DIGESTIBILITY OF 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. 
1| cups molasses. 
3f 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. 
