Science in the Kitchen Part 9

MACARONI.

DESCRIPTION.--Macaroni is a product of wheat prepared from a hard, clean, glutenous grain. The grain is ground into a meal called _semolina_, from which the bran is excluded. This is made into a tasty dough by mixing with hot water in the proportion of two thirds _semolina_ to one third water. The dough after being thoroughly mixed is put into a shallow vat and kneaded and rolled by machinery. When well rolled, it is made to a.s.sume varying shapes by being forced by a powerful plunger through the perforated head of strong steel or iron cylinders arranged above a fire, so that the dough is partially baked as it issues from the holes. It is afterwards hung over rods or laid upon frames covered with cloth, and dried. It is called by different names according to its shape. If in the shape of large, hollow cylinders, it is _macaroni;_ if smaller in diameter, it is _spaghetti;_ if fine, _vermicelli;_ if the paste is cut into fancy patterns, it is termed _pasta d'Italia_.

Macaroni was formerly made only in Italy, but at present is manufactured to a considerable extent in the United States. The product, however, is in general greatly inferior to that imported from Italy, owing to the difference in the character of the wheat from which it is made, the Italian macaroni being produced from a hard, semi-translucent wheat, rich in nitrogenous elements, and which is only grown successfully in a hot climate. Like all cereal foods, macaroni should be kept in a perfectly dry storeroom.

TO SELECT MACARONI.--Good macaroni will keep in good condition for years. It is rough, elastic, and hard; while the inferior article is smooth, soft, breaks easily, becomes moldy with keeping. Inferior macaroni contains a large percentage of starch, and but a small amount of gluten. When put into hot water, it a.s.sumes a white, pasty appearance, and splits in cooking. Good macaroni when put into hot water absorbs a portion of the water, swells to nearly double its size, but perfectly retains its shape. Inferior macaroni is usually sold a few cents cheaper per pound than the genuine article. It contains a much smaller amount of gluten. The best quality of any shape one pleases can be bought in most markets for ten or fifteen cents a pound.

TO PREPARE AND COOK MACARONI.--Do not wash macaroni. If dusty, wipe with a clean, dry cloth. Break into pieces of convenient size. Always put to cook in boiling liquid, taking care to have plenty of water in the saucepan (as it absorbs a large quant.i.ty), and cook until tender.

The length of time required may vary from twenty minutes, if fresh, to one hour if stale. When tender, turn into a colander and drain, and pour cold water through it to prevent the tubes from sticking together. The fluid used for cooking may be water, milk, or a mixture of both; also soup stock, tomato juice, or any preferred liquid.

Macaroni serves as an important adjunct to the making of various soups, and also forms the basis of other palatable dishes.

_RECIPES._

HOME-MADE MACARONI.--To four cupfuls of flour, add one egg well beaten, and enough water to make a dough that can be rolled. Roll thin on a breadboard and cut into strips. Dry in the sun. The best arrangement for this purpose is a wooden frame to which a square of cheese-cloth has been tightly tacked, upon which the macaroni may be laid in such a way as not to touch, and afterwards covered with a cheese-cloth to keep off the dust during the drying.

BOILED MACARONI.--Break sticks of macaroni into pieces about an inch in length, sufficient to fill a large cup; put it into boiling water and cook until tender. When done, drained thoroughly, then add a pint of milk, part cream if it can be afforded, a little salt and one well-beaten egg; stir over the fire until it thickens, and serve hot.

MACARONI WITH CREAM SAUCE.--Cook the macaroni as directed in the proceeding, and serve with a cream sauce prepared by heating a scant pint of rich milk to boiling, in a double boiler. When boiling, add a heaping tablespoonful of flour, rubbed smoothed in a little milk and one fourth teaspoonful of salt. If desired, the sauce may be flavored by steeping in the milk before thickening for ten or fifteen minutes, a slice of onion or a few bits of celery, and then removing with a fork.

MACARONI WITH TOMATO SAUCE.--Break a dozen sticks of macaroni into two-inch lengths, and drop into boiling milk and water, equal parts. Let it boil for an hour, or until perfectly tender. In the meantime prepare the sauce by rubbing a pint of stewed or canned tomatoes through a colander to remove all seeds and fragments. Heat to boiling, thicken with a little flour; a tablespoonful to the pint will be about the requisite proportion. Add salt and if desired, a half cup of very thin sweet cream. Dish the macaroni into individual dishes, and serve with a small quant.i.ty of the sauce poured over each dish.

