The Chemistry of Cookery

the ‘Birmingham Journal,’ about twenty years ago, viz. that the water in which green peas are boiled should not be thrown away. It contains much of the saline constituents of the peas, some soluble casein, and has a fine flavour, the very essence of the peas. If to this, as it comes from the saucepan, be added a little stock, or some Liebig’s ‘Extract,’ a delicious soup is at once produced, requiring nothing more than ordinary seasoning. With care, it may form a clear soup such as just now is in fashion among the fastidious, but prepared however roughly, it is a very economical, wholesome, and appetising soup, and costs a minimum of trouble. I must here add a few words in advocacy of the further adoption in this country of the French practice of using as _potage_ the water in which vegetables generally (excepting potatoes) have been boiled. When we boil cabbages, turnips, carrots, &c., we dissolve out of them a very large proportion of their saline constituents; salts which are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of health; salts without which we become victims of gout, rheumatism, lumbago, neuralgia, gravel, and all the ills that human flesh with a lithic acid diathesis is heir to; _i.e._ about the most painful series of all its inheritances. The potash of these salts existing therein in combination with organic acids is separated from these acids by organic combustion, and is then and there presented to the baneful lithic acid of the blood and tissues, the stony torture-particles of which it converts into soluble lithate of potash, and thus enables them to be carried out of the system. I know not which of the Fathers of the Church invented fast-day and _soupe maigre_, but could almost suppose that he was a scientific monk, a profound alchemist, like Basil Valentine, who, in his seekings for the _aurum potabile_, the elixir of life, had learned the beneficent action of organic potash salts on the blood, and therefore used the authority of the Church to enforce their frequent use among the faithful. The above remarks when