Receipt 4.—The tomato is fashionable, but a sour apple, if equal pains were taken with it, and it were equally fashionable, might be equally useful. It adds, however, to nature's vast variety!
Receipt 5.—Watermelons, coming as they do at the end of the hot season, when eaten with bread, are happily adapted (as most other ripe fruits are, when eaten in the same way, and at their own proper season) to prevent disease, and promote health and happiness.
Receipt 6.—Muskmelons are richer than watermelons, but not more wholesome. Of the canteloupe I know but little.
Receipt 7.—The cucumber. Taken at the moment when ripe—neither green nor acid—the cucumber is almost, but not quite as valuable as the melon. It should be eaten in the same way, rejecting the rind. The Orientals of modern days sometimes boil them, but in former times they ate them uncooked, though always ripe. Unripe cucumbers are a modern dish, and will erelong go out of fashion.
Receipt 8.—Onions have medicinal properties, but this should be no recommendation to healthy people. Raw, they are unwholesome; boiled, they are better; fried, they are positively pernicious.
Receipt 9.—Nuts are said to be adapted to man in a state of nature; but I write for those who are in an artificial state, not a natural state. Of the chestnut I have spoken elsewhere. The hazelnut is next best, then perhaps the peanut and the beechnut. The butternut, and walnut or hickory-nut, are too oily. Nor do I see how they can be improved by cookery.
Receipt 10.—Cabbage, properly boiled, and without condiments, is tolerable, but rather stringy, and of course rather indigestible.
Receipt 11.—Greens and salads are stringy and indigestible. Besides, they are much used, as condiments are, to excite or provoke an appetite—a thing usually wrong. A feeble appetite, say at the opening of the spring, however common, is a great blessing. If let alone, nature will erelong set to rights those things, which have gone wrong perhaps all winter; and then appetite will return in a natural way.
But the worst thing about greens, salads, and some other things, is, they are eaten with vinegar. Vinegar and all substances, I must again say, which resist or retard putrefaction, retard also the work of digestion. It is a universal law, and ought to be known as such, that whatever tends to preserve our food—except perhaps ice and the air-pump—tends also to interfere with the great work of digestion. Hence, all pickling, salting, boiling down, sweetening, etc., are objectionable. Pereira says, "By drying, salting, smoking, and pickling, the digestibility of fish is greatly impaired;" and this, except as regards drying, is but the common doctrine. It should, however, be applied generally as well as to fish.