MACARONI BAKED WITH GRANOLA.--Break macaroni into pieces about an inch in length sufficient to fill a large cup, and cook until tender in boiling milk and water. When done, drain and put a layer of the macaroni in the bottom of an earthen pudding dish, and sprinkle over it a scant teaspoonful of granola. Add a second and third layer and sprinkle each with granola; then turn over the whole a custard sauce prepared by mixing together a pint of milk, the well beaten yolks of two eggs or one whole egg, and one-fourth of a teaspoonful of salt. Care should be taken to arrange the macaroni in layers loosely, so that the sauce will readily permeate the whole. Bake for a few minutes only, until the custard has well set, and serve.

EGGS AND MACARONI.--Break fifteen whole sticks of macaroni into two-inch lengths, and put to cook in boiling water. While the macaroni is cooking, boil the yolks of four eggs until mealy. The whole egg may be used if caught so the yolks are mealy in the whites simply jellied, not hardened. When the macaroni is done, drain and put a layer of it arranged loosely in the bottom of an earthen pudding dish. Slice the cooked egg yolks and spread a layer of them over the macaroni. Fill the dish with alternate layers of macaroni and egg, taking care to have the top layer of macaroni. Pour over the whole a cream sauce prepared as follows: Heat one and three fourths cup of rich milk to boiling, add one fourth teaspoonful of salt and one heaping spoonful of flour rubbed smooth in a little cold milk. Cook until thickened, then turn over the macaroni. Sprinkle the top with grated bread crumbs, and brown in a hot oven for eight or ten minutes. Serve hot.

TABLE TOPICS.

Sir Isaac Newton, when writing his grail work, "Principia," lived wholly upon a vegetable, diet.

ROBERT COLLYER once remarked; "One great reason why I never had a really sick day in my life was that as boy I lived on oatmeal and milk and brown bread, potatoes and a bit of meat when I could get it, and then oatmeal again."

HOT-WEATHER DIET.--The sultry period of our summer, although comparatively slight and of short duration, is nevertheless felt by some people to be extremely oppressive, but this is mainly due to the practice of eating much animal food or fatty matters, conjoined as it often is with the habit of drinking freely of fluids containing more or less alcoholics. Living on cereals, vegetables, and fruits, and abstaining from alcoholic drinks, the same persons would probably enjoy the temperature, and be free from the thirst which is the natural result of consuming needlessly heating food.--_Sir Henry Thompson._

_Mistress_ (arranging for dinner)--"Didn't the macaroni come from the grocer's, Bridget?"

_Bridget_--"Yis, mum, but oi sint it back. Every won av thim leetle stims wuz impty."

Some years since, a great railroad corporation in the West, having occasion to change the gauge of its road throughout a distance of some five hundred miles, employed a force of 3,000 workmen upon the job, who worked from very early in the morning until late at night.

Alcoholic drinks were strictly prohibited, but a thin gruel made of oatmeal and water was kept on hand and freely partaken of by the men to quench their thirst. The results were admirable; not a single workmen gave out under the severe strain, and not one lost a day from sickness. Thus this large body of men were kept well and in perfect strength and spirits, and the work was done in considerably less time than that counted on for its completion.

In Scotch households oatmeal porridge is as inevitable as breakfast itself, except perhaps on Sundays, as this anecdote will ill.u.s.trate.

A mother and child were pa.s.sing along a street in Glasgow, when this conversation was overheard:--

"What day is the morn, mither?"

"Sabbath, laddie."

"An' will wi hae tea to breakfast, mither?"

"Aye, laddie, gin we're spared."

"An' gin we're no spared, will we hae parrich?"

BREADSTUFFS AND BREADMAKING

Although the grains form most nutritious and palatable dishes when cooked in their unground state, this is not always the most convenient way of making; use of them. Mankind from earliest antiquity has sought to give these wonderful products of nature a more portable and convenient form by converting them into what is termed bread, a word derived from the verb _bray_, to pound, beat, or grind small, indicative of the ancient manner of preparing the grain for making bread. Probably the earliest form of bread was simply the whole grain moistened and then exposed to heat. Afterward, the grains were roasted and ground, or pounded between stones, and unleavened bread was made by mixing this crude flour with water, and baking in the form of cakes. Among the many ingenious arrangements used by the ancients for baking this bread, was a sort of portable oven in shape something like a pitcher, in the inside of which a fire was made. When the oven was well heated, a paste made of meal and water was applied to the outside. Such bread was baked very quickly and taken off in small, thin sheets like wafers. A flat cake was the common form in which most of the bread of olden times was baked; being too brittle to be cut with a knife, the common mode of dividing it was by breaking and hence the expression "breaking bread" so common in Scripture.

