Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/386

372 agree that the climate is especially favorable to longevity, provided bitter beer, and all other alcoholic drinks, all peppery condiments, and flesh foods, are avoided. The most remarkable example of vigorous old age I have ever met was a retired colonel eighty-two years of age, who had risen from the ranks, and had been fifty-five years in India without furlough; drank no alcohol during that period; was a vegetarian in India, though not so in his native land. I guessed his age to be somewhere about sixty. He was a Scotchman, and an ardent student of the works of both George and Dr. Andrew Combe.

While still seasonable I add by way of postscript a receipt for a dish lately invented by my wife. It is vegetable marrow au gratin, prepared by simply boiling the vegetable as usual, slicing it, placing the slices in a dish, covering them with grated cheese, and then browning slightly in an oven or before the fire, as in preparing the well-known "cauliflower au gratin." I have modified this (with improvement, I believe) by mashing the boiled marrow and stirring the grated cheese into the midst of it while as hot as possible; or, better still, by adding a little milk, a pinch of bicarbonate of potash, mixing with the cheese, and then returning this purée to the saucepan, heating and stirring it there for a few minutes to effect the complete solution of the cheese. This dish is not so pretty as that au gratin browned in orthodox fashion, but is more digestible.

In an unguarded moment I promised to include the above in this series, and will do the best I can to fulfill the promise; but the utmost result of this effort can only be a contribution to the subject which is too profoundly mysterious to be fully grasped by any intellect that is not sufficiently clairvoyant to penetrate paving-stones and see through them to the interiors of the closely tiled cellars wherein the mysteries are manipulated.

I will first define what I mean by the cookery of wine. Grape-juice in its unfermented state may be described as "raw wine," or this name may be applied to the juice after fermentation. I apply it in the latter sense, and shall use it as describing grape-juice which has been spontaneously and recently fermented without the addition of any foreign materials, or altered by keeping, or heating, or any other process beyond fermentation. All such processes and admixtures which effect any chemical changes on the raw material I shall describe as cookery, and the result as cooked wine. When wine made from other juice than that of the grape is referred to it will be named specifically.

At the outset a fallacy, very prevalent in this country, should be controverted. The high prices charged for the cooked material sold to Englishmen has led to absurdly exaggerated notions of the original value of wine. I am quite safe in stating that the average market