Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/72

64 food. I have no doubt whatever that it may. It could be done at once if the incrusting resinous matter were removed, for pure cellulose in the form of cotton and linen rags has been converted into sugar artificially in the laboratory of the chemist; and in the ripening of fruits such conversion is effected on a large scale in the laboratory of Nature. A Jersey pear, for example, when full grown in autumn is little better than a lump of acidulated wood. Left hanging on the leafless tree, or gathered and carefully stored for two or three months, it becomes by Nature's own unaided cookery the most delicious and delicate pulp that can be tasted or imagined.

Certain animals have a remarkable power of digesting ligneous tissue. The beaver is an example of this. The whole of its stomach, and more especially that secondary stomach the cœcum, is often found crammed or plugged with fragments of wood and bark. I have opened the crops of several Norwegian ptarmigans, and found them filled with no other food than the needles of pines, upon which they evidently feed during the winter. The birds, when cooked, were scarcely eatable on account of the strong resinous flavor of their flesh.

I may here, by-the-way, correct the commonly-accepted version of a popular story. We are told that when Marie Antoinette was informed of a famine in the neighborhood of the Tyrol, and of the starving of some of the peasants there, she replied, "I would rather eat pie-crust" (some of the story-tellers say "pastry") "than starve." Thereupon the courtiers giggled at the ignorance of the pampered princess who supposed that starving peasants had such an alternative food as pastry. The ignorance, however, was all on the side of the courtiers and those who repeat the story in its ordinary form. The princess was the only person in the court who really understood the habits of the peasants of the particular district in question. They cook their meat, chiefly young veal, by rolling it in a kind of dough made of sawdust, mixed with as little coarse flour as will hold it together; then place this in an oven or in wood-embers until the dough is hardened to a tough crust, and the meat is raised throughout to the cooking-point. Marie Antoinette said that she would rather eat croutins than starve, knowing that these croutins, or meat pie-crusts, were given to the pigs; that the pigs digested them, and were nourished by them in spite of the wood-sawdust.

When I come to the other constituents of vegetable food it will be understood that the changes effected in their cookery are but nominal, and that nearly the whole business of vegetable cookery consists in rendering the cellular tissue more digestible than it is in the raw state; or in breaking it up to liberate its contents. When on the subject of cooking animal food, I had to define the cooking temperature as determined by that at which albumen coagulates, and to point out the mischief arising from exceeding that temperature and thus rendering the albumen horny and indigestible.