The Chemistry of Cookery

equally nourishing with meat-soup, three-fourths of the meat which would be requisite for the latter by the common process of making soup are saved and made useful in another way—as by roasting, &c. 7. That jellies ought always to be associated with some other principles to render them both nutritive and digestible.’[8] The reader may make a very simple experiment on himself by preparing first a pure gelatin-soup from isinglass, or the prepared gelatin commonly sold, and trying to make a meal of this with bread alone. Its insipidity will be evident with the first spoonful. If he perseveres, it will become not merely insipid, but positively repulsive; and, should he struggle through one meal and then another, without any other food between, he will find it, in the course of time (varying with constitution and previous alimentation), positively nauseous. Let him now add to it some of Liebig’s ‘Extract of Meat,’ and he will at once perceive the difference. Here the natural appetite foreshadows the result of continuing the experiment, and points the way to correcting the errors of the Academicians and Baron Liebig. The jellies that we take at evening parties, or the jujubes used as sweetmeats, are flavoured with something positive. I have tasted ‘Blue-Ribbon’ jellies that were wretchedly insipid. This was not merely owing to the absence of alcohol, of which very little can remain in such preparations, but rather to the absence of the flavouring ingredients of the wine. I venture to suggest the further, deliberate, and scientific extension of this principle, by adding to bone-soup, or other form of insipid gelatin, the potash, salts, phosphates, &c., which are found in the juices of meat and vegetables. They may either be prepared in the manufacturing laboratory, like Parrish’s ‘Chemical Food,’ or ‘Syrup of phosphates,’ or extracted from fruits, as commercial limejuice is extracted. I recommend those who are interested to manufacture and offer for sale a good preparation of limejuice gelatin. It would seem that gelatin alone, although containing the elements required for nutrition, requires something more to render it digestible. We shall probably be