The principles and practice of vegetarian cookery : founded on chemical analysis, and embracing the most approved methods of the art / by the author of "Fruits and farinacea and The proper food of man."

  • Smith, John, 1798-1885.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The principles and practice of vegetarian cookery : founded on chemical analysis, and embracing the most approved methods of the art / by the author of "Fruits and farinacea and The proper food of man.". Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    Cafe au Lait. (c.) Put four ounces of coffee into a biggin and pour upon it three quarters of a pint of boiling water. The coffee for this preparation must be strong to excess. To half a pint of boiling milk add one quarter of the coffee just made, or a less quantity if desired weaker, and sweeten it with lump sugar. In the choice of coffee, prefer Mocha, next to this Bourbon and Mauritius, and lastly, West India coffee, 547. Coffee and tea, and, in a less degree, cocoa and chocolate, increase the activity of the vascular and nervous systems and thereby promote cheerfulness, animation, and nervous energy, but they not unfrequently produce congestion, headache, trembling, palpitation of the heart, restlessness, and inability to sleep. They also retard the assimilative process, and the waste or metamorphosis of the tissues ; they consequently diminish the amount of urea and of the uric and phosphoric acids in the secretions, and a free use of them renders less solid food necessary. The latter results, however, are no proof of the real value of these beverages in the maintenance of a healthy condition of the system, which is pro- moted rather by the gradual but constant metamorphosis and reproduction of all the tissues; and the retarding of these processes retains semi-effete matters too long in the organism. These beverages, therefore, should be used cautiously by all who lead a sedentary life. They should be totally discarded, or used very sparingly by persons disposed to obesity or to diseases of the heart, and by those in whom the nervous system is too sensitive, or the circulation too much excited, and in certain skin diseases which become obstinate from defect of destructive absorption. Water has an opposite effect to tea and coffee ; it increases rather than diminishes the interstitial metamorphosis of tissues (4). Cocoa and chocolate contain much oil, and in composition have a close resemblance to milk; they unite in themselves the exhilarating properties of tea with the strengthening qualities of milk, and are therefore capable of sustaining bodily strength and nervous energy.* • See Medical Times, April 27th, 1850 ; Professor Lehmann On the Vsc of Coffee as a Beverage, etc.; Johnston's Chemistry of Common Life; Dr. T. K. Cham hr us—Brit. A Foreign Med. Chi. Bet>., No. xxviii, Oct., 1854.