MODERN HOUSEHOLD COOKERY BOOK. 29

General Principles of Cooking Meats, Joints,
Poultry—Boiled and Roast.

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General Principles of Cooking Meats, Etc.—There are six dif-
ferent ways of cooking food—roasting, broiling, boiling, stewing,
frying and baking. Roasting and broiling are considered the most
nutritious; boiling and stewing the most economical and digestible;
frying and baking the most convenient and speedy.

Three different constituents must enter into our daily food
to supply the waste and wants of the body and keep all organs in
good working order—nitrogenous, carbonaceous and mineral foods.

Nitrogenous food forms flesh and muscle and also supplies
strength. Carbonaceous food gives heat and acts as fuel to the
engine. Mineral food is necessary for the formation and repair
of bone, and is an important constituent of the blood.

Principal nitrogenous or flesh-forming foods:

Animal: Butcher meat, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese and milk.
Vegetable: Flour, oatmeal, peas, lentils.

Carbonaceous or body-warming foods:

Animal: Butter, suet, oil, fat.

Vegetable: Sugar, treacle, rice, all starchy foods.

Mineral Food.—Green vegetables, water, wheat and oatmeal,
milk. These three constituents necessary to supply the wants of
the human body may be found in vegetable foods alone, but this
is not so concentrated as animal food, and a much larger proportion
requires to be consumed, as, for instance, 4 lbs. of potatoes will go
only as far in affording muscular tissue as 2 lbs. of bread or 1 lb. of
meat.

We consume butter with our bread and mix it with our pastry
because wheaten flour is deficient in natural fat; or we eat cheese
and onions with bread, if engaged in hard manual labor, to add to
the proportion of gluten it naturally contains.

Oils or fats alone will not sustain life; neither will starch
or sugar alone; and so we eat meat or eggs with rice and potatoes,
fat with cabbage, vegetable oil with salad, and cauliflower with
melted butter, all for the same purpose of supplying the body with
the three constituents required.

No nutritive substance is more generally used than bread, and
none known more generally adapted to support life for any length
of time without injury, excepting oatmeal porridge, which so closely
resembles good bread in its composition as to be almost identical
with it, and milk, which is still more adapted to support life, parti-
cularly in the young.