The Chemistry of Cookery

Rumford’s soup. I strongly recommend such a soup to vegetarians—_i.e._ the Rumford soup No. 1, already described, but with the admixture of a little pearl malt with the pearl barley (or malt flour failing the pearl malt). A small proportion of malt (one-twentieth, for example) has a considerable effect, but a larger amount is desirable. In all cases this quantity may be regulated by experience and according to whether a decided malt flavour is or is not preferred. I have not yet met with any malted maize commercially prepared, but my experiments on a small scale show that it is a very desirable product. As regards the action of vegetable diastase on cellulose, whether it is capable of breaking it up or effecting its hydration and conversion into digestible sugar, I am not yet able to speak positively, but the following facts are promising. I treated sago, tapioca, and rice with the maltose as above, and found that at a temperature of 140° to 150° all the starch disappears in about half an hour, as proved by the iodine test. Still the liquid was not clear: flocculi of cellulose, &c., were suspended in it. I kept this on the top of a stove several days, where the temperature of the liquid varied from 100° to 180° while the fire was burning, but fell to that of the atmosphere during the night. The quantity of the insoluble matter considerably diminished, but it was not entirely removed. This led me to make further experiments, still in progress, on the ensilage of human food with the aid of diastase. These experiments are on a small scale, and are sufficiently satisfactory to justify more effective trials on a larger scale. It is well known that ordinary ensilage succeeds much better on a large than on a small scale, and I have no doubt that such will be the case with my diastase ensilage of oatmeal, pease-pudding, mashed roots, &c. I am also treating such vegetable food material with various acids for the same purpose. When by these or other means we convert vegetable tissue