470 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
Pork, the flesh of the hog, has already received some particular 
consideration here as Bacon, which is this flesh when cured for 
keeping. “‘ Corned” Pork was an abbreviation of acorned 
Pork, the animal having been fed upon acorns, such as were 
the chief support of the large herds of swine on which our first 
British forefathers subsisted. Acorns, when roasted, and ground, 
can be employed as a fair substitute for coffee. By distillation 
they will yield an ardent spirit. The Acorn contains chemically 
starch, a fixed oil, citric acid, uncrystallizable sugar, and a 
special sugar known as quercit. It is worth serious notice 
medically, that in years remarkable for abundance of acorns, 
very disastrous losses have occurred among young cattle in oak 
forests, or if fed on the oak produce, through outbreaks of acorn 
poisoning, or the acorn disease; the symptoms were wasting, 
loss of appetite, diarrhoea, discharge from nose, and eyes, and 
sores within the mouth. As regards cookery, the primitive 
ages were those of “innocence, and acorns.” ‘‘ Thef weren 
wont lyghtly to slaken hir hunger at euene with acornes of Okes ” 
(Chaucer). In Jane Austen’s capital domestic novel, Emma, the 
fidgety malade imaginaire, old Mr. Woodhouse, when a home-fed 
little porker had just been slaughtered for his household, 
instructed his daughter to the effect that certainly the pork 
was small, and delicate; but unless they could “make sure of 
the loin being made into steaks, nicely fried, without the smallest 
grease, and not roasted (for no stomach can bear roast Pork), 
we had better,” said he to his daughter, “ send the leg away to our 
neighbour, Mrs. Bates ; don’t you think so, my dear?” Galen, 
of old, prescribed Pork as a good food for persons who worked 
hard ; and not a few modern physicians maintain that it is the 
most easily digested of all meats. “ Certainly it is more readily 
digested,” says the Epicure (January, 1904), “ than that respect- 
able impostor, the boiled chicken, which so cruelly defies the 
feeble powers of an invalid.” : 
Veal is the flesh of a young calf (Vitellus), of which the skin 
is made into vellum. It contains much less iron, and alkali 
salts, than beef, but is, on the other hand, richer in connective 
tissue. This flesh affords 19 per cent of proteids, that of the 
ox 20 per cent, and that of the sheep 17 per cent. “ Weal pie, 
said Sam Weller, soliloquizing (at the shooting party in Pickwick), 
“is a wery good thing when you know the lady as made it, and 
is quite sure it ain’t kittens.” ‘I lodged in the same house 
