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Meals

THAT diseases can be treated medicinally throughout their course from first to last by food constituents taken at meals, which food principles identically represent drugs as given heretofore in mixtures, pills, or powders, periodically every few hours, is our present unhesitating contention. With this view our endeavour is to prove the facts by an analytical comparison of the prescribed foods with the pharmaceutical preparations of the chemist; and to supply a code of foods fully as remedial, which the doctor may confidently order at his daily visit, and which the patient will gratefully appreciate. Meantime, something of interest is to be said here about meals in general, both of past times, and of the present era. Early Breakfast, for instance, had its beginning in 1463, and up to a century ago was a light, trifling meal. Queen Elizabeth and her Court rose at six, drank their morning ale, with brawn, at seven, and dined at 11 a.m. Cromwell dined at half-past one p.m. In 1750, five o'clock p.m. was the fashionable dinner hour; and towards the close of the eighteenth century breakfast parties began to be given at noon. Lord Chesterfield, in his famous letters to his (natural) son (1774), wrote: "I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have not infrequently made a hero of the same man who through indigestion, a restless night and a rainy daybreak would have proved a coward." "Lord Chesterfield," said The Edinburgh Review, was the wittiest man of quality of his time." George the Second dubbed him " a little tea-table scoundrel." He married a lady who is believed to have been a daughter of George the First. Boswell tells in his Life of Dr. Johnson, that the great doctor "thought of Chesterfield as a lord among wits, but found him only a wit among lords"; whilst concerning the famous letters of this Lord Chesterfield to his son, "they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master." "Hope" (unsubstantial food), said Lord Bacon, "is a good breakfast, but a bad supper," (when better nourishment is needed). 66 66 "Breakfast! come to breakfast!

Little ones, and all!

How their merry footsteps Patter at the call!

Break the bread: pass freely Milk which cream-like flows!

A blessing on their appetites, And on their lips of rose!"

Dinner may be pleasant :

So may social tea :

Yet methinks the breakfast Best of all the three, With its smile of welcome, Its holy voice of prayer, It forgeth heavenly armour Against the hosts of care."

As to the English "country Sunday," and its substantial meat and drink at the mid-day meal after morning service, especially with the Chapel-goers, Richard Jefferies has told in his eloquent Saxon speech (Field and Hedgerow, one of his last essays) : "There is no man so feasted as the Chapel pastor. His tall, round body, and his broad, red face might be taken for the outward man of a sturdy farmer, and he likes his pipe, and glass. He dines every Sunday, and at least once a week besides, at the house of one of his staunch supporters. It is said that once at such a dinner (in a Sussex yeoman's homestead), after a large plateful of black currant pudding, the pastor, finding there was still some juice left, lifted the plate to his mouth, and carefully licked it all round; the hostess hastened to offer a spoon, but he declined, thinking that his way was much the best for gathering up the essence of the fruit. So simple were his manners, he needed no spoon; and, indeed, if we look back, the apostles managed without forks, and put their fingers in the dish."

