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Vegetables

POTATOES, peas, corn, beans, and many of the vegetables which are universally used, receive fair treatment, but in American kitchens there is still much to learn on the subject of how to make the best of what a country cook calls "greens." In the spring, one craves this sort of food for the well-being of the body and because appetite demands it. The earth yields with the seasons exactly the sort of food we ought to eat, and eat liberally, for it is nature's own medicine. First, let us divide vegetables into classes. There are such cereals as rice, then corn, and legumes, which include the large family of beans, peas, and lentils. In the root class we have beets, carrots, parsnips, turnips, and radishes. Green vegetables include a variety of things herbaceous, from cabbage to dandelions. In bulbs there is the onion family and garlic; then what are called fruit vegetables, eggplant, peppers, okra, cucumbers, and squash. There is also the fungous class, such as mushrooms and truffles. Each class has a different food value; they require different treatment in cookery and are suited to accompany different foods, although our nation would be in no way the loser, either in health or economy, if it learned, like the French people, to make an excellently cooked vegetable serve for one course.

Before we consider the cooking of vegetables, let us study what their properties are and what they do for our bodies. Every vegetable contains more or less of what is called cellulose tissue. This helps to keep the stomach and intestines perfectly healthy. For instance, when we eat meat, we put into our stomachs a highly concentrated food that requires the addition of other foods, bulky and less easily digested, to make a perfectly balanced meal.

Strange as it may seem, the value of vegetables lies in the fact that they are made up largely of a membranous substance so bulky and full of refuse that the stomach expels it to the intestines almost in an unchanged condition. Meanwhile, the blood has taken to itself such mineral matter and salts as are necessary to the human system. While digestion is in progress, the loose mass of cellulose is keeping up the peristaltic action that goes on for several hours after eating in the healthy stomach. It is not necessary that there be nourishment in everything we eat. We require the pure distilled water and salts of green vegetables just as much as we do the proteid of meat and the nitrogen of legumes.

To get the fullest value from vegetables, they must be fresh. The country woman, who can pick green things from her garden before the dew has dried from them, is lucky indeed.

The best that can be done by a city housewife is to do her own marketing intelligently and carefully. In marketing, beware of root vegetables which are overclean about the roots.

The greengrocer has his method of reviving stale goods; roots are soaked from a withered condition back to a fresh appearance. Cabbage and lettuce are skillfully stripped of their outer leaves, and although dirty, sandy spinach is less attractive in looks than cleaner leaves, it is apt to be fresher than that which has been revived by washing. Even cucumbers, VEGETABLES eggplant, and tomatoes can be revived by an ice-water bath. Within thin, membranous walls vegetables inclose a semifluid mass that stores up minute cells of starch or other material. As soon as the tender growth of the young plant is over, these cells grow woody and tough.

You can readily see this process in old asparagus, something we hesitate to eat; yet in thousands of families stale vegetables, which have developed the same conditions as if they were old, are used for economy's sake. It would really, in such a case, be better to omit vegetables from a menu. One is eating woody fiber, which can be torn apart like threads, and is almost as easy as thread to digest. Suppose we see for ourselves just what this fibrous mass is like.

Take two messes of peas, one of them green things fresh from the pod. Cook in boiling water. They will be ready for the table in ten minutes, but first make them into a purée by forcing the pulp through a potato ricer. They contain little but pulp. Nothing except skins is left in the strainer. The value of fresh green peas lies in the sugar and mineral salts they contain.

Now, take old dried peas such as are used as a base for soup. They have been soaking for twenty-four hours in cold water. Afterwards long, slow cooking softens them so they can be squeezed through the ricer. Then it actually takes muscle to get a purée from them, and it is small in proportion to the residue retained by the strainer. They are not only the dry, husky skins of the peas, but a quantity of pure waste which no stomach can properly digest. Still, this pulp made into a soup is a nutritious dish.

That is why so many people with slow digestion can take in soup such vegetables as corn, tomato, beans, lentils, and celery, when the vegetable in its entirety would cause no end of distress.

Every vegetable is almost lacking in fat; the legumes have the largest proportion, and they average only three per cent. Therefore, fat in some form is added to every vegetable dish. We beat cream or butter into mashed potatoes, bake beans with a bit of pork on top of them, and pour oil over salads.

Now to the various methods of preparation and cooking of vegetables. Probably root vegetables are used most largely in every household.