Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/401

Rh second place. The chestnut also is largely eaten by the poorer population, both it and maize containing more fatty matter than wheat, oats, and legumes.

In Spain, the inhabitants subsist chiefly on maize and rice, with some wheat and legumes, among them the garbanzo or "chick pea," and one of the principal vegetable components of the national olla, which contains also a considerable proportion of animal food in variety, as bacon, sausage, fowl, etc. Fruit is fine and abundant; especially so are grapes, figs, and melons. There is little or no butter, the universal substitute for which is olive-oil, produced in great quantity. Fowls and the pig furnish the chief animal food, and garlic is the favorite condiment.

Going northward, flesh of all kinds occupies a more considerable place in the dietary. In France the garden vegetables and legumes form an important staple of diet for all classes; but the very numerous small land proprietors subsist largely on the direct products of the soil, adding little more than milk, poultry, and eggs, the produce of their small farms. The national pot-au-feu is an admirable mixed dish, in which a small portion of meat is made to yield all its nutritive qualities, and to go far in mingling its odor and savor with those of the fragrant vegetables which are so largely added to the stock. The stock-meat eaten hot, or often cold with plenty of green salad and oil, doubtless the most palatable mode of serving it, thus affords a source of fat, if not otherwise provided for by butter, cheese, etc.

Throughout the German Empire, the cereals, legumes, greens, roots, and fruits supply an important proportion of the food consumed by the common population. Wheaten bread chiefly, and some made from rye, also beans and peas, are used abundantly. Potatoes and green vegetables of all kinds are served in numerous ways, but largely in soups, a favorite dish. Meats, chiefly pork, are greatly esteemed in the form of sausage, and appear also as small portions or joints, but freely garnished with vegetables, on the tables of those who can afford animal diet. Going northward, where the climate is no longer adapted for the production of wheat, as in parts of Russia, rye and oats form the staple food from the vegetable kingdom, associated with an increased quantity of meat and fatty materials.

Lastly, it is well known that the inhabitants of the Arctic zone are compelled to consume large quantities of oily matter, in order to generate heat abundantly; and also that animal food is necessarily the staple of their dietary. Vegetables, which, moreover, are not producible in so severe a climate, would there be wholly inadequate to support life.

We will now consider the food which the English peasant and artisan provide. The former lives, for the most part, on wheaten bread and cheese, with occasionally a little bacon, some potatoes, and perhaps garden greens: it is rarely indeed that he can obtain flesh. To