The Chemistry of Cookery

on this point and others concerning the composition of this fluid leads me to suppose that the secretions of the human stomach vary with the food habitually taken; that flesh-eaters acquire a gastric juice similar to that of carnivorous animals, while vegetable feeders are supplied with digestive solvents more suitable to their food. This idea is supported by the testimony of rigid vegetarians. They tell me that at first the pure vegetarian diet did not appear to satisfy them, but after a while it became as sustaining as their former food. This is explained if, in consequence of the modification of the gastric and other digestive juices, the vegetarian food became more completely digested after vegetarian habits became established. The properties of fibrin, so far as cookery is concerned, place it between albumen and gelatin; it is coagulable like albumen, and soluble like gelatin, but in a minor degree. Like gelatin, it is tasteless and non-nutritious _alone_. This has been proved by feeding animals on lean meat, which has been cut up and subjected to the action of cold water, which dissolves out the albumen and other juices of the flesh, and leaves only the muscular fibre and its envelopes. The experiment has been made in laboratories, and also on a larger scale in Australia, where the lean beef from which the ‘Extract of Meat’ had been taken out by cold water was given to dogs, pigs, and other animals; but, after taking a few mouthfuls, they all rejected it, and suffered starvation when it was forced upon them without other food. The same is the case with the spontaneously coagulated fibrin of the blood; it is, when washed, a yellowish opaque fibrous mass, without smell or taste, insoluble in cold water, alcohol, or ether, but imperfectly soluble if digested for a considerable time in hot water. The following is the chemical composition of these three constituents of lean meat, according to Mulder: +-----------+---------+----------+--------+ | -- | Albumen | Gelatine | Fibrin | +-----------+---------+----------+--------+ |Carbon | 53·5 | 50·40 | 52·7 | |Hydrogen | 7·0 | 6·64 | 6·9 |