The ancient Greeks had as their meals acratisma (breakfast), deipnon, or aristin (as early dinner), and darpee (supper, or late dinner); their hesperisma corresponded to our five o'clock tea. The Romans had pentaculum (breakfast), prandium (luncheon), and cœna (dinner). The old Low Latin term for the noonday meal was merenda, as suggesting the notion of food to be earned before it was enjoyed. So in Friar Bacon's poem, A Prophesie, (1604) it stands declared that "in the good old days he that wrought not till he sweated was held unworthy of his meat." The modern luncheon, or nuncheon, was the archaic prandium, or under-meat, displaced by our breakfast, but which then came between the noontide dinner, and the evening supper. Nowadays to some persons, fond of outdoor daily life, and sunshine, and the beauties of nature, a mid-day solid meal is distasteful, and repugnant. Thus pronounces-Elizabeth (in the Solitary Summer) when called from the green fields, and the intellectual enjoyment of life in the fresh country air, to the heavy, substantial family luncheon within doors: "Luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would fain try to sail by it like Ulysses (tied to the mast) if I only had a biscuit to comfort me; but there are babies to be fed, and the man of wrath, my husband: and how can a respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which those dearest to her are sticking? So I stand by them, and am punished every day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying after the sunshiny morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet, and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy of love with life, to come back, and live through those dreary luncheonridden hours when the soul is crushed out of sight, and sense, to take up with cutlets, and asparagus, and revengeful sweet things." Cotton, who collaborated with Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler, said: "My diet is always one glass of ale so soon as I am dressed, and no more till dinner." Viator, in the same noted book, exclaims, "I will light my pipe, for that is my breakfast too." The word lunch is literally (Welsh) a lump, and was at first simply a lump of bread and cheese taken between meals. At the Restoration period dinner never began with soup, and the fish was usually served together with the meats. Nearly every man dined wearing his hat, as the draughts in the dwellings were ghastly. Only one knife, and one fork, were placed before each diner, even at the Royal table, whilst at most dinners forks were an unknown quantity. "Dinner," as a modern writer declares, "should never be eaten without a Seventeenth Century Poet, in an old yellow-leaved edition, being on the table, not to be read, of course, any more than the flowers are to be eaten, but just to make a music of association very softly to our thoughts! Dinner is a mystery! a mystery whereof the greatest chef knows but little!" "Even our digestion is governed by angels," said Blake, "and (if you will but resist the trivial inclination to substitute 'bad angels') is there really any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned into brains, and beer into beauty? Every handsome woman we see has been made out of beef-steaks, and the finest poem that was ever written came out of a grey, pulpy mass such as we make brain-sauce of."

Captain Gronow, formerly of the Grenadier Guards, wrote in his Reminiscences (1862) concerning "Diet, and Cookery in England," as he remembered them, in the early part of the eighteenth century: "Even in the best houses, when I was a young man the dinners were wonderfully solid, hot, and stimulating. The menu of a grand dinner was thus composed : Mulligatawny and turtle soups were the first dishes placed before you; a little lower the eye met with the familiar salmon at one end of the table, and the turbot, surrounded by smelts, at the other. The first course was sure to be followed by a saddle of mutton, or a piece of roast beef; and then you could take your oath that fowls, tongue, and ham would as assuredly succeed as darkness after day. The universally adored, and ever popular boiled potato, produced at the very earliest period of the dinner, was eaten with everything up to the moment when the sweets appeared. Our vegetables, the best in the world, were never honoured by an accompanying sauce, and generally came to the table cold. A prime difficulty to overcome was the placing on your fork, and finally in your mouth, some half-dozen different eatables which occupied your plate at the same time; for example, your plate would contain, say, a slice of turkey, a piece of stuffing, a sausage, pickles, a slice of tongue, cauliflower, potatoes, and perhaps something more. A perpetual thirst seemed to come over people, both men and women, as soon as they had tasted their soup; and from that moment everybody was taking wine with everybody else until the close of dinner, and it was such wine as produced that kind of cordiality which frequently passes into stupefaction. From the bazaar of all these good things, according to habit and custom, a judicious, and careful selection had to be made, with the endeavour to place a portion of each in your mouth at the same moment. In fact, it appeared to me that we used to do all our compound cookery between our jaws. How all this eating and drinking ended was obvious, from the prevalence of gout, and the necessity (for everyone) of making the pill-box their constant bedroom companion." "Better," said Solomon, the wisest of men, " is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox, and hatred therewith." Miss Horace Smith, of Rejected Addresses parentage, went on an occasion to the theatre at Brighton, and being asked after returning home if she had enjoyed herself, replied, "It was all dull; the house was nearly empty: there was no one in the stalls, not even an ox." As to relish for a meal, the French proverb “l'appetit vient en mangeant" embodies an indisputable truth- "Often will the relish increase as the meal progresses"; moreover, the sight of others eating is appetizing of itself. Major Loder, in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, is credited with a remark which goes to prove the truth of this assertion : "Come away into the supper room, Mrs. R.," he says to the guileless Becky; "seeing these nobs grubbing away has made me peckish, too." In, or about the year 1600 it was customary to "dyne at XI of the clocke." For instance, "My Lady Cholmeley, having ordered her household during one morning, and instructed her many daughters in their various duties, went round her domaine from hop garthe to hen yard, from linen closet to larder, prying, tasting, and admonishing, until her family was call'd together to dyne at noon." During the time of Louis XIII of France the dinner was announced by blowing a horn, and thence came the order "Cornez le diner," leading to naming the viands "Corned beef," etc. "We had pudding before meat in my day," says Mr. Holbrook, the old-fashioned bachelor-yeoman in Cranford (Mrs. Gaskell, 1863). "When I was a young man we used to keep strictly to my father's rule, 'No broth, no ball : no ball, no beef,' and we always began dinner with broth; then came the suet puddings boiled in the broth with the beef; and then the meat itself. If we did not sup our broth we had no ball, which we liked a deal better; and the beef came last of all. Now folks begin with sweet things, and turn their dinners topsy turvy." In the familiar nursery rhyme of Froggy would a-wooing go, the same practice is clearly alluded to with regard to the little dinner, of which a menu is given in the song's refrain, -"Roly, poly" (pudding), followed by "gammon (of pork), and spinach"; quite a satisfying repast, though probably the first course of jam roll didn't digest comfortably, because immediately afterwards, "Heigho! said Roly."

