Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery

belong to either of these classes. I shall treat first of the different kinds of food prepared from grain or farinaceous substances; secondly, of fruits; thirdly, of roots; and fourthly, speak of a few articles that do not properly belong to any of the three. While, therefore, as will be seen by the remarks already made, I have many things to say that the community cannot yet bear, it need not escape the observation of the most careless reader, that I aim at nothing less than an entire ultimate subversion of the present system of cookery, believing it to be utterly at war with the laws of God, and of man's whole nature. CLASS I.--FARINACEOUS, OR MEALY SUBSTANCES. The principal of these are wheat, oats, Indian corn, rice, rye, barley, buckwheat, millet, chestnuts, peas, beans, and lentils. They are prepared in various forms. DIVISION I.--BREAD. The true idea of bread is that coarse or cracked and unbolted meal, formed into a mass of dough by means of water, and immediately baked in loaves of greater or less thickness, according to the fancy. Some use bolted meal; most raise bread by fermentation; many use salt; some saleratus, or carbonate of potash; and, in the country, many use milk instead of water to form the paste. I might also mention several other additions, which, like saleratus, it is becoming fashionable to make. All these things are a departure, greater or less, from the true idea of a bread; and bread made with any of these changes, is so much the less perfectly adapted to the promotion of health, happiness, and longevity. Bolting is objectionable, because bread made from bolted meal, especially when eaten hot, is more apt, when the digestive powers are not very vigorous, to form a paste, which none but very strong stomachs can entirely overcome. Besides, it takes out a part of the sweetness, or life, as it is termed, of the flour. They who say fine flour bread is sweetest, are led into this mistake by the force of habit, and by the fact that the latter comes