Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/406

 —and they are numerous—in this form. The same principle, it may be observed, has, although empirically, produced the well-known dishes of beans and bacon, ham and green peas, boiled pork and pease-pudding, all of them old and popular but scientific combinations. Thus also the French, serving petits pois as a separate dish, add butter freely and a dash of sugar, the former making the compound physiologically complete, the latter agreeably heightening the natural sweetness of the vegetable.

Let me recall, at the close of these few hints about the haricot, the fact that there is no product of the vegetable kingdom so nutritious; holding its own in this respect, as it well can, even against the beef and mutton of the animal kingdom. The haricot ranks just above lentils, which have been so much praised of late, and rightly, the haricot being also to most palates more agreeable. By most stomachs, too, haricots are more easily digested than meat is; and, consuming weight for weight, the eater feels lighter and less oppressed, as a rule, after the leguminous dish; while the comparative cost is very greatly in favor of the latter. I do not of course overlook in the dish of simple haricots the absence of savory odors proper to well-cooked meat; but nothing is easier than to combine one part of meat with two parts of haricots, adding vegetables and garden herbs, so as to produce a stew which shall be more nutritious, wholesome, and palatable than a stew of all meat with vegetables, and no haricots. Moreover, the cost of the latter will be more than double that of the former.

I have just adverted to the bread of the laborer, and recommended that it should be made from entire wheat meal; but it should not be so coarsely ground as that commonly sold in London as "whole meal." The coarseness of "whole meal" is a condition designed to exert a specific effect on the digestion for those who need it, and, useful as it is in its place, is not desirable for the average population referred to. It is worth observing, in relation to this coarse meal, that it will not produce light agreeable bread in the form of loaves: they usually have either hard, flinty crusts, or soft, dough-like interiors; but the following treatment, after a trial or two, will be found to produce excellent and most palatable bread: To two pounds of whole meal add half a pound of fine flour and a sufficient quantity of baking-powder and salt; when these are well mixed, rub in about two ounces of butter, and make into dough with half milk and water, or with all milk if preferred. Make rapidly into flat cakes like "tea-cakes," and bake in a quick oven, leaving them afterward to finish thoroughly at a lower temperature. The butter and milk supply fatty matter in which the wheat is somewhat deficient; all the saline and mineral matters of the husk are retained; and thus a more nutritive form of bread can not be made. Moreover, it retains the natural flavor of the wheat, in place of the insipidity which is characteristic of fine flour, although it is indisputable that bread produced from the latter, especially at Paris and