306 Bread. [July, 



This art of civilized life traveled slowly ; and so late as the sixteenth 

 century, the only bread known in Sweden and Norway, was unleavened 

 cakes, baked by the women. But now the art is well understood in all 

 civilized countries ; and to know how to make a good article is deemed 

 indispensable to a country housekeeper ; and, to their praise be it said, 

 they generally far excel the professional baker in producing sweet and 

 wholesome bread. 



A few general principles, pertaining to the chemistry of the matter, 

 may be given here. 



The first requisite is, of course, good flour. In chemical language, it 

 should contain its proper proportions of starch, gluten, gum, sugar, and 

 water, chemically combined. The starch affords us those elements which 

 are active in keeping up animal heat, and producing fat, — the gluten 

 furnishes in addition that essential element of muscle, nitrogen, always 

 present in nutritious food. 



The gluten, too, by its viscid nature, imprisons each little bubble of 

 carbonic acid, as it endeavors to escape from the rising bread, and is 

 thus distended with cells, made light, fit to mix with the digestive 

 juices of the stomach. Without this distension, baked gluten might 

 answer for artificial horn, gutta percha, or gum elastic, but would 

 hardly do for bread. 



It is a singular circumstance, and one well calculated to impress us 

 with a sense of the power of that " breath of life " which the Almighty 

 breathed into the organic world, that its multitudinous products, in 

 all their variety, are composed of only three or four simple elements. 

 Who could believe, had not the analyst proved it, that the sweet sugar 

 and honey, the bitter aloes, the fragrant strawberry, the nauseous hen- 

 bane, the stimulating alcohol, the soporific chloroform, the nourishing 

 starch and gluten, the poisonous strychnine and prussic acid, the former 

 the sustainers of life, the others destroying it with lightning-like rapidity, 

 are all made of the same materials ? Some of them, indeed, of very 

 different properties, are identical in composition ; thus, starch, gum and 

 sugar, are all made of twelve parts of charcoal and ten of water ; or, in 

 chemical language, carbon twelve, hydrogen ten, and oxygen ten parts. 

 By the vital force, and by certain manipulations, the dry mealy starch 

 can be readily transformed into viscid gum, or sweet sugar ; but the 

 gluten, as we have said, contains that muscle-making element, nitrogen, 

 or azote, in its natural state a regular misanthrope. While many of 

 the other elements rush together and form alliances which even death 

 can not destroy, it seems desirous of standing alone, and therefore enters 

 into few compacts, unless controlled by the vital force; and then under 



