Dr. Nichols' penny vegetarian cookery : the science and art of selecting and preparing a pure, healthful, and sufficient diet.

  • Nichols, Thomas Low, 1815-1901.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Nichols' penny vegetarian cookery : the science and art of selecting and preparing a pure, healthful, and sufficient diet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    refinements have only brought us to the starchy, tasteless, constipating, often alumy, or otherwise debased, unnatural, and unwholesome white bread of the bakers# , . 11 j _/r Decorticated bread, made of wheat with the outer skin rubbed off, may be best for a few persons with irritable bowels, but for most, am for all in the least liable to constipation, the whole meal is best The usual mode of making bread light is by fermentation, a process of decay By it a portion of the starch is first converted into feugar, then into alcohol and carbonic acid, the globules of which make bread light, and then into acid, which makes it sour. qtto , Unleavened bread is sweeter, and more nutritious than leavened The sooner fermentation is checked by heat, the better the bread; but bakers want to make big loaves, and use alum to keep them from becoming sour. , _• Good, wholesome bread is made of rye, barley, and maize, or the inter-mixtures. Yankees revel in Boston Brown Bread, made of rye an Indian corn maize. Barley bread used to be common in Cumberland; oat cakes are still eaten in Scotland. . Clean nice bread is the aerated, mixed with water into which carbonic acid has been absorbed under pressure. Mix a basin of meal or hour quickly with a bottle of soda-water, and you have aerated bread. Baking powder, thoroughly mixed with the meal, when the mass is wetted, generates carbonic acid. If it be made of pure bicarbonate of soda and tartaric acid in exactly neutralising proportions, it will make light and healthy bread. . . . , - Some prefer to produce the carbonic acid by mixing bicarbonate of soda with the meal, and then putting a neutralizing quantity of hydro¬ chloric acid into the water used to make the dough. The resulting element in this case is common salt—chloride o/ sodium. With the baking powder it is tartrate of sodium, , « Ur. Nichols’ Bread-raiser” is simply a carefully-made baking powder combining the best materials in accurate proportions. We find bread made without fermentation sweeter, and we think it more healthful, than that which is fermented. The biscuits made of Dr. Nichols’ Food of Health are unfermented. Light thin cakes, called “gems,” are made of the whole meal of wheat in America by beating air into a thin batter of meal, as one beats eggs. The batter is then dropped upon hot irons and quickly baked. These cakes are crisp and delicious. Scotch griddle or girdle cakes made or oatmeal spread thin and baked over the fire are similar. American « Johnny cake * and “ hoe cake ” is made of Indian corn-maize meal, mixed with water, and spread about an inch thick on a shallow tin, or the broad negro hoe, and baked by being set before the fire, and eaten hot. The best bread is made of good wheat freshly ground and quickly baked. Perhaps the very best is that made of fresh meal, not too fine, simply mixed with water and baked in the most primitive way, as it was before the tent of Abraham. To this day, the common bread of the East is made of the whole meal of wheat, ground by the women in a hand mill every morning, mixed with water and baked at the fire. ^ This is the principal food of some of the hardiest and strongest men in the world. Such bread, with a handful of dates or figs, or a bunch of grapes, makes a pure, delicious, and most healthful diet.