THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 65 



No such precautions are demanded in the boiling of vegetables. 

 The Avork to be done in cooking a cabbage or a turnip, for example, is 

 merely to soften the cellular tissue by the semi-solvent action of hot 

 water ; there is nothing to avoid in the direction of overheating. Even 

 if the water could be raised above 212°, the vegetable would be rather 

 improved than injured thereby. 



The question that now naturally arises is, whether modem science 

 can show us that anything more can be done in the jDreparation of 

 vegetable tissue than the mere softening in boiling water. In ray first 

 paper I said that the practice of using the digestive apparatus of sheep, 

 oxen, etc., for the preparation of our food is merely a transitory bar- 

 barism, to be ultimately superseded by scientific cookery, by preparing 

 vegetables in such a manner that they shall be as easily digested as 

 the prepared grass we call beef and mutton. I do not mean by this 

 that the vegetable we should use shall be gi'ass itself, or that grass 

 should be one of the vegetables. We must, for our requirement, se- 

 lect vegetables that contain as much nutriment in a given bulk as our 

 present mixed diet, but in doing so we encounter the serious diflaculty 

 of finding that the readily soluble cell-wall or main bulk of animal 

 food — the gelatine — is replaced in the vegetable by the cellulose, or 

 woody fiber, which is not only more difficult of solution, but is not 

 nitrogenous — is only a compound of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. 



XXIX. 



Next to the enveloping tissue, the most abundant constituent of 

 the vegetables we use as food is starch. Laundry associations may 

 render the Latin name "/ecw^a," or ^^ farina,'''' more agreeable when 

 applied to food. We feed very largely on starch, and take it in a 

 multitude of forms. Excluding water, it constitutes above three 

 fourths of our " staff of life " ; a still larger proportion of rice, which 

 is the staff of Oriental life, and nearly the whole of arrowroot, sago, 

 and tapioca, which maybe described as composed of starch and water. 

 Peas, beans, and every kind of seed and grain contain it in prepon- 

 derating proportions ; potatoes the same, and even those vegetables 

 which we eat bodily, all contain within theu* cells considerable quan- 

 tities of starch. 



Take a small piece of dough, made in the usual manner by moisten- 

 ing wheat-flour, put it in a piece of muslin and work it with the fingers 

 under water. The water becomes milky, and the milkiness is seen to 

 be produced by minute granules that sink to the bottom when the 

 agitation of the water ceases. These are starch-granules. They may 

 be obtained by similar treatment of other kinds of flour. Viewed 

 under a microscope they are seen to be ovoid particles with peculiar 

 concentric markings that I must not tarry to describe. The form and 

 size of these granules vary according to the plant from which they are 

 derived, but the chemical composition is in all cases the same, except- 



VOL. XXY. — 5 



