The Chemistry of Cookery

they are easily dissociated or decomposed by heat. This may be shown by heating some cream of tartar or tartaric acid on a strip of metal or glass. It will become carbonised to a cinder, like other organic matter. If the heat is raised sufficiently this cinder will all burn away to carbonic acid and water in the case of the pure acid, or will leave carbonate of potash if cream of tartar or other potash salt is thus burned. Unless I am mistaken, this represents violently what occurs gradually and mildly in the human body, which is in a continuous state of slow combustion so long as it is alive. The organic acids of the potash salts suffer slow combustion, give off their excess of carbonic acid and water to be breathed out, evaporated, and ejected, leaving behind their potash, which combines with the otherwise stony lithic acid just when and where it comes into separate existence by the organic actions which effect the above-described slow combustion. If we take potash in combination with a mineral acid, such as the sulphuric, nitric, or hydrochloric, no such decomposition is possible; the bonds uniting the elements of the mineral acid are too strong to be sundered by the mild chemistry of the living body, and the mineral acid, if separated from its potash base, would be most mischievous, as it precipitates the lithic acid in its worst form. For this reason, all free mineral acids are poisons to those who have a lithic acid diathesis; they may even create it where it did not previously exist. Hence the iniquity of cheapening the manufacture of lemonade, ginger-beer, &c., by using dilute sulphuric or hydrochloric acid as a substitute for citric or tartaric acid. I shall presently come to the cookery of wines, and have something to say about the mineral acids used in producing the choicer qualities of some very ‘dry,’ high-priced samples which, according to my view of the subject, have caused the operations of lithotomy and lithotrity to be included among the luxuries of the rich. It should be understood