The Chemistry of Cookery

source of such depraved appetite. It may also be engendered by the opposite extreme of excessive luxurious pandering to general sensuality. The practical inference suggested by this experience and these observations is, that speech-making, pledge-signing, and blue-ribbon missions can only effect temporary results unless supplemented by satisfying the natural appetite of hungry people by supplies of food that are not only nutritious, but savoury and _varied_. Such food need be no more expensive than that which is commonly eaten by the poorest of Englishmen, but it must be far better cooked. Comparing the domestic economy of the poorer classes of our countrymen with that of the corresponding classes in France and Italy (with both of which I am well acquainted), I find that the raw material of the dietary of the French and Italians is inferior to that of the English, but a far better result is obtained by better cookery. The Italian peasantry are better fed than the French. In the poor osterias above referred to, not only the Friday salt fish, but all the other viands, were incomparably better cooked than in corresponding places in England, and the variety was greater than is common in many middle-class houses. The ordinary supper of the ‘roughs’ above-named was of three courses: first, a ‘_minestra_,’ _i.e._ a soup of some kind, continually varied, or a savoury dish of macaroni; then a ragoût or savoury stew of vegetables and meat, followed by an excellent salad; the beverage, a flask of thin but genuine wine. When I come to the subject of cheese, I will describe their mode of cooking and using it. My first walk through Italy extended from the Alps to Naples, and from Messina to Syracuse. I thus spent nearly a year in Italy during a season of great abundance, and never saw a drunken Italian. A few years after this I walked through a part of Lombardy, and found the little osterias as bad as English beershops or low public-houses. It was a period of scarcity and trouble, ‘the three plagues,’ as they called them—the potato disease, the silkworm