Musa, Musoe, The Gods were at tea: Musoe, Musam, Eating Raspberry jam: Musa, Musah, Made by Cupid's mamma.
RHUBARB (Garden). see Dock, page 159.
RICE.
Rice, or Ryse, the grain of Oryza sativa, a native cereal of India, is considered here scarcely as a Herbal Simple, but rather as a common article of some medicinal resource in the store cupboard of every English house-hold, and therefore always at band as a vegetable remedy.
Among the Arabs Rice is considered a sacred food: [462] and their tradition runs that it first sprang from a drop of Mahomet's perspiration in Paradise.
Being composed almost exclusively of starch, and poorer in nitrogen, as well as in phosphoric acid, than other cereals, it is less laxative, and is of value as a demulcent to palliate irritative diarrhoea, and to allay intestinal distress.
A mucilage of Rice made by boiling the well-washed grain for some time in water, and straining, contains starch and phosphate of lime in solution, and is therefore a serviceable emollient. But when needed for food the grain should be steamed, because in boiling it loses the little nitrogen, and the greater part of the lime phosphate which it has scantily contained.
Rice bread and Rice cakes, simply made, are very light and easy of digestion. The gluten confers the property of rising on dough or paste made of Rice flour. But as an article of sustenance Rice is not well suited for persons of fermentative tendencies during the digestion of their food, because its starch is liable to undergo this chemical change in the stomach.
Dr. Tytler reported in the Lancet (1833), cases resembling malignant cholera from what he termed the morbus oryzoeus, as provoked by the free and continued use of Rice as food. And Boutins, in 1769, published an account of the diseases common to the East Indies, in which he stated that when Rice is eaten more or less exclusively, the vision becomes impaired. But neither of these allegations seems to have been afterwards authoritatively confirmed.
Chemically, Rice consists of starch, fat, fibrin, mineral matter such as phosphate of lime, cellulose, and water.