Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/407

 Vienna, is unrivaled for delicacy, texture, and color. Whole meal may be bought; but mills are now cheaply made for home use, and wheat may be ground to any degree of coarseness desired.

Here illustration by recipe must cease; although it would be an easy task to fill a volume with matter of this kind, illustrating the ample means which exist for diminishing somewhat the present wasteful use of "butcher's, meats" with positive advantage to the consumer. Many facts in support of this position will appear as we proceed. But another important object in furnishing the foregoing details is to point out how combinations of the nitrogenous, starchy, fatty, and mineral elements may be made, in well-proportioned mixtures, so as to produce what I have termed a "perfect" dish—perfect, that is, so far as the chief indication is concerned, viz., one which supplies every demand of the body, without containing any one element in undue proportion. For it is obvious that one or two of these elements may exist in injurious excess, especially for delicate stomachs, the varied peculiarities of which, as before insisted on, must sometimes render necessary a modification of all rules. Thus it is easy to make the fatty constituent too large, and thereby derange digestion, a result frequently experienced by persons of sedentary habits, to whom a little pastry, a morsel of foie gras, or a rich cream is a source of great discomfort, or of a "bilious attack"; while the laborer, who requires much fatty fuel for his work, would have no difficulty in consuming a large quantity of such compounds with advantage. Nitrogenous matter also is commonly supplied beyond the eater's wants; and, if more is consumed than can be used for the purposes which such aliment subserves, it must be eliminated in some way from the system. This process of elimination, it suffices to say here, is undoubtedly a prolific cause of disease, such as gout and its allies, as well as other affections of a serious character, which would in all probability exist to a very small extent, were it not the habit of those who, being able to obtain the strong or butcher's meats, eat them daily year after year, in larger quantity than the constitution can assimilate.

Quitting the subject of wheat and the leguminous seeds, it will be interesting to review briefly the combinations of rice, which furnishes so large a portion of the world with a vegetable staple of diet. Remembering that it contains chiefly starch, with nitrogen in small proportion, and almost no fat or mineral elements, and just sufficing perhaps to meet the wants of an inactive population in a tropical climate, the first addition necessary for people beyond this limit will be fat, and, after that, more nitrogen. Hence the first effort to make a dish of rice "complete" is the addition of butter and a little Parmesan cheese, in the simple risotto, from which, as a starting-point, improvement, both for nutritive purposes and for the demands of the palate, may be carried to any extent. Fresh additions are made in the shape of marrow, of morsels of liver, etc., of meat broth with onion and spice,