Page:Foods and their adulteration; origin, manufacture, and composition of food products; description of common adulterations, food standards, and national food laws and regulations (IA foodstheiradulte02wile).pdf/301

 of this kind without being an adulterant. From this class of bodies, however, there is excluded artificial colors and artificial flavoring essences bearing the name of genuine. A yellow cake which does not owe its color to the eggs or other normal ingredients employed must be regarded as an adulterated article, especially if the dye used in producing the yellow is one of the coal dyes or coal tar derivatives such as naphthol yellow. The use of imitation fruit flavors such as the so-called strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, vanilla, etc., is also to be regarded as an adulteration. The adulteration of cakes may be regarded as confined particularly to these two classes of article assuming that all the other ingredients are wholesome and without injurious effects upon the digestion. The eggs used in cake making should be fresh and palatable. Too often passé storage eggs and eggs broken and preserved with borax or formaldehyde and unfit for consumption have been used by the bakers of cakes.

Mineral coloring matters have sometimes been found in cakes and these are more objectionable by far than the artificial colors above mentioned. Where molasses from sugar-cane factories is used in the manufacture of cake a considerable trace of chlorid of tin or of zinc salts may be found therein, derived from the wash used in the centrifugal when drying sugar crystals or from the process of bleaching the molasses. This must be regarded as a very serious adulteration and molasses of this kind should never be used in the manufacture of cake nor for edible purposes upon the table. Sulfurous acid may also be absorbed during the process of bleaching the sugar-cane juices.

It is needless to add that cake with its complex character should be eaten as a relish rather than a diet. There is no hygienic or dietetic objection to the mixture of sugar with the flour in the making of ordinary sweetened bread. Such bread must be regarded as highly nutritious and as differing from ordinary bread only in a disturbance of the natural food content of the loaf caused by the addition of a carbohydrate to the bread. Many of the cakes which are sold contain so small a quantity of sugar that they ought not to be classed with the sweet cake. Out of the whole number of samples used in the making up of the above average only four contained so little sugar as to be ineligible to bear the name of sweet cake or sweetened bread.

Breakfast Foods.—A very large variety of cereal preparations are on the market under the general name of breakfast foods. These preparations are made directly from the cereals more or less completely ground by subjecting them to certain manipulations of a fermentative or culinary character by means of which the preparations are made ready for immediate consumption or at least with only a moderate degree of additional cooking. The changes which take place in the preparation of cereals for breakfast foods are of two general characters, namely, those produced by fermentative action with malt, yeast, or other ferments, and, second, changes produced by heating,