OUTLINES
OF A
NEW SYSTEM OF FOOD AND COOKERY.
In the work of revising and preparing the foregoing volume for publication, the writer was requested to add to it a system of vegetable cookery. At first he refused to do so, both on account of the difficulty of bringing so extensive a subject within the compass of twenty or thirty pages, and because it did not seem to him to be called for, in connection with the present volume. But he has yielded his own judgment to the importunity of the publishers and other friends of the work, and prepared a mere outline or skeleton of what he may hereafter fill up, should circumstances and the necessary leisure permit.
But there is one difficulty to be met with at the very threshold of the subject. Vegetable eaters are not so hard driven to find whereon to subsist, as many appear to suppose. For the question is continually asked, "If you dispense wholly with flesh and fish, pray what can you find to eat?" Now, while we are aware that one small sect of the vegetarians—the followers of Dr. Schlemmer—eat every thing in a raw state, we are, for ourselves, full believers in plain and simple cookery. That a potato, for example, is better cooked than uncooked, both for man and beast, we have not the slightest doubt. We believe that a system of preparing food which renders the raw material more palatable, more digestible, and more nutritious, or perhaps all this at once, must be legitimate, and even preferable—if not for the individual, at least for the race.
But the difficulty alluded to is, how to select a few choice dishes from the wide range—short of flesh and fish—which God and nature permit. For if we believed in the use of eggs when commingled with food, we should hardly deem it proper to go the whole length of our French brethren, who have nearly seven hundred vegetable dishes, of which eggs form a component part; nor the whole length even to which our own powers of invention might carry us; no, nor even the whole length to which the writer of an English work now before us, and entitled "Vegetable Cookery," has gone—the extent of about a thousand plain receipts. We believe the whole nature of man, and even his appetite, when unperverted, is best served and most fully satisfied with a range of dishes which shall hardly exceed hundreds.
It is held by Dr. Dunglison, Dr. Paris, and many of the old school writers, that all made dishes—all mixtures of food—are "more or less rebellious;" that is, more or less indigestible, and consequently more or less hurtful. If they mean by this, that in spite of the accommodating power of the stomach to the individual, they are hurtful to the race, I go with them most fully. But I do not believe that all made dishes, to all persons, are so directly injurious as many suppose. God has made man, in a certain sense, omnivorous. His physical stomach can receive and assimilate, like his mental stomach, a great variety of substances; and both can go on, without apparent disease, for a great many years, and perhaps for a tolerably long life in this way.
There is, however, a higher question for man to ask as a rational being and as a Christian, than whether this or that dish will hurt him directly. It is, whether a dish or article is best for him—best for body, mind, and heart—best for the whole human nature—best for the whole interests of the whole race—best for time, and best for eternity. Startle not, reader, at this assertion. If West could properly say, "I paint for eternity," the true disciple of Christ and truth can say, "I eat and drink for eternity." And a higher authority than any that is merely human has even required us to do so.
This places the subject of preparing food on high ground. And were I to carry out my plan fully, I should exclude from a Christian system of food and cookery all mixtures, properly so called, and all medicines or condiments. Not that all mixtures are equally hurtful to the well-being of the race, nor all medicines. Indeed, considering our training and habits, some of both, to most persons, have become necessary. I know of many whose physical inheritance is such, that salt, if not a few other medicinal substances, have become at least present necessaries to them. And to those mixtures of substances closely allied, as farina with farina—meal of one kind with meal of another—I could scarcely have any objection, myself. Nature objects to incompatibles, and therefore I do; and medicine, and all those kinds of food which are opposed one to another, are incompatible with each other. When one is in the stomach, the other should not be.