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

to the breakfast that is invariably inforced with oranges, melons or grapes, each in its season. And there is not a dyspeptic among them! BREAKFAST CEREALS Some dietetists, who are neither cranks nor simpletons, disbelieve in cereals of whatsoever sort as a first course at breakfast. They urge that to spread a hot poultice all over the lining of the stomach is to relax and weaken that organ; that it goes to sleep, as it were, and is too inert to dispose properly of the rest of the meal. Others are strenuous in the belief that the act of chewing is necessary to the proper assimilation of even semi-solids, and since few people think of chewing porridge, the value of it as nutriment is doubtful. There is force in the latter demur. Children should be taught to chew porridge of all kinds, also bread and milk. One zealous dietist insists that milk—“the one and only perfect food”—ought to be masticated. The motion of the jaws excites the salivary glands, he says, causing the flow of a secretion most favorable to digestion. As to the “hot poultice,” there is a grain of reason in the objection. As I have explained in urging the propriety of beginning breakfast with fruit, the coat of the stomach is masked, after the sleep of the night, by a thin mucus, which interferes with the task of the digestive agencies. If fruit is not eaten, a draft of cold water, not iced, will do the work in part. A few swallows of really hot water are better still. A sip of tea or coffee—or, perhaps, best of all, vichy, apollinaris or other good mineral water, may precede the nourishing cereal. That it is nourishing when the stomach gets hold of it, is undeniable. Oatmeal builds up bone, and muscle, and brain; Indian meal mush and hominy are gently laxative and cooling to the blood; preparations of wheat are less laxative, and therefore safer in hot weather, and for teething children, than oatmeal in any form. Rice boiled tender in milk is both palatable and wholesome. Each