Volume Ii Part 67 (1/2)
3. Cheese is of various kinds, according to the greater or less quant.i.ty of cream, which it contains, and according to its age. Those cheeses, which are easiest broken to pieces in the mouth, are generally easiest of digestion, and contain most nutriment. Some kinds of cheese, though slow of digestion, are also slow in changing by chemical processes in the stomach, and therefore will frequently agree well with those, who have a weak digestion; as I have seen toasted cheese vomited up a whole day after it was eaten without having undergone any apparent change, or given any uneasiness to the patient. It is probable a portion of sugar, or of animal fat, or of the gravy of boiled or roasted meat, mixed with cheese at the time of making it, might add to its pleasant and nutritious quality.
4. The reason, why autumnal milk is so much thicker or coagulable than vernal milk, is not easy to understand, but as new milk is in many respects similar to chyle, it may be considered as food already in part digested by the animal it is taken from, and thence supplies a nutriment of easy digestion. But as it requires to be curdled by the gastric acid, before it can enter the lacteals, as is seen in the stomachs of calves, it seems more suitable to children, whose stomachs abound more with acidity, than to adults; but nevertheless supplies good nourishment to many of the latter, and particularly to those, who use vegetable food, and whose stomachs have not been much accustomed to the unnatural stimulus of spice, salt, and spirit. See Cla.s.s I. 1. 2. 5.
III. 1. The seeds, roots, leaves, and fruits of plants, const.i.tute the greatest part of the food of mankind; the respective quant.i.ties of nourishment, which these contain, may perhaps be estimated from the quant.i.ty of starch, or of sugar, they can be made to produce: in farinaceous seeds, the mucilage seems gradually to be converted into starch, while they remain in our granaries; and the starch by the germination of the young plant, as in making malt from barley, or by animal digestion, is converted into sugar. Hence old wheat and beans contain more starch than new; and in our stomachs other vegetable and animal materials are converted into sugar; which const.i.tutes in all creatures a part of their chyle.
Hence it is probable, that sugar is the most nutritive part of vegetables; and that they are more nutritive, as they are convertible in greater quant.i.ty into sugar by the power of digestion; as appears from sugar being found in the chyle of all animals, and from its existing in great quant.i.ty in the urine of patients in the diabaetes, of which a curious case is related in Sect. XXIX. 4. where a man labouring under this malady eat and drank an enormous quant.i.ty, and sometimes voided sixteen pints of water in a day, with an ounce of sugar in each pint.
2. Oil, when mixed with mucilage or coagulable lymph, as in cream or new milk, is easy of digestion, and const.i.tutes probably the most nutritive part of animal diet; as oil is another part of the chyle of all animals. As these two materials, sugar and b.u.t.ter, contain much nutriment under a small volume, and readily undergo some chemical change so as to become acid or rancid; they are liable to disturb weak stomachs, when taken in large quant.i.ty, more than aliment, which contains less nourishment, and is at the same time less liable to chemical changes; because the chyle is produced quicker than the torpid lacteals can absorb it, and thence undergoes a further chemical process. Sugar and b.u.t.ter therefore are not so easily digested, when taken in large quant.i.ty, as those things, which contain less nutriment; hence, where the stomach is weak, they must be used in less quant.i.ty. But the custom of some people in restraining children entirely from them, is depriving them of a very wholesome, agreeable, and substantial part of their diet. Honey, manna, sap-juice, are different kinds of less pure sugar.
3. All the esculent vegetables contain a bland oil, or mucilage, or starch, or sugar, or acid; and, as their stimulus is moderate, are properly given alone as food in inflammatory diseases; and mixed with milk const.i.tute the food of thousands. Other vegetables possess various degrees and various kinds of stimulus; and to these we are beholden for the greater part of our Materia Medica, which produce nausea, sickness, vomiting, catharsis, intoxication, inflammation, and even death, if unskilfully administered.
The acrid or intoxicating, and other kinds of vegetable juices, such as produce sickness, or evacuate the bowels, or such even as are only disagreeable to the palate, appear to be a part of the defence of those vegetables, which possess them, from the a.s.saults of larger animals or of insects. As mentioned in the Botanic Garden, Part II. Cant. I. line 161, note. This appears in a forcible manner from the perusal of some travels, which have been published of those unfortunate people, who have suffered s.h.i.+pwreck on uncultivated countries, and have with difficulty found food to subsist, in otherwise not inhospitable climates.
