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

regularly enforced, will make a well-bred boy of him. And right habits learned in childhood last a lifetime. There is common sense in each of the conventions at which vulgarians scoff. DIET AND DIGESTION The second depends upon the first. The two make up a whole which is Health. “Food values” is so emphatically a technical term that I would not employ it here if it did not express just what I mean, when used untechnically. What we eat has many and differing values. It is possible, without degenerating into dietetic cranks, to appraise them properly and to apply the knowledge thus gained to the building up of these bodies of ours and the consequent up-building of the immortal better part they encase. Digestions are so many and so diverse, the one from the other, that it is rank folly to prescribe bills-of-fare warranted to agree with everybody. Take, for example, milk. It has won from the ablest writers on dietetics the title of the One Perfect Food for the human race. Specialists on dyspepsia prescribe an almost exclusive milk diet for obstinate cases. In typhoid fevers it is the specific regimen. One man consumes inordinate quantities, by advice, to increase adipose tissue. A woman lives upon skim milk, swallowed very slowly, to reduce her flesh. And so on through multifarious cases—all acting upon the recommendation of experts. All the time, as each of us knows, certain stomachs can not digest milk, or even retain it long enough to test its nutritive properties, while in others it causes intense heartburn and engenders bile. Toast and tea are the stock invalid diet, the civilized world over. Yet Medical Daniels (M. D.’s) are rising up by the score to protest against ruining stomachs with tannic acid and burdening digestive organs by forcing what is no better than dry sawdust upon them. Chocolate is freely prescribed as digestible, and so nutritious that one could live and not lose flesh, eating nothing else, for weeks together. I am acquainted personally with ten people at least, to whom any form of chocolate is poisonous and