DIGESTIBILITY OE THE GRAIN" SORGHUMS. 5 



and to prevent the drying out and hardening of the loaf. In most 

 of the digestion experiments with the sorghum breads, accordingly, 

 the bread was made by the following recipe, which it will be noted 

 contains ginger added to make the bread more palatable: 



SORGHUM BREAD. 



15 cups meal. 



3| teaspoons soda. 



If cups molasses. 



3| teaspoons salt. 



5 teaspoons ginger. 



1 scant cup lard (melted in). 



If quarts hot water (added to above mixture). 



In this series of tests the bread was baked about 1| hours, without 

 preliminary cooking in the double boiler. The loss of water by 

 evaporation usually caused it to lose from one-fifth to one-sixth of 

 its original weight, but moisture enough remained after the baking to 

 give a bread composed almost entirely of crumb and sufficiently 

 moist to be palatable. Although the bread contained no glutinous 

 material as a binder and tended to crumble when hot, it could easily 

 be cut without much crumbling when cold. Six similar lots of 

 bread were prepared from dwarf kafir, feterita, dwarf milo, kaoliang, 

 corn, and wheat meals, and eaten as a part of a simple mixed diet. 

 The basal ration was composed of apple sauce, potatoes, and butter 

 and furnished only a small fraction of all the protein in the diet, 

 namely, about 20 per cent, which was derived very largely from the 

 potatoes. Although theoretically it would have been even better to 

 eliminate all protein from the basal ration in order to make possible 

 an absolutely direct determination of the digestibility of true grain 

 protein, it was not considered practicable to make use of a protein- 

 free basal ration in these experiments, as such a diet would not have 

 been palatable. 



Since it seemed desirable to determine whether the method of pre- 

 paring the meals for eating materially influenced their digestibility, 

 experiments were also made with the sorghums cooked in the form 

 of a mush. It was found that a satisfactory mush could be pre- 

 pared in the usual household way as follows: About 15 cups of meal, 

 with salt for seasoning, were mixed with somewhat more boiling 

 water than could be absorbed, and this was cooked for three to four 

 hours in a double boiler which kept the temperature of the mush 

 just below the boiling point for the entire cooking period. The basal 

 ration eaten with the mushes in the digestion experiments consisted 

 of apple sauce, butter, and a cane-sugar sirup — essentially the same 

 ingredients as were used in the experiments with the different kinds 

 of bread. By omitting the potatoes from the ration, however, the 

 amount of protein from accessory foods was greatly reduced, so that 

 98 to 99 per cent of the total protein consumed was supplied by the 

 grain protein. 