4. As these acrid and intoxicating juices generally reside in the mucilage, and not in the starch of many roots, and seeds, according to the observation of M. Parmentier, the wholesome or nutritive parts of some vegetables may be thus separated from the medicinal parts of them. Thus if the root of white briony be rasped into cold water, by means of a bread-grater made of a tinned iron plate, and agitated in it, the acrid juice of the root along with the mucilage will be dissolved, or swim, in the water; while a starch perfectly wholesome and nutritious will subside, and may be used as food in times of scarcity.
M. Parmentier further observes, that potatoes contain too much mucilage in proportion to their starch, which prevents them from being converted into good bread. But that if the starch be collected from ten pounds of raw potatoes by grating them into cold water, and agitating them, as above mentioned; and if the starch thus procured be mixed with other ten pounds of boiled potatoes, and properly subjected to fermentation like wheat flour, that it will make as good bread as the finest wheat.
Good bread may also be made by mixing wheat-flour with boiled potatoes.
Eighteen pounds of wheat flour are said to make twenty-two pounds and a half of bread. Eighteen pounds of wheat-flour mixed with nine pounds of boiled potatoes, are said to make twenty-nine pounds and a half of bread.
This difference of weight must arise from the difference of the previous dryness of the two materials. The potatoes might probably make better flour, if they were boiled in steam, in a close vessel, made some degrees hotter than common boiling water.
Other vegetable matters may be deprived of their too great acrimony by boiling in water, as the great variety of the cabbage, the young tops of white briony, water-cresses, asparagus, with innumerable roots, and some fruits. Other plants have their acrid juices or bitter particles diminished by covering them from the light by what is termed blanching them, as the stems and leaves of cellery, endive, sea-kale. The former method either extracts or decomposes the acrid particles, and the latter prevents them from being formed. See Botanic Garden, Vol. I. additional note x.x.xIV. on the Etiolation of vegetables.
5. The art of cookery, by exposing vegetable and animal substances to heat, has contributed to increase the quant.i.ty of the food of mankind by other means besides that of destroying their acrimony. One of these is by converting the acerb juices of some fruits into sugar, as in the baking of unripe pears, and the bruising of unripe apples; in both which situations the life of the vegetable is destroyed, and the conversion of the harsh juice into a sweet one must be performed by a chemical process; and not by a vegetable one only, as the germination of barley in making malt has generally been supposed.
Some circ.u.mstances, which seem to injure the life of several fruits, seem to forward the saccharine process of their juices. Thus if some kinds of pears are gathered a week before they would ripen on the tree, and are laid on a heap and covered, their juice becomes sweet many days sooner. The taking off a circular piece of the bark from a branch of a pear-tree causes the fruit of that branch to ripen sooner by a fortnight, as I have more than once observed. The wounds made in apples by insects occasion those apples to ripen sooner; caprification, or the piercing of figs, in the island of Malta, is said to ripen them sooner; and I am well informed, that when bunches of grapes in this country have acquired their expected size, that if the stalk of each bunch be cut half through, that they will sooner ripen.
The germinating barley in the malt-house I believe acquires little sweetness, till the life of the seed is destroyed, and the saccharine process then continued or advanced by the heat in drying it. Thus in animal digestion, the sugar produced in the stomach is absorbed by the lacteals as fast as it is made, otherwise it ferments, and produces flatulency; so in the germination of barley in the malt-house, so long as the new plant lives, the sugar, I suppose, is absorbed as fast as it is made; but that, which we use in making beer, is the sugar produced by a chemical process after the death of the young plant, or which is made more expeditiously, than the plant can absorb it.
It is probably this saccharine process, which obtains in new hay-stacks too hastily, and which by immediately running into fermentation produces so much heat as to set them on fire. The greatest part of the grain, or seeds, or roots, used in the distilleries, as wheat, canary seed, potatoes, are not I believe previously subjected to germination, but are in part by a chemical process converted into sugar, and immediately subjected to vinous fermentation; and it is probable a process may sometime be discovered of producing sugar from starch or meal; and of separating it from them for domestic purposes by alcohol, which dissolves sugar but not mucilage; or by other means.
Another method of increasing the nutriment of mankind by cookery, is by dissolving cartilages and bones, and tendons, and probably some vegetables, in steam or water at a much higher degree of heat than that of boiling.
This is to be done in a close vessel, which is called Papin's digester; in which, it is said, that water may be made red-hot, and will then dissolve all animal substances; and might thus add to our quant.i.ty of food in times of scarcity. This vessel should be made of iron, and should have an oval opening at top, with an oval lid of iron larger than the aperture; this lid should be slipped in endways, when the vessel is filled, and then turned, and raised by a screw above it into contact with the under edges of the aperture. There should also be a small tube or hole covered with a weighted valve to prevent the danger of bursting the digester.
