The Chemistry of Cookery

but for special remedies that they use (the mottebeer, cranberry, &c., grown and preserved especially for the purpose). The Laplanders make a broth of scurvy-grass and similar herbs; I have watched them gathering these, and observed that the wild celery was a leading ingredient. Scurvy on board ship results from eating salt meat, the potash of which has escaped by exosmosis into the brine or pickle. The sailor now escapes it by drinking citrate of potash in the form of lime-juice, and by alternating salt junk with rations of tinned meats. I once lived for six days on bread and cheese only, tasting no other food. I had, in company with C. M. Clayton (son of the Senator of Delaware, who negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), taken a passage from Malta to Athens in a little schooner, and expecting a three days’ journey we took no other rations than a lump of Cheshire cheese and a supply of bread. Bad weather doubled the expected length of our journey. We were both young, and proud of our hardihood in bearing privations, were staunch disciples of Diogenes; but on the last day we succumbed, and bartered the remainder of our bread and cheese for some of the boiled horse-beans and cabbage-broth of the forecastle. The cheese, highly relished at first, had become positively nauseous, and our craving for the forecastle vegetable broth was absurd, considering the full view we had of its constituents and of the dirtiness of its cooks. I attribute this to the lack of potash salts in the cheese and bread. It was similar to the craving for common salt by cattle that lack necessary chlorides in their food. I am satisfied that cheese can never take the place in an economic dietary, otherwise justified by its nutritious composition, unless this deficiency of potash is somehow supplied. My device of using it with milk as a solvent supplies it in a simple and natural manner. The milk is not necessary, though preferable. I find that a solution of cheese may be made in water by simply grating or thinly slicing