l66 THIRTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE EAST. 



These potatoes communicate to the bread an excellent 

 flavour, and keep it for a longer time soft and elastic. The 

 bread is made in loaves of about the third of a pound in 

 weight, and is put to leaven on the leaves of butea frondosa, 

 and afterwards baked. How strange a mixture to replace 

 the toddy, and the office of which is performed in our own 

 country by simple yeast. 



In Ainsli's Materia Indica, we read : — " Toddy is a sweet, 

 aperient, most delicious drink. Taken fresh from the tree, 

 early in the morning, before the sun is up, it is certainly 

 a luscious and most pleasant beverage, cooling, refreshing, 

 and nourishing ; it is besides employed for making the best 

 kind of Indian arrack, and yields a great deal of sugar, 

 Europeans, especially delicate females, in India, who are 

 apt to suffer much from constipation, find a cupful of this 

 toddy, drank every morning at fi/e o'clock, one of the sim- 

 plest and best remedies they can employ." 



It may, perhaps, be of some interest to my readers to 

 cite here a passage from a scientific work, unknown to the 

 greater part of the public, which may serve as a comment 

 on the above subject. This passage is taken from Smith's 

 Encyclopoedia^NoX. Ill,, p. 332 : — "There is no food which may 

 not be made a medicine in one form or another. Water, 

 bread crumbs, eggs, gelatine, and osmazome (brown soup), are 

 thus used. And we find, also, that food, taken improperly or 

 immoderately, may become poisonous ; for instance, flour and 

 sugar, to persons affected with diabetes ; bread and potatoes, 

 in scrofula ; meat, in cases of fever, he., &c. Again, as civili- 

 sation has progressed, several medicaments and poisons have 

 been discovered to be valuable for habitual use as dietetics, 

 spices, stimulants, or cosmetics. In fact, there is scarcely 

 any class of medicines which does not afford some aid to our 

 culinary operations, even resins, acrid poisons, and narcotics 

 not excepted ( asafoetida, Peruvian balsam, capsicum, saffron, 

 cherry-laurel, &c.) A certain Tyrolean peasant took arsenic 

 as a stomachic, for which it has also for a long period 

 been used in veterinary medicines.* We enjoy beverages 



* This circumstance confirms the probability of the story of the 