The great Duke of Wellington, when journeying through France with Alava in 1814, invariably on being asked at what time of the coming day they should next start, replied, "At daybreak"; and to the question what they should have for dinner, answered, "Cold meat." "Je les ai eu en horreur, à la fin," Alava declared; "ces deux mots la-daybreak, et cold meat." Thackeray, as one of the last generation, dined early :- "A plain leg of mutton, my Lucy, I prithee get ready at three !

Have it smoking, and tender, and juicy, And what better meat can there be?

To "dine with Duke Humphrey" (buried at St. Alban's, 1446) was to wander dinnerless about his tomb; whereupon Quin is supposed (in an epigram by Garrick) to have soliloquized thus concerning the embalmed Duke below:- "A plague on Egypt's arts, I say:

Embalm the dead! on senseless clay Rich wines and spices waste !

Like sturgeon, or like brawn shall I Bound in a precious pickle lie Which I can never taste ?

Let me embalm this flesh of mine With turtle-fat and Bordeaux wine, And spoil the Egyptian trade !

Than Humphrey's Duke more happy I:

Embalmed alive old Quin shall die, A mummy ready made!"

When Mr. Pickwick and Bob Sawyer reached Towcester, dripping wet from outside the coach, at the "Saracen's Head," "A werry good little dinner," said Sam Weller, in attendance upon them, "can be got ready in half-an-hour, -pair of fowls, Sir, and a weal cutlet, French beans, taturs, tart, and tidiness. You had better stop vere you are, Sir, if I might recommend! Take adwice, Sir, as the doctor said." Again, when Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen were having a nap, they were roused by the mere whispering of the talismanic word "dinner " in their ears; and to dinner they went, with "good digestion waiting on appetite, and health on both, and a waiter on all three."

At the Supper given in her lodgings by Miss Snevellicci, of the Theatre Royal, Portsmouth (see Nicholas Nickleby, 1838), to her parents after a benefit performance, and to which Mr. Johnson (Nicholas), the leading actor, was specially invited, "the cloth was laid, under the joint superintendence of all the ladies, upon two tables put together, the one being high and narrow, and the other low, and broad. There were oysters at the top, sausages at the bottom, a pair of snuffers in the centre, and baked potatoes wherever it was most convenient to put them." Samuel Pepys, when at the Hague (in 1660), 66 gained admission late one evening to the 'Prince of Orange'; this done, we went to a place we had taken to sup in, where a sallet, and two or three bones of mutton were provided for a matter of ten of us, which was very strange."

