3-,-t DOMESTIC ECONOMY. [Chap. IV. 



tion who is confined to one single article, or to two or three articles of food. 

 Look, for example, at the rice-eating nations; also to those uho, like the 

 Esquimaux, live principally upon the fat of seals and whales; or to savage 

 :i.'itions, confined to an almost exclusive diet of meat. Each shows a lack 

 of some quality that we consider essential in civilized man. The coiitint- 

 moiit of a large portion of a nation of people to a diet of potatoes is rapidly 

 working a deterioration in the race. 



"The profusions of nature tempt the appetite of man. The productions 

 of all the earth are at his command. But, for tlie control of his appetites, 

 man is endowed with reason and conscience. The brute is governed in re- 

 gard both to the quantity and kind of its ibod by an instinct from which 

 it rarely deviates, unless when domesticated, and consequently corrupted. 



" There are three practical laws to be observed in the taking of food. One 

 regards the time, another the quality, and the third the quantity. 



'• An interval of at least live hours should elapse between meals for 

 adults, unless some extraordinary exertion has exhausted the system, or 

 !-oinething has interrupted or prevented the reception of a full meal at the 

 i^tated hour. The stated hours should be regular." 



375. Quality of Food Suited to a Farmer's Family.—" As to the quality of 

 the food, there is no doubt that the more simply it is cooked the more easily 

 it is digested. 



" Chemical analysis should be the guide for the cookery book. 



" Ko one would think of eating raw potash, a substance .that dissolves 

 metals, but we do not hesitate to eat saleratus, which is a modified prepara- 

 tion of it, and has the same, though a more gradual effect, upon the organic 

 tissues and the blood. Soda, it is well understood, rots cloth and takes the 

 skin from the hands when it is put into soap, or even when used to ' break 

 hard water,' as the washerwomen term it; yet we put it into bread and 

 cakes. Our stomachs were not made to digest metals, and wlien we powder 

 them and eat them, we try to cheat nature. 



"Spices were undoubtedly made for use in those climates where they 

 grow, but the natives of those climates use them much more sparingly than 

 we do. We may reasonably suppose that they are more adapted to the 

 wants of hot climates than of cold ones, as nature has placed them in the 

 former, and yet we saturate our food with them, mix them together, destroy 

 the flavors of each by so doing, and make a stimulus to appetite by a con- 

 glomeration, which is a most unnatural one, and gradually injures the very 

 power of digestion. We thus conceal, also, that fine aroma of vegetables 

 and meats wliich distinguishes one from the other, and deprive ourselves of 

 the pleasure God designed we should feel in partaking of them. There is 

 a delicate fruit of the tropics resembling a muskmelon, which grows, how- 

 ever, not upon a vine, but upon a tree, the taste of which is so finely deli- 

 cate, that a foreigner can not even perceive it at first; but if he does not 

 cover it M'itli pepper and salt, as we have seen many foreigners do, to 'give 

 it a taste,' he will, after partaking of it a few days or weeks (accoi'ding to 



