Dr. Nichols' penny vegetarian cookery : the science and the art of selecting and preparing a pure, healthful, and sufficient diet illustrated by food diagrams and portraits of distinguished vegetarians / by T.L. Nichols.

  • Nichols, Thomas Low, 1815-1901.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Nichols' penny vegetarian cookery : the science and the art of selecting and preparing a pure, healthful, and sufficient diet illustrated by food diagrams and portraits of distinguished vegetarians / by T.L. Nichols. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which I could, with a little sacrifice in respect to fruit, have easily reduced to a penny a-day. A West Indian planter—an Englishman in Jamaica, who owned 300 negroes, fed them for years on bananas—the produce of twelve acres, which is at the rate of twenty-five persons to the acre. Even here, in the United Kingdom, when people have learned to live on a perfectly healthy and beautiful and delicious diet of grains, pulse, fruits, and (so-called) vegetables, this country of ours, fairly distributed as to occupation or ownership, and properly cultivated, with its waste matter restored to the land instead of defiling rivers and poisoning the sea, will be able, without any necessity of importing food, to feed ten times its present population in such health that the death-rate would never be above 10 per 1000, and people would com¬ monly live from 100 to 130 years, while there would be no employment for doctors and no demand for drugs. These are -some of the reasons why I have written this Penny Vegetarian Cookery. Another is to spread a wider knowledge of my various writings on Sanitary and Social Science, in which other reasons may be found, if any more are needed. OF FEUIT. As fruit, after milk, which is the first food of all animals of the class Mammalia, was the original, and is the most natural food of man, let us begin with fruit. All good ripe fruits are best eaten in their natural state. Fresh ripe grapes, strawberries, peaches, apricots, and mellow pears and apples cannot be improved by cookery. Unripe gooseberries and apples and the coarser kinds of pears may be stewed or baked, as in tarts, adding the sugar they have not yet made. As sugar preserves fruit, it also is apt to preserve it in the stomach, making it difficult of digestion—therefore put in no more than is needful. Some kind of fruit should form a portion of every meal—not at the end of a meat dinner, but rather at the beginning of every meal, especially at breakfast. Hard and sour apples can be baked, boiled, steamed or cut in slices and fried in a little oil or butter. Dried apples, pears, raisins, and figs should be washed clean, then soaked for some hours, and then set on the range or in the oven to simmer until quite soft and tender. When other fruits are not to be had, we can generally find dried figs or dates, and always dried grapes, or raisins, which, stewed as above, and eaten as fruit, are most delicious, healthful, and nutritious. Figs and raisins are as hearty as bread—and like brown bread, wheaten groats, and “ Food of Health,” are remedies for constipation far better than all drugs. Stewed raisins also are not dear. Good pudding raisins average 4d. a pound, which is about equal to the fresh grapes at Id. A good dish of them may well adorn every table. One of my favourite dishes at any meal is a bread and fruit pudding. Oil or butter a deep dish; cover bottom and sides with thin slices of bread, brown or white, then a layer of slices of apples or pears, or soaked raisins or figs, or all together, then a layer of bread, crumbs or slices, and so on until the dish is full, sprinkling each fruit layer with sugar, if the fruits are sour, and as needed. Then fill up with water, cover over with slices of bread, and bake two or three hours, the longer the better, in a slow oven. Eat hot or cold; and as it will keep good