Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

the stomach, doing thoroughly the part of grinders and incisors. The cow sets us the best example of all our sensible dumb teachers. The wondrous-wise air with which she munches cud by the hour is a proverb among sages. The so-called nobler part of creation is not ashamed to seek in the pepsin, which is a memorial to her wisdom, a remedy for the ills brought upon himself by obstinate disregard of the duty her example enforces. It is not a nice thing to talk or write of, as I have admitted. And this is not because the act of mastication is unseemly. The measured movement of the jaws in the decorous disposition of whatever is committed to them is no more grotesque than the “winking as usual,” enjoined by the photographer. This is emphatically true when food is cut small before it is eaten. The stomach is long-suffering and kind, but not omnipotent. The salivary glands are her natural and most efficient allies. The “bolter” cuts off supplies from this source. The chunks of solid matter, washed down with scalding liquid or iced water, are more than the other gastric juices can manage. The result is as sure as the addition of two and two, followed by the subtraction of four. A judicious mother who has made physiology a study for her children’s sake, teaches her little ones to chew the well-cooked cereals that form the staple of their breakfast. Furthermore, she teaches that it is indecent to swallow anything except liquids without chewing it. The rule is not arbitrary. Each child comprehends the office of the saliva, that the motion of chewing excites it, and that to take crude lumps of anything into the stomach is absolutely wrong. In the chance that other mothers may imitate her example lies the only hope of the American stomach. The adult bolter is joined to his evil practice. He is feeding with egg-coal an engine that was built to be run with pea coal, adding to the mischief done the delicate machinery the outrage of chunking in and packing down the