bread | 69 | 10 | 0 | 10 | 2¼ |
| Salt | 19 | 13 | 0 | 1 | 2½ |
24 maass, very weak beer, vinegar, or rather small beer turned sour, about 24 quarts | 46 | 13 | 0 | 1 | 5½ |
| Water, about 560 quarts | 1,077 | 0 | — | ||
| —————— | ———— | ||||
| 1,485 | 10 | 1 | 11 | 9 | |
| —————— | |||||
| Fuel, 88 lbs. dry pine wood | 0 | 0 | 2¼ | ||
| Wages of three cook maids, at 20 florins a year each | 0 | 0 | 3⅔ | ||
| Daily expense of feeding the three cook maids, at 10 creutzers (3⅔ pence sterling) each, according to agreement | 0 | 0 | 11 | ||
| Daily wages of two men servants | 0 | 1 | 7¼ | ||
| Repairs of kitchen furniture (90 florins per ann.) daily | 0 | 0 | 5½ | ||
| ———— | |||||
| Total daily expenses when dinner is provided for 1,200 persons | 1 | 15 | 2⅔ | ||
This amounts to 422/1200, or a trifle more than ⅓ of a penny for each dinner of this No. 1 soup. The cost was still further reduced by the use of the potato, then a novelty, concerning which Rumford makes the following remarks, now very curious. ‘So strong was the aversion of the public, particularly the poor, against them at the time when we began to make use of them in the public kitchen of the House of Industry in Munich, that we were absolutely obliged, at first, to introduce them by stealth. A private room in a retired corner was fitted up as a kitchen for cooking them; and it was necessary to disguise them, by boiling them down entirely, and destroying their form and texture, to prevent their being detected.’ The following are the ingredients of ‘Soup No. 2,’ with potatoes: