Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/408

394 which constitute the mixture, when well prepared, nutritious and highly agreeable. The analogue of this mainly Italian dish is the pilau or pilaff of the Orientals, consisting as it does of nearly the same materials, but differently arranged. The curry of poultry and the kedgeree of fish are further varieties which it is unnecessary to describe. Follow the same combination to Spain, where we find a popular national dish, but slightly differing from the foregoing, in the polio con arroz, which consists of abundance of rice, steeped in a little broth and containing morsels of fowl, bacon, and sausage, with appetizing spices, and sufficing for an excellent meal.

Another farinaceous product of world-wide use is the maize or Indian corn. With a fair amount of nitrogen, starch, and mineral elements, it contains also a good proportion of fat, and is made into bread, cakes, and puddings of various kinds. It is complete, but susceptible of improvement by the addition of nitrogen. Hence, in the United States, where it is largely used, it is often eaten with beans under the name of "succotash." In Italy it is ground into the beautiful yellow flour which is conspicuous in the streets of almost every town; when made into a firm paste by boiling in water, and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, a nitrogenous aliment, it becomes what is known as polenta, and is largely consumed with some relish in the shape of fried fish, sardines, sausage, little birds, or morsels of fowl or goose, by which, of course, fresh nitrogen is added. Macaroni has been already alluded to; although rich in nitrogenous and starchy materials, it is deficient in fat. Hence it is boiled and eaten with butter and parmesan (à l'italienne) and with tomatoes, which furnish saline matters, with meat gravy, or with milk.

Nearer home the potato forms a vegetable basis in composition closely resembling rice, and requiring therefore additions of nitrogenous and fatty elements. The Irishman's inseparable ally, the pig, is the natural, and to him necessary, complement of the tuber, making the latter a complete and palatable dish. The every-day combination of mashed potato and sausage is an application of the same principle. In the absence of pork, the potato-eater substitutes a cheap oily fish, the herring. The combination of fatty material with the potato is still further illustrated in our baked potato and butter, in fried potatoes in their endless variety of form, in potato mashed with milk or cream, served in the ordinary way with maître d'hôtel butter, or arriving at the most perfect and finished form in the pommes de terre sautées an beurre of a first-class French restaurant, where it becomes almost a, plat de luxe. Even the simple bread and butter or bread and cheese of our own country equally owe their form and popularity to physiological necessity; the deficient fat of the bread being supplemented by the fatty elements of each addition, the cheese supplying also its proportion of nitrogenous matter, which exists so largely in its peculiar principle caseine. So, again, all the suet-puddings, "