474 



RECREATION. 



any food, except milk, which is so univer- 

 sally used, as bread ; and not only is it now 

 known almost everywhere, but since history 

 began it has, in some form or other, made 

 one of the staples of diet among all but the 

 most savage peoples. In the earliest his- 

 torical records it is spoken of, and the 

 wild tribes which to-day inhabit South Af- 

 rica know something of its use. Of course 

 the bread made by the Kaffir to-day, or by 

 the American Indian 300 years ago is dif- 

 ferent from our own. It would be interest- 

 ing to trace the relationship between the 

 bread-making processes of given peoples 

 and their rank in the scale of civilization. 

 The Kaffir simply grinds his grain between 

 2 stones, makes a paste of this meal and 

 water, and bakes it in the ashes of his camp 

 fire; Israel, in Egypt, ate leavened bread; 

 the ancient Greeks cultivated the yeast 

 plant ; in Pompeii an oven was found con- 

 taining 81 loaves of bread pot unlike our 

 own ; the Swiss peasant still bakes his 

 weekly loaves in the village oven ; and so 

 on, to the mammoth bakeries and innumer- 

 able fancy breads of our large towns. Such 

 a classification would not be utterly absurd, 

 for except among the lowest savages and in 

 the extremest climates some kind of grain 

 is recognized as a necessary food, and bread 

 furnishes it in one of its most convenient 

 forms ; that is, a form in which it yields 

 the greatest nourishment for the least labor 

 and cost. No wonder, then, that the. more 

 intelligent a people flie better bread they 

 make. 



The reason for this importance of bread 

 is simple. Ever since the far off days when 

 our forefathers first found the wild cereals, 

 or began to cultivate them, men have known 

 that food prepared from them would sup- 

 port life and strength better than any other 

 single food except milk. The diet of the 

 poor in India and China often consists al- 

 most entirely of wheat or millet cakes or 

 rice, and although in our land the ease with 

 which we can get other foods makes bread 

 seem less important, there are still many 

 districts in Europe where people eat little 

 else. To a large part of mankind bread is 

 still the staff of life, and if they pray for 

 their daily bread, they mean it literally. 



In regard to its ingredients, bread is one 

 of the simplest of our cooked foods, but in 

 regard to the change which the raw materi- 

 als must undergo to produce a finished loaf, 

 it is one of the most complicated. Flour, 

 water, a pinch of salt, and a little yeast — 

 the necessary^ things — can be counted on the 

 fingers of one hand, yet to describe the pro- 

 cesses of bread making with any degree of 

 completeness would require many hundred 

 pages. Without going into a detailed de- 

 scription of these processes, it will perhaps, 

 be interesting to recall what the main steps 

 in bread making are. 



Beginning back in the flour mills, the 

 gram is ground into powder, the coarser 

 parts of which are sifted out as bran, while 

 the finest constitute our flour. Once in the 

 baker's hands, the flour is mixed with 

 water and yeast, or something which will 

 produce the same effect. When this paste 

 or dough, containing yeast, is set in a warm 

 place, the yeast begins to work, as we say, 

 and the dough to rise; in other words, the 

 yeast causes a change known as alcoholic 

 fermentation to set in, one of the principal 

 results of which is the production of carbon 

 dioxide gas. If the dough was well mixed, 

 this gas appears all through it, and, ex- 

 panding, leavens or raises it. After the 

 yeast has worked sufficiently the dough is 

 shut up in a hot oven. Here the heat kills 

 the yeast and prevents further alcoholic 

 fermentation, causes the gas to expand and 

 stretch open the little pockets which it 

 forms between the particles of dough, and 

 changes some of the water present into 

 steam, thus raising the loaf still more. 

 Further, the heat hardens and darkens the 

 outer layers into what we call the crust. 

 The sum of these changes in the oven we 

 call baking. When they have been con- 

 tinued long enough our bread is done, ready 

 to cool and eat. 



LIMES IN THE WEST INDIES. 



The lime industry of the W r est Indies, 

 although small as compared with sugar and 

 cacao, is yet of considerable importance at 

 Dominica and Montserrat, the former sup- 

 plying more than one-half the total exports 

 of the islands. At Dominica, lime juice 

 alone, raw and concentrated, to the value 

 of $156,759, and lime oil, the essential oil 

 made from lime skins, to the value of $14,- 

 366, were exported during the year 1901-2. 

 These figures do not include the exports 

 of green and pickled limes, in which a con- 

 siderable trade is carried on with the United 

 States and Canada. The increase in this 

 trade may be seen from the fact that in 

 1898 the number of barrels, cases, etc., of 

 green limes exported to the United States 

 was 3,534 as compared with 7,412 in 1901. 

 In 1900 428 barrels of pickled limes were 

 exported to British North America, and 

 904 in 1901. 



According to the Agricultural News, a 

 journal published in Barbados, "the value 

 of green limes in the United States varies 

 from $5 to $10 a barrel, according to sea- 

 son and demand. From a barrel of limes, 

 7 to 8 gallons of juice are obtained. The 

 juice is shipped either raw or in a concen- 

 trated form. The latter is boiled down to 

 a density of 10 or 12 to 1 ; that is, 10 gal- 

 lons of raw juice to 1 gallon of concen- 

 trated. It takes on an average 80 barrels 

 of limes to give 54 gallons of concentrated 

 juice. The value of raw lime juice in the 



