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

secured by the use of uncooked grains, it is useless, and worse than useless, to resort to cookery at all, especially the cookery of bread. I have mentioned Dr. Schlemmer and his followers already as holding this opinion. Many of these people confine themselves to the use of uncooked grains and fruits. They do not cook their beans and peas. Nor can it be denied that they enjoy thus far very good health. Now, while I admit that man, as an individual, can get along very well in this way, I am most fully persuaded that many kinds of farinaceous food are improved by cookery. Of the potato, I have already, incidentally, spoken. But are not wheat and corn, and many other grains, as well as the potato, improved by cookery? A barrel of flour (one hundred and ninety-six pounds) will make about two hundred and seventy pounds of good dry bread. It does not appear that the bread contains more water than the grain did from which it was made. Whence, then, the increase of weight by seventy-four pounds? Is not the water--a part of it, at least--which is used in making bread, rendered solid, as water is in slacking lime; or at least so incorporated with the flour or meal as to add both to its weight, and to its nutritious properties? Or if, in the present infancy of the science of domestic chemistry, we are not able to give a satisfactory answer to the question, is not an affirmative highly probable? Such an answer would give no countenance, I believe, to the custom of raising our bread, since the increase of weight in making unfermented cakes or loaves, is about as great as in the case of fermented ones. One of the strongest arguments ever yet brought against bread-making is, that it relieves us from the necessity of mastication. But to this we reply, that such cakes as may be made (and such loaves even) require more mastication than the uncooked grains. Pereira, in his excellent work on Diet, endeavors to support the doctrine that cooking bursts