Where the powers of digestion are weakened, broths made by boiling animal and vegetable substances in water afford a nutriment; though I suppose not so great as the flesh and vegetables would afford, if taken in their solid form, and mixed with saliva in the act of mastication. The aliment thus prepared should be boiled but a short time, nor should be suffered to continue in our common kitchen-utensils afterwards, as they are lined with a mixture of half lead and half tin, and are therefore unwholesome, though the copper is completely covered. And those soups, which have any acid or wine boiled in them, unless they be made in silver, or in china, or in those pot-vessels, which are not glazed by the addition of lead, are truly poisonous; as the acid, as lemon-juice or vinegar, when made hot, erodes or dissolves the lead and tin lining of the copper-vessels, and the leaden glaze of the porcelain ones. Hence, where silver cannot be had, iron vessels are preferable to tinned copper ones; or those made of tinned iron-plates in the common tin-shops, which are said to be covered with pure or block tin.
6. Another circ.u.mstance, which facilitates the nourishment of mankind, is the mechanic art of grinding farinaceous seeds into powder between mill-stones; which may be called the artificial teeth of society. It is probable, that some soft kinds of wood, especially when they have undergone a kind of fermentation, and become of looser texture, might be thus used as food in times of famine.
Nor is it improbable, that hay, which has been kept in stacks, so as to undergo the saccharine process, may be so managed by grinding and by fermentation with yeast like bread, as to serve in part for the sustenance of mankind in times of great scarcity. Dr. Priestley gave to a cow for some time a strong infusion of hay in large quant.i.ty for her drink, and found that she produced during this treatment above double the quant.i.ty of milk.
Hence if bread cannot be made from ground hay, there is great reason to suspect, that a nutritive beverage may be thus prepared either in its saccharine state, or fermented into a kind of beer.
In times of great scarcity there are other vegetables, which though not in common use, would most probably afford wholesome nourishment, either by boiling them, or drying and grinding them, or by both those processes in succession. Of these are perhaps the tops and the bark of all those vegetables, which are armed with thorns or p.r.i.c.kles, as gooseberry trees, holly, gorse, and perhaps hawthorn. The inner bark of the elm tree makes a kind of gruel. And the roots of fern, and probably of very many other roots, as of gra.s.s and of clover taken up in winter, might yield nourishment either by boiling or baking, and separating the fibres from the pulp by beating them; or by getting only the starch from those, which possess an acrid mucilage, as the white briony.
7. However the arts of cookery and of grinding may increase or facilitate the nourishment of mankind, the great source of it is from agriculture. In the savage state, where men live solely by hunting, I was informed by Dr.
Franklin, that there was seldom more than one family existed in a circle of five miles diameter; which in a state of pasturage would support some hundred people, and in a state of agriculture many thousands. The art of feeding mankind on so small a grain as wheat, which seems to have been discovered in Egypt by the immortal name of Ceres, shewed greater ingenuity than feeding them with the large roots of potatoes, which seem to have been a discovery of ill-fated Mexico.
This greater production of food by agriculture than by pasturage, shews that a nation nourished by animal food will be less numerous than if nourished by vegetable; and the former will therefore be liable, if they are engaged in war, to be conquered by the latter, as Abel was slain by Cain. This is perhaps the only valid argument against inclosing open arable fields. The great production of human nourishment by agriculture and pasturage evinces the advantage of society over the savage state; as the number of mankind becomes increased a thousand fold by the arts of agriculture and pasturage; and their happiness is probably under good governments improved in as great a proportion, as they become liberated from the hourly fear of beasts of prey, from the daily fear of famine, and of the occasional incursions of their cannibal neighbours.
But pasturage cannot exist without property both in the soil, and the herds which it nurtures; and for the invention of arts, and production of tools necessary to agriculture, some must think, and others labour; and as the efforts of some will be crowned with greater success than that of others, an inequality of the ranks of society must succeed; but this inequality of mankind in the present state of the world is too great for the purposes of producing the greatest quant.i.ty of human nourishment, and the greatest sum of human happiness; there should be no slavery at one end of the chain of society, and no despotism at the other.--By the future improvements of human reason such governments may possibly hereafter be established, as may a hundred-fold increase the numbers of mankind, and a thousand-fold their happiness.