RECEIPT 8.--Onions have medicinal properties, but this should be no recommendation to healthy people. Raw, they are unwholesome; boiled, they are better; fried, they are positively pernicious.
RECEIPT 9.--Nuts are said to be adapted to man in a state of nature; but I write for those who are in an artificial state, not a natural state. Of the chestnut I have spoken elsewhere. The hazelnut is next best, then perhaps the peanut and the beechnut. The butternut, and walnut or hickory-nut, are too oily. Nor do I see how they can be improved by cookery.
RECEIPT 10.--Cabbage, properly boiled, and without condiments, is tolerable, but rather stringy, and of course rather indigestible.
RECEIPT 11.--Greens and salads are stringy and indigestible. Besides, they are much used, as condiments are, to excite or provoke an appetite--a thing usually wrong. A feeble appetite, say at the opening of the spring, however common, is a great blessing. If let alone, nature will erelong set to rights those things, which have gone wrong perhaps all winter; and then appetite will return in a natural way.
But the worst thing about greens, salads, and some other things, is, they are eaten with vinegar. Vinegar and all substances, I must again say, which resist or retard putrefaction, retard also the work of digestion. It is a universal law, and ought to be known as such, that whatever tends to preserve our food--except perhaps ice and the air-pump--tends also to interfere with the great work of digestion. Hence, all pickling, salting, boiling down, sweetening, etc., are objectionable. Pereira says, "By drying, salting, smoking, and pickling, the digestibility of fish is greatly impaired;" and this, except as regards _drying_, is but the common doctrine. It should, however, be applied generally as well as to fish.
[26] I shall use these terms indiscriminately, as they mean in practice the same thing.
[27] Both these processes are patented in Great Britain. The bread thus retains its sweetness--no waste of its saccharine matter, and no residuum except muriate of soda or common salt. Sesquicarbonate of soda is made of three parts or atoms of the carbonic acid, and two of the soda.
[28] Keep butter and all greasy substances away from every preparation of food which belongs to this division--especially from green peas, beans, corn, etc.