Dr. Franklin’s favourite Breakfast was a good basin of warm Gruel, in which there was a small slice of Butter with Toasted Bread and Nutmeg—the expense of this, he reckoned at three half-pence.
“Mastication is a very necessary Preparation of solid Aliment, without which there can be no good Digestion.”—The above are the first lines in Arbuthnot’s Essay on Aliment.
This first act of the important process of Digestion, is most perfectly performed, when the flavour, &c. of our Food is agreeable to our Taste;—we naturally detain upon our Palate those things which please it,—and the Meat we relish most, is consequently most broken down by chewing, and most intimately incorporated with the Saliva—this is the reason why what we desire most, we digest best.
Here, is a sufficient answer, to the Folios which have sprung from the Pens of cynical and senseless Scribblers—on whom Nature not having bestowed a Palate, they have proscribed those pleasures they had not Sense[113] to taste, or comprehend the wise purposes for which they were given to us, and
“Compound for Sins they are inclin’d to,
By damning those they have no mind to.”
How large a share of the business of Digestion is managed by Mastication, has been shown by the experiments of Spallanzani[114].
To Chew long, and leisurely, is the only way to extract the essence of our food—to enjoy the taste of it, and to render it easily convertible into laudable Chyle, by the facility it gives to the gastric juices to dissolve it without trouble.
The pleasure of the Palate, and the health of the Stomach, are equally promoted by this salutary habit, which all should be taught to acquire in their infancy.
The more tender meat is, the more we may eat of it.—That which is most difficult to Chew, is of course most difficult to Digest.
From 30 to 40 (according to the tenderness of the meat) has been calculated as the mean number of Munches, that solid meat requires, to prepare it for its journey down the Red Lane; less will be sufficient for tender, delicate, and easily digestible white meats.