to renew the fatty tissues of the body, but to yield heat and energy, hence the Eskimo subsists largely on fat and blubber; in a more temperate climate both meat and vegetable food are advantageously used, while in hot regions a plant dietary is found to be the best adapted for man. Climate, therefore, and the particular requirements of individual constitutions, must determine the adoption of a vegetarian, or a mixed vegetarian, or a meat diet.
Constituents of Food.—It is hardly necessary to say that, whether one lives on animal or vegetable food, the same constituents must be present. Water, starch, or sugar, salts, and flesh-formers are not less demanded by one class of the community than the rest. As for water, it is free to all; but it is worthy of notice that in most vegetarian cookery-books there is a large preponderance of soups, and stews, and porridges, all moist foods, containing much water, and therefore not calling for much water to accompany them. Vegetable food is not provocative of thirst to the same extent that animal food is. In most of the recipes, condiments and seasonings are sparingly used; in some they are not used at all. We have, however, in the recipes that follow, added a usual amount of seasoning.
Starch or Sugar.—These are a vegetable food, and used by all. The people who do without starch are those who live in the region of ice and snow, where plants cannot grow, and where a rigid vegetarian would soon have to give up the struggle for life. The prepared starches, such as cornflour, arrowroot, sago and tapioca are very cheap, and starch, in combination with other substances—in potatoes, flour, rice, oatmeal—is commoner still.
Fat—is rather difficult of digestion with some, who get over it by having recourse to butter, which is more easily digested than the fat of meat. But there is a small quantity of fat in cereals, and in many foods where it is not suspected. Vegetable oils are both palatable and cheap. There is olive-oil, used for salads very sparingly in this country, very plentifully on the Continent; walnut-oil, also common in France, Italy and Switzerland; cotton-seed oil, pressed from the seed of the cotton plant, and exported to England in large quantities, partly to adulterate the dearer kinds of oils, partly for more legitimate use in preserving fish and in frying.
Albuminoids,—commonly described as flesh-formers, are also found to some extent in nearly all vegetables. Gluten in flour, fibrin in all cereals, nitrogen in some form in every plant that grows—these all supply flesh-formers in different quantities. Vegetarians never recommend, and seldom practice, the habit of eating very white bread, and so get more flesh-formers by that channel than all the rest of the world. But the great stand-by is in the pulses—beans, peas and lentils—which are richer in albuminoids than any food that is known. Macaroni and semolina, though made only of wheat and water, are richer in flesh-formers than the white wheat-flour commonly used.
