The Chemistry of Cookery

after feeding for a year on grass only. My strictures on the potato do not apply to them as used in England, where the prevailing vice of our ordinary diet is that it is too carnivorous. The potatoes we eat with our meat serve to dilute it, and supply the farinaceous element in which flesh is deficient. The reader may have observed that most of the starch foods are derived from the roots or stems of plants. Many others are used in tropical climates where little labour is demanded or done, and, therefore, but little nitrogenous food required. FOOTNOTE: [15] In fairness to retailers I should state that the price of arrowroot just now is unusually low; the ordinary range is from twopence to two shillings. People who are afraid of having their arrowroot adulterated should ask themselves what can be used to cheapen the St. Vincent at the above-quoted prices, which are those of the unquestionably genuine article. CHAPTER XII. GLUTEN—BREAD. HAVING treated the cookery of the chief constituents of the roots and stems of the plant, the fibre and the starch, I now come to food obtained from the seeds and the leaves. Taking the seeds first, as the more important, it becomes necessary to describe the nitrogenous constituents which are more abundant in them than in any other part of the plant, though they also contain starch and cell material, or woody fibre, as already stated. In the preceding chapter I described a method of separating starch from flour by washing a piece of dough in water, and thereby removing the starch granules, which fall to the bottom of the water. If this washing is continued until no further milkiness of the water is produced, the piece of dough will be much reduced in dimensions, and changed into a grey, tough, elastic, and viscous or glutinous substance, which has been compared to bird-lime, and has received the appropriate name of _gluten_. When dried, it becomes a hard, horny, transparent mass. It is insoluble in cold water, and partly soluble in hot water. It is soluble in strong