60 THE WONDERFUL HOUSE THAT JACK HAS 



Plain, well-done bread or toast is undoubtedly the 

 best form of body-building material prepared from 

 flour, and much more easily digested than biscuit, 

 muffins, and various forms of hot bread. Pancakes, 

 pastry, doughnuts, and other cakes are probably the 

 least digestible forms into which flour is made. While 

 the eggs, butter, sugar, and other materials united with 

 flour to form the numerous pies and cakes may them- 

 selves be excellent foods, the combination resulting is 

 often far less easily digested than the single components. 

 One reason why muffins, biscuit, and the various cakes 

 are not as wholesome as bread, is that they cannot be 

 cooked long enough to properly break up the starch 

 granules as is done by the thirty or forty minutes' 

 baking given to bread. These minute starch gran- 

 ules, when subjected to heat the necessary time, pop 

 open like kernels of pop-corn. When the starch gran- 

 ules are not broken open in this way, they are nec- 

 essarily more difficult to digest. 



The best that can be said for pies and cakes is that 

 they should be eaten only in small quantities, if at all. 

 Usually they are in a form that does not admit of much 

 chewing. On this account, they are often swallowed 

 half masticated, the digestive juices in the stomach 

 and intestines being left with an unnecessarily large 

 amount of work to perform. To depend upon such 

 foods for the proteid, starch, fat, and sugar our bodies 

 need for repair and growth, is as unwise as it would be 

 for the carpenter to make large use of woods that are 



