[21] For proof that arsenic or ratsbane is sometimes added to cheese, see the Library of Health, volume ii., page 69. In proof of the poisonous tendency of milk and butter, see Whitlaw's Theory of Fever, and Clark's Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption.
[24] Or, more nearly, perhaps, a year and a half, in this country. In England, it is one year and five-sevenths.
In the work of revising and preparing the foregoing volume for publication, the writer was requested to add to it a system of vegetable cookery. At first he refused to do so, both on account of the difficulty of bringing so extensive a subject within the compass of twenty or thirty pages, and because it did not seem to him to be called for, in connection with the present volume. But he has yielded his own judgment to the importunity of the publishers and other friends of the work, and prepared a mere outline or skeleton of what he may hereafter fill up, should circumstances and the necessary leisure permit.
But there is one difficulty to be met with at the very threshold of the subject. Vegetable eaters are not so hard driven to find whereon to subsist, as many appear to suppose. For the question is continually asked, "If you dispense wholly with flesh and fish, pray what can you find to eat?" Now, while we are aware that one small sect of the vegetarians--the followers of Dr. Schlemmer--eat every thing in a raw state, we are, for ourselves, full believers in plain and simple cookery. That a potato, for example, is better cooked than uncooked, both for man and beast, we have not the slightest doubt. We believe that a system of preparing food which renders the raw material more palatable, more digestible, and more nutritious, or perhaps all this at once, must be legitimate, and even preferable--if not for the individual, at least for the race.
But the difficulty alluded to is, how to select a few choice dishes from the wide range--short of flesh and fish--which God and nature permit. For if we believed in the use of eggs when commingled with food, we should hardly deem it proper to go the whole length of our French brethren, who have nearly seven hundred vegetable dishes, of which eggs form a component part; nor the whole length even to which our own powers of invention might carry us; no, nor even the whole length to which the writer of an English work now before us, and entitled "Vegetable Cookery," has gone--the extent of about a thousand plain receipts. We believe the whole nature of man, and even his appetite, when unperverted, is best served and most fully satisfied with a range of dishes which shall hardly exceed hundreds.