Various substances have been and are employed for making this needful article. Until the last few decades, barley was the grain most universally used. Chestnuts, ground to a flour, are made into bread in regions where these nuts abound. Quite recently, an immense peanut crop in the Southern States was utilized for bread-making purposes. In ancient times, the Thracians made to bread from a flour made from the _water coltran_, a p.r.i.c.kly root of triangular form. In Syria, mulberries were dried and grounded to flour. Rice, moss, palm tree piths, and starch producing roots are used by different nationalities in the preparation of bread. In many parts of Sweden, bread is made from dried fish, using one half fish flour and one half barley flour; and in winter, flour made from the bark of trees is added. Desiccated tomatoes, potatoes, and other vegetables are also mixed with the cereals for bread-making. In India, the lower cla.s.ses make their bread chiefly from millet. Moss bread is made in Iceland from the reindeer moss, which toward autumn becomes soft, tender, and moist, with a taste like wheat bran. It contains a large quant.i.ty of starch, and the Icelanders gather, dry, pulverize it, and thus prepare it for bread-making. The ancient Egyptians often made their bread from equal parts of the whole grain and meal.

The breadstuff's most universally used among civilized nations at the present time are barley, rye, oats, maize, buckwheat, rice, and wheat, of which the last has acquired a decided preference.

If made in the proper manner and from suitable material, bread is, with the exception of milk, the article best fitted for the nourishment of the body, and if need be, can supply the place of all other foods. Good bread does not cloy the appet.i.te as do many other articles of food, and the simplest bill of fare which includes light, wholesome bread, is far more satisfying than an elaborate meal without it. Were the tables of our land supplied with good, nutritious, well-baked bread, there would be less desire for cake, pastry, and other indigestible particles, which, under the present system of cookery, are allowed to compensate for the inferior quality and poor preparation of more wholesome foods.

Bread has been proverbially styled the "staff of life." In nearly all ancient languages the entomology of the word "bread" signifies all, indicating; that the bread of earlier periods was in truth what it should be at the present time,--a staff upon which all the functions of life might with safety depend.

Notwithstanding the important part bread was designed to play in the economy of life, it would be hardly possible to mention another aliment which so universally falls below the standard either through the manner of its preparation or in the material used.

Bread, to answer the requirements of a good, wholesome article of food, beside being palatable, must be light, porous, and friable, so that it can be easily insalivated and digested. It should not contain ingredients which will in any way be injurious if taken into the system, but should contain as many as possible of the elements of nutrition.

Wheat, the substance from which bread is most generally made, contains all the necessary food elements in proper proportions to meet the requirements of nutrition, and bread should also contain them. The flour, however, must be made from the whole grain of the wheat, with the exception of the outer husk.

What is ordinarily termed fine flour has a large part of the most nutritive properties of the grain left out, and unless this deficiency is made up by other foods, the use of bread made from such material will leave the most vital tissues of the body poorly nourished, and tend to produce innumerable bad results. People who eat bread made from fine white flour naturally crave the food elements which have been eliminated from the wheat, and are thus led to an excessive consumption of meat, and the nerve-starvation and consequent irritability thus induced may also lead to the use of alcoholic drinks. We believe that one of the strongest barriers women could erect against the inroads of intemperance would be to supply the tables of the land with good bread made from flour of the entire wheat.

The superiority of bread made from the entire wheat or unbolted meal has been attested by many notable examples in history. In England, under the administration of William Pitt, there was for several years such a scarcity of wheat that to make it hold out longer, a law was pa.s.sed by Parliament that the army should be supplied with bread made of unbolted flour. This occasioned much murmuring on the part of the soldiers, but nevertheless the health of the army improved so greatly as to be a subject of surprise. The officers and the physicians at last publicly declared that the soldiers had never before been so robust and healthy.

According to the eminent Prof. Liebig, whole-wheat bread contains 60 per cent more of the phosphate or bone forming material than does meat, and 200 per cent more gluten than white bread. To the lack of these elements in a food so generally used as white flour bread, is undoubtedly due the great prevalence of early decaying teeth, rickets, and other bone diseases. Indeed, so many are the evils attendant upon a continued use of fine flour bread that we can in a great measure agree with a writer of the last century who says, in a quaint essay still to be seen at the British Museum, that "fine flour, spirituous liquors, and strong ale-house beer are the foundations of almost all the poverty and all the evils that affect the labouring part of mankind."

Bread made from the entire wheat is looked upon with far more favor than formerly, and it is no longer necessary to use the crude products of the grain for its manufacture, since modern invention has worked such a revolution in milling processes that it is now possible to obtain a fine flour containing all the nutritious elements of the grain. The old-time millstone has been largely superceded by machinery with which the entire grain may be reduced to fine flour without the loss of any of its valuable properties. To be sure, the manufacture of fine white flour of the old sort, is still continued, and doubtless will be continued so long as color takes precedence over food value. The improved processes of milling have, however, enabled the millers to utilize a much larger proportion of the nutritious elements of the grain than formerly, and still preserve that whiteness is so pleasing to many consumers. Although it is true that there are brands of white flour which possess a large percentage of the nutrient properties of the wheat, it is likewise true that flour which contains _all_ the nutritive elements is _not_ white.

