The Chemistry of Cookery

all this was finally repaid, and, at the end of six years, there remained a net profit of 100,000 florins, ‘after expenses of every kind, salaries, wages, repairs, &c., had been deducted.’ When will _our_ workhouses be administered with similar results? I must not dwell upon his devices for gradually inveigling the lazy creatures into habits of industry, for he understood human nature too well to adopt the gaoler’s theory, which assumes that every able-bodied man can do a day’s work daily, in spite of previous habits. Rumford’s patients became industrious ultimately, but were not made so at once. This development of industry was one of the elements of financial and moral success, and the next in importance was the economy of the commissariat, which depended on Rumford’s skilful cookery of the cheapest viands, rendering them digestible, nutritious, and palatable. Had he adopted the dietary of an English workhouse or an English prison, his financial success would have been impossible, and his patients would have been no better fed, nor better able to work. The staple food was what he calls a ‘soup,’ but I find, on following out his instructions for making it, that I obtain a porridge rather than a soup. He made many experiments, and says: ‘I constantly found that the richness or quality of a soup depended more upon a proper choice of the ingredients, and a proper management of the fire in the combination of these ingredients, than upon the quantity of solid nutritious matter employed;—much more upon the art and skill of the cook than upon the sum laid out in the market.’ Our vegetarian friends will be interested in learning that at first he used meat in the soup provided for the beggars, but gradually omitted it, and the change was unnoticed by those who ate, and no difference was observable as regards its nutritive value. In 1790, little, or rather nothing, was known of the chemistry of food. Oxygen had been discovered only sixteen years before, and chemical analysis, as now understood, was an unknown art. In spite of this Rumford selected