[3] "Groats," or _grits_, a coarse ground corn meal, or _very_ small hominy, fanned and sifted. This can be prepared at any country corn mill, is a cheap and valuable article of diet for the sick. It can be boiled or baked. In the latter form, a sauce made with a little sugar, butter and lemon juice, or vinegar, renders it very palatable. When boiled it is usually eaten with a little butter and salt.
[4] In the diseases produced by bad food, such as scorbutic dysentery and diarrhœa, the patient's stomach often craves for and digests things, some of which certainly would be laid down in no dietary that ever was invented for sick, and especially not for such sick These are fruit, pickles, jams, gingerbread, fat of ham or bacon, suet, cheese, butter, milk. These cases I have seen not by ones, nor by tens, but by hundreds. And the patient's stomach was right and the book was wrong. The articles craved for, in these cases, might have been principally arranged under the two heads of fat and vegetable acids.
There is often a marked difference between men and women in this matter of sick feeling. Women's digestion is generally slower.
[5] Chicken broth, with the fat well skimmed off, is, to most patients, more palatable than beef tea.
[6] Another most excellent dietetic article is biscuit jelly, made according to the following formula:
BISCUIT JELLY.—_Biscuit_, crushed, 4 oz.—cold water, 2 quarts; soak for some hours; boil to one half; strain; evaporate to one pint; then flavor with sugar, red wine and cinnamon.
_Parched Corn_, powdered and sweetened to suit the taste, is recommended as a pleasant and nutritious diet for invalids.
In a Southern convalescent, one of the most desirable things that can be given them is _thin_ corn meal, ground, well boiled, seasoned with salt, and presented while hot.
[7] It is made a frequent recommendation to persons about to incur great exhaustion, either from the nature of the service, or from their being not in a state fit for it, to eat a piece of bread before they go. I wish the recommenders would themselves try the experiment of substituting a piece of bread for a cup of tea or coffee, or beef tea, as a refresher. They would find it a very poor comfort. When soldiers have to set out fasting on fatiguing duty, when nurses have to go fasting in to their patients, it is a hot restorative they want, and ought to have, before they go, not a cold bit of bread. And dreadful have been the consequences of neglecting this. If they can take a bit of bread _with_ the hot cup of tea, so much the better, but not _instead_ of it. The fact that their is more nourishment in bread than in almost anything else has probably induced the mistake. That it is a fatal mistake there is no doubt. It seems, though very little is known on the subject, that what "assimilates" itself directly, and with the least trouble of digestion with the human body, is the best for the above circumstances. Bread requires two or three processes of assimilation, before it becomes like the human body.