Page:Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.djvu/150

108 REASONS FOR COOKING

Food is prepared and cooked for six reasons: (1) To render mastication easy; (2) to facilitate and hasten digestion; (3) to convert certain naturally hurtful substances into nutritious foods; (4) to eliminate harmful foreign elements evolved in food (e.g. the tinea of tapeworm in beef and mutton; trichinae in pork; the ptomaines resulting from tissue waste); (5) to combine the right foods in proper proportions for the needs of the body; (6) to make it agreeable to the palate and pleasing to the eye.

It may be said that the last "reason" is in flat contradiction to number two; that is only apparently so. Apart from the purely aesthetic value of an agreeable meal, and a well-spread table (and certainly no one will wish that any pleasure or beauty should be gratuitously foregone), there remain many solid arguments for reason number six. "The eye does half the eating." The street boy who flattens his nose against the pastrycook's window-pane while his mouth waters at the sight of the good things within; the animal who, before he is killed, is shown food, in order that he may produce pepsine; the starving man whose pangs are even sharper when he smells some one else's good dinner; all are so many witnesses that the sight and smell of food cause the digestive juices to flow more abundantly.

Pleasant flavours are a necessity of diet. No man could be nourished on tasteless food, though arranged on the most approved scientific basis. No man can live healthily on a monotonous diet, though there may be nothing wanting from the point of view of chemical analysis. The health of the inmates of public institutions has over and over again shown noticeable improvement by reason of some change in the dietary, not implying greater expenditure, nor greater nourishment, nor even alteration of constituents. As in all human affairs there are facts to be reckoned with that science cannot foretell or explain.

Mastication acts mechanically in subdividing food and so exposing a greater surface to the action of the digestive juices with which it afterwards comes in contact. It acts chemically by reason of the digestive power of saliva on starch. Among animals there are some gramnivora that spend a large part of their time in chewing their food, the flow of saliva being very profuse; there are others, chiefly carnivora, that bolt food whole, and afterwards digest at leisure. Prepared food is more or less divided, so that to some extent mastication is superseded. For the rest, in the kitchen starch is hydrated, fibre softened or made brittle, dough vesiculated, albumen coagulated, and indigestible matter removed.

Any one may perceive how impossible it would be to masticate a mouthful of flour, and how raw meat would clog the teeth. Hurrying over our meals, as we do, we should fare badly if all the grinding and subdividing of human food had to be accomplished by human teeth.