The famous Dr. Johnson seems, according to Leslie Stephen, to have "eaten like a wolf, savagely, silently, and with undiscriminating fury." He was not a pleasant object during the performance; he became totally absorbed in the business of the moment; a strong perspiration broke out, and the veins of his forehead swelled. He liked coarse, satisfying dishes, boiled pork, and veal pie, stuffed with plums, and sugar; whilst in regard to wine he seems to have accepted the doctrines of the critic of a certain fluid (professedly "Port") who asked, "What more can you want? It is black, it is thick, and it makes you drunk." Moreover, he would pour oyster sauce over his plumpudding. Sydney Smith, remonstrating with Sir George Phillips by letter (1829), wrote: "And now, Sir George, let me caution you against indulgence in that enormous appetite of yours; you eat every day as much as four men in holy orders, and yourself a layman!"

There seems to be without doubt an evident relation between the increased consumption of meat as food, and the frequent occurrence of appendicitis (or obstruction of the little worm-like process attached where the small intestines terminate in the first pouch-cæcum of the large bowels), which has recently taken to prevail so commonly. Plain meals, and fasts, have become almost completely banished from amongst us; and in towns where this appendicitis has grown more frequent of late, flesh food is now the chief nutriment. "I have seen," says Dr. Keen, "lately a number of cases of appendicitis among young subjects, who had been reared on animal food, at a period when the nourishment ought to have consisted exclusively in a milk diet." Among the large cities of the United States of America, appendicitis obtains so widely that it is estimated one-third of the population is attacked by this trouble. In the majority of cases it would appear that the small tube of the appendix is invaded by a particular microbe, the Bacillus coli communis. Modern teaching says that this appendix is more than an obsolete rudimentary structure, and has its uses by pouring a secretion into the large bowel for promoting the digestion of food therein. Carnivorous animals do not possess a cæcum, but among herbivorous animals the organ is very large. Generally when obstructive appendicitis is threatened, thorough washing-out of the breeding bed of the offending microbe in the cæcum, and appendix, by a copious injection of a warm water, will overcome the trouble, and will put the matter right pretty soon. Sir William MacEwen, of the Charing Cross Hospital, now teaches that the human appendix is also "the home of a troglodyte microbe that wages the fiercest war against undigested food."

