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

in contact, more readily than coarse bread, with the papillæ of the tongue, and seems to have more taste to it because it touches at more points. Raising bread by inducing fermentation, wastes a part of the saccharine matter; and the more it is raised, the greater is the waste. By lessening the attraction of cohesion, it makes it more easy of digestion, it is true; but the loss of nutriment and of pleasure to the true appetite more than counterbalances this. Bakers, in striving to get a large loaf, rob the bread of most of its sweetness. Salt is objectionable, because it hardens the bread, and renders it more difficult of digestion. Our ancestors, in this country, did not use it at all; and many are the families that will not use it now. Those who use salt in bread, tell us how _flat_ it would taste without it. This idea of flatness has two sources. 1. We have so long given our bread the taste of salt, as we have most other things, that it seems tasteless without it. 2. The flatness spoken of in an article of food is oftentimes the true taste of the article, unaltered by any stimulus. If any two articles need to be stimulated with salt, however, it is rice and beans--bread never. If saleratus is used in bread where no acidity is present, it is a medicine; or, if you please, a poison both to the stomach and intestines. If it meets and neutralizes an acid either in the bread-tray or the stomach, the residuum is a new chemical compound diffused through the bread, which is more or less injurious, according to its nature and quantity. Milk is objectionable on the score of its tendency to render the bread more indigestible than when it was wet with water, and perhaps by rendering it too nutritious. For good bread without the milk is already too nutritious for health, if eaten exclusively, for a long time. That man should not live on bread alone, is as true physically as it is morally. No bread