The Chemistry of Cookery

VEGETABLE CASEIN AND VEGETABLE JUICES. AS most of my readers doubtless know, peas, beans, lentils and other seeds of leguminous plants are more nutritious, theoretically, than the seeds of grasses, such as wheat, barley, oats, maize, &c. I was glad to see at the Health Exhibition a fine series of the South Kensington cases, displaying in the simplest and most demonstrative manner the proximate analyses of the chief materials of animal and vegetable food. I refer to them now because they did not receive the attention they deserve. On the opening day there was, out of all the crowd, only one other besides myself bestowing any attention upon them. These cases show 1 lb. of wheat, oats, potatoes, peas, &c. &c., on trays; by the side of these are bottles, containing the quantity of water in the 1 lb., and other trays, containing the other constituents of the same quantity; the starch, gluten, casein, the mineral matter, &c., thus displaying at a glance the nutritious value of each so far as chemical analysis can display it. Those Irishmen and others who think I have been too hard upon the potato, will do well to take its nutritive measure thus, and compare it with that of other vegetable foods. I should add that these cases form a part of the permanent collection of the South Kensington Museum, and therefore may be studied at any time. All the leguminous seeds, the ground-nuts, &c., have their nitrogenous constituents displayed under the name of ‘casein.’ The use of this term is rather confusing. In many modern books it does not appear at all in connection with the vegetable kingdom, but is replaced by ‘legumin.’ Liebig regarded this nitrogenous constituent of the leguminous seeds, almonds, &c., as identical with the casein of milk, and it was a pupil and friend of Liebig’s—the late Prince Consort—who devised and originally supervised this graphic method of displaying the chemistry of food.[16] I will not here discuss the vexed question of whether the analyses of Liebig, identifying legumin with casein, or rather those of Dumas and Cahours, who state