Of flours made from the entire grain there are essentially two different varieties, that which is termed _unbolted wheat meal_ or _Graham_ flour, and that called _wheat-berry, whole-wheat_, or _entire-wheat_ flour. The princ.i.p.al difference between the two consists in the preliminary treatment of the wheat kernel before reduction, Graham flour containing more or less of the flinty bran, which is wholly innutritious and to a sensitive stomach somewhat irritating. In the manufacture of _whole_ or _entire_-wheat flour, the outer, flinty bran is first removed by special machinery, and then the entire grain pulverized, by some of approved method, to different grades of fineness. The absence of the indigestible bran renders the entire-wheat flour superior in this respect to Graham, though for many persons the latter is to preferred.

HOW TO SELECT FLOUR.--The first requisite in the making of good bread is good flour. The quality of a brand of flour will of course depend much upon the kind of grain from which it is prepared--whether new or old, perfect, or deteriorated by rust, mold, or exposure, and also upon the thoroughness with which it has been cleansed from dust, chaff, and all foreign substances, as well as upon the method by which it is ground. It is not possible to judge with regard to all these particulars by the appearance of the flour, but in general, good flour will be sweet, dry, and free from any sour or musty smell or taste. Take up a handful, and if it falls from the hand light and elastic, it is pretty sure to be good. If it will retain the imprint of the fingers and falls and a compact ma.s.s or a damp, clammy, or sticky to the touch, it is by no means the best. When and knead a little of it between the fingers; if it works soft and sticky, it is poor. Good flour, when made into dough, is elastic, and will retain its shape. This elastic property of good flour is due to the gluten which it contains. The more gluten and the stronger it is, the better the flour. The gluten of good flour will swell to several times its original bulk, while that of poor flour will not.

In buying white flour, do not select that which is pure white with a bluish tinge, but that which is of a creamy, yellowish-white tint. While the kinds of flour that contain the entire nutritive properties of the wheat will necessarily be darker in color, we would caution the reader not to suppose that because flour is dark in color it is for that reason good, and rich in nutritive elements. There are many other causes from which flour may be dark, such as the use of uncleansed or dark varieties of wheat, and the large admixture of bran and other grains; many unscrupulous millers and flour dealers make use of this fact to palm off upon their unsuspecting customers an inferior article. Much of the so-called Graham flour is nothing more than poor flour mixed with bran, and is in every way inferior to good white flour. Fine flour or made from the entire wheat may generally be distinguished from a spurious article by taking a small portion into the mouth and chewing it. Raw flour made from the entire grain has a sweet taste, and a rich, nutty flavor the same as that experienced in chewing a whole grain of wheat, and produces a goodly quant.i.ty of gum or gluten, while a spurious article tastes flat and insipid like starch, or has a bitter, pungent taste consequent upon the presence of impurities. This bitter taste is noticeable in bread made from such flour. A given quant.i.ty of poor flour will not make as much bread as the same quant.i.ty of good flour, so that adulteration may also be detected in this way. Doubtless much of the prejudice against the use of whole-wheat flour has arisen from the use of a spurious article.

As it is not always possible to determine accurately without the aid of chemistry and a microscope whether flour is genuine, the only safe way is to purchase the product of reliable mills.

It is always best to obtain a small quant.i.ty of flour first, and put it to the test of bread-making; then, if satisfactory, purchase that brand so long as it proves good. It is true economy to buy a flour known to be good even though it may cost more than some others. It is not wise to purchase too large a quant.i.ty at once unless one has exceptionally good facilities for storage, as flour is subject to many deteriorating influences. It is estimated that a barrel of good flour contains sufficient bread material to last one person one year; and from this standard it can be easily estimated in what proportion it is best to purchase.

TO KEEP FLOUR.--Flour should always be kept in a tight receptacle, and in a cool, dry, well-ventilated place. It should not be allowed to remain in close proximity to any substances of strong odor, as it very readily absorbs odors and gaseous impurities. A damp atmosphere will cause it to absorb moisture, and as a result the gluten will lose some of its tenacity and become sticky, and bread made from the flour will be coa.r.s.er and inferior in quality. Flour which has absorbed dampness from any cause should be sifted into a large tray, spread out thin and exposed to the hot sun, or placed in a warming oven for a few hours.