English and French cookery

Among'the minor vegetables, Asparagus is light and nourishing when freshly picked and young, and eaten with butter-oil — the thickened melted butter generally served is a mistake — and when cold, with a seasoning of vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper. Seakale demands much more attention than it attracts. It is extremely wholesome and easily digested, and in many respects is preferable to asparagus itself. Neither Broccoli nor Cauliflower can be considered nourishing, containing only a small quantity of rnuci- lage ; but the latter is digested with more ease than most vegetables. Cabbage is, similarly innutritious, and fresh from its hot bath is vastly improved, as food, by the addition of a little fat or butter. Brussels Sprouts rank with these. Spinach, again, conveys little strength to the body, but is a light, tasty, and wholesome dish when skilfully cooked in little water, chopped fine, and mixed with butter. Vegetable Marrows need no praise. At all stages they afford a healthgiving and excellent light meal.. A good French cook would scorn a marrow or cauliflower cooked a Veau. Artichokes, and much else finding its way into Covent Garden, are delicacies, and may be passed over here. Among the vegetables usually eaten uncooked, or as salad, Cucumbers take the first place ; they are gently aperient, cooling, and act upon the blood ; but the presence of wood-fibre in abundance rendering them indigestible, physicians recommend their being eaten with the rind on. Celery needs no reference. Celeriac, on the other hand, is little known ; it can hardly be distinguished from celery, lends itself more readily to cultivation, and is cooked in a shorter time. Boiled or stewed, and served with white or brown sauce, it forms an admirable and digestible dish. Speaking generally, the chief aliments yielded to the digestive functions by the vegetable kingdom are starch, mucilage, and sugar. Starch is furnished by potatoes, chestnuts, and the seeds of leguminosae, by peas, broad beans, kidney beans, and lentils. This aliment is in general more rapidly digested than either the albuminous, as in eggs, the fibrinous, as in meat, or the gelatinous, as from bones, skin, sinews, etc. It is most strengthening of all vegetable substances. Mucilage is found in carrots, beetroots, turnips, parsnips, lettuce, endive, spinach, artichokes, asparagus, peas, French beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and radishes, but always in combination with some saccharine, acid, or bitter substance. ‘ It excites,’ we read, 1 only in a very slight degree, the mucous membrane of the stomach, and its passage through the digestive tube is rapid.’ United, however, to the fibrinous element — cooked, for instance, in strong gravy — it becomes a nutritious and unexciting article of food, well suited to regulate any increased activity of the vital functions. Fruits. Fruits are chiefly valuable for their delicious flavours and cooling quality, possessing, with one or two exceptions, small nutriment. Apples vary in nutritive value with the varying portious of sugar, acid, mucilage, water, and soft woody fibre of which they consist. They arc most wholesome when cooked, and in the form of apple-pie have the reputation of being highly nutritive and digestible. Apples also aid the digestion of other foods. American apples are, as a rule,