Old persons bear a spare diet best, then adults; whereas youths tolerate it less easily, particularly children. In persons who are ill-nourished the tubercle bacillus seems to find a specially favourable soil; so that the association between bad feeding, and such diseases as lung consumption, and scrofula, is well established, while an improvement in nutrition is not infrequently followed by their cure. This is the probable reason why diabetic patients (who are kept too often in a chronic state of partial starvation) become so liable to tubercular disease of the lungs, or of some other organ; and why tall men who take only as much food as their fellows of lower stature, fall short of full health, and develop a tendency to consumption. Again, that "a hungry man is an angry man " has grown to be a recognized truth. On the other hand, the theory has been mooted, with no small show of reason, that persons with large appetites, and good digestions, who eat more of highly organized foods than they require, or can use up, are particularly prone to cancer. There is a natural tendency for healthy persons beyond middle age to consume more food than they actually need. Dr. Rabagliati, of Bradford, puts it among his Aphorisms that ""taking a cold,' as it is called, far more often depends on wrong feeding than on exposure to a chill, or than on climatic changes; whereby it follows that the best way for avoiding any such catarrhal attacks (often contracted more severely in hot weather than in winter, and yet no one speaks of them as 'taking heat,' their chilly shiver being then rather the first stage of feverishness) is not merely to wrap up well, but, as a more important point, to eat properly; certainly not more often than at three daily meals, indeed only at two by preference, and then not taking more than from twelve to twenty-four ounces of ordinary food, according to age, and occupation followed. If in six months, or so, the person still finds himself catching cold too readily, or too often, he should eat only in the morning and evening, taking moderate meals; and if again after another time of six months the same trouble persists, he should reduce the quantity of food to eight ounces at one meal, and four ounces at the other. Still once again, if the disposition to cold-taking yet declares itself, then only one daily meal should be had, consisting of twelve, or sixteen ounces of appropriate food." 66 According to Villa Novus, hys prescription, "the use of meat in a morning is to be disallowed as gross, hebetant, feral, altogether fitter for wild beasts than men; per contra, he commendeth herb diete for this meal as gentle, humane, active, conducing to contemplation; breaking the fast on eggs, and cooling salades, mallows, winter cresses, and those herbes." Charles Lamb, in his essay on Popular Fallacies, insists that "when advanced in years a man should not take his chief meal in solitude, for it to be properly nutritive"; this he styles "the solemn ceremony of manducation." "There are," as Health maintains, some happily-disposed individuals who can dine alone, and not eat too fast, nor too much, nor too little; but with the majority of persons it is different. Towards due and easy nutrition the food should be masticated slowly, and the mind not be intensely exercised during the process." Our forefathers took their meals seriously at times, inculcating such mannerisms as "Cease your chatter, and mind your platter," or "None but fools and fiddlers sing at their meat." We are certainly wiser in promoting social pleasantries at table, and in believing that "the chatted meal is half digested." Everyone knows that violent bodily exercise is bad just after a meal, and mental exertion is equally so. In fact, the experience of all past generations has perpetuated the lesson that a man should not eat alone, nor think deeply at the time of a meal, but should talk, and be talked to, while he feeds. Most persons do not ponder profoundly while they talk, and such light talking is a natural accompaniment to eating, and drinking; it needs no moralist to declare the evils of solitariness at meals. Most assuredly it is not good for man to eat and drink alone. Pleasantly, and gracefully enough, when a Russian dinner concludes, the hostess takes her stand at the table end, and the guests come up one by one to kiss her hand, while the children thank both father and mother for the good meal they have received. Milton wrote to the effect that "the interim of convenient rest before meat may both with profit, and delight be taken up in recreating, and composing the travailed spirits with the solemn, and divine Harmonies of musick, heard, or learned; the like also would not be unexpedient after meat, to assist, and cherish nature in her first concoction." As to sleep after dinner, Dr. Chambers declares it retards digestion, and allows the distended stomach to act injuriously on the circulation of the brain. "It is proper only for very aged persons, or invalids, and not always for them." Concerning a "tea dinner," writes Ian Maclaren, "it is the most loathsome meal ever invented; and we'll never have it at the Free Manse. A certain number of tea dinners would make a man into a Plymouth Brother! it's merely a question of time." Bouchard has shown that if food is retained in the stomach longer than for five hours, the changes which then take place therein are fermentative and putrefactive, rather than digestive. Flatulent discomfort occurs chiefly during the latter part of a slow, and over-burdened digestion, when the food mass has reached the large intestines, wherein it sluggishly ferments. When it enters the small intestines at first, certain residual bacteria preserve it from fermenting there; but further on in the larger bowels most of the liquids are absorbed, and the production of antiseptic acids ceases, so that putrefactive gases are generated therein, giving rise to distension, and to remorse for over-indulgence at table. The liver exercises a poison-destroying power by the bile, and the kidneys will eliminate intestinal microbes. "Olim erat anxia anus, valde anxia; quid tibi visum est? Potando tantum, tantum si pavit edendo !

Et quanquam potu vivebat plurima, et esu Ipsa erat æternum fulmen, lis, jurgia, clamor." "There was an old woman, and what do you think?

She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink:

And though victuals and drink were the chief of her diet, Yet this restless old woman could never keep quiet."