Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten].

  • Edwin Lankester
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of their leaves, and roasted by a quick fire till the grain is brown, and eaten with a little salt or butter, are a delicacy. Secondly, when the grain is riper and harder, the ears, boiled in their leaves and eaten with butter, are also good and agreeable food. The tender green grains dried may be kept all the year, and, mixed with green haricots (kidney beans), also dried, make at any time a pleasing dish, being first soakeil some hours in water, and then boiled. When the grain is ripe and hard there are also several ways of using it. One is, to soak it all night in a lessive or lye, and then pound it in a large wooden mortar with a vvooden pestle; the skin of each grain is by that means skinned otf, and the farinaceous part left whole, which being boiled, swells into a white soft pulp, and eaten with milk, or with butter and sugar, is deli- cious. The dry grain is also sometimes ground loosely, so as to be broken into pieces of the size of rice, and being winnowed to separate the bran, it is then boiled and eaten with turkies or other fowls, as rice. Ground into a finer meal, they make of it, by boiling, a basty pudding or houi/ti, to be eaten with milk, or with butter and sugar ; this reseuddes what the Italians call polenta. They make of the same meal, with water and salt, a hasty cake, which being stuck against a hoe or other flat iron, is placed erect before the fire, and so baked to be used as broad. Broth is also agreeaidy thickened with the same meal. They also parch it in this manner. 1 An iron ])ot is filled with sand, and set on the fire till t the sand is very hot; two or three pounds of the grain I arc then thrown in, and well mixed with the sand by li stirring; each grain bursts and throws out a white sub- : stance of twice its bigne.ss ; the sand is separated by a I wire sieve, and returned into the ])ot to be again heated, and the operation is repeated w ith fresh grainthat which h IS parched is |)ounded to a powder in mortars. This, being li sifted, will keej) long for n.so. An Indian will’(ravel I) far anil .suh.sist long on a small bag of it, taking only six I or eight ounces ol it per day mixed with water. 'I’lie I flour of maize, mixed with that of wheat, makes excellent i bread, sweeter and more agreeable than that of w heat
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