POISONING WITH MAPLE SUGAR.
A particular friend of mine purchased one day, at a stand in the city, two small cakes of maple sugar. It was early in the spring, and very little of the article had as yet been manufactured. My friend, in his eagerness, devoured them immediately. He observed, before eating them, that they had a very dark appearance; but the taste was correct, as far as he could judge, and he did not hesitate. He was one of those individuals, moreover, who are not greatly given to self-denial in the matter of appetite.
The next day he had as sore a mouth as I ever saw. The inflammation extended not only to the back part of the mouth, but into the throat, and probably quite into the stomach, and was attended with a most distressing thirst, with loss of appetite, and occasional nausea. In short, it unfitted him for business the whole day; indeed it was many days before he recovered entirely.
My own conclusion, after a careful investigation of the facts, was, that the sugar was cooled down in vessels of iron, which were, in some way, more or less oxydated or rusted, and that a small quantity of free acid having been, by some means unknown, developed in the sugar, it entered into a chemical combination with the metallic oxyde, to form a species of copperas—perhaps the genuine sulphate of iron itself.
No medicine was given, nor was any needed. It was sufficient to let the system rest, till Nature, with the assistance of small quantities of water,—such as she was constantly demanding,—could eject the intruding foe. It required only a little patient waiting.
There is scarcely a doubt that the sufferer learned, from his experiment, one important lesson; viz., to let alone every thing which, by cooking, has been changed to a dark color. Beets are sometimes blackened by cooking in iron vessels, as well as sugar; and so are apples and apple-sauce, and sundry other fruits and vegetables.
The word apple-sauce reminds me of an incident that recently occurred in my own family. A kind neighbor having sent us some apple-sauce, such of the family as partook of it freely, suffered, soon afterward, in a way that led to the suspicion of poison. This apple-sauce was quite dark-colored, but tasted well enough.
We have seen, in Chapter XXVIII., that in the use of apple-sauce, or apple butter, or, indeed, any thing containing an acid, which has been in contact with the inner surface of red earthen ware, glazed with the oxyde of lead, people are sometimes poisoned; but for common, plain, apple-sauce, recently cooked, to be poisonous, is rather unusual. However, we can hardly be too careful in these matters. Serious evils have sometimes arisen from various kinds of complicated cookery, even when the healthiness of the vessels used was quite above suspi. A powerful argument this in favor of simplicity.
It should also be remembered, with regard to sugar, that this is a substance whose use, even when known to be perfectly innoxious, is, at best, of doubtful tendency, beyond the measure which the Divine Hand has incorporated into the various substances which are prepared for our use. That sugar, in considerable quantities, leads to fulness, if not to fatness, is no proof of its healthfulness; since fatness itself is a sign of disease in man and all other animals, as has, of late, been frequently and fully demonstrated.