Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1877 — Summer Foods. [ARTICLE]

Summer Foods.

When the mercury stands at 90 deg. in the shade, the body requires but little fuel to keep the blood at its normal heat of 98 deg. Therefore, we eat less heatproducing food in summer than we do in winter. The wastes of nerve and muscular tissues must be preserved, so that the body’s strength may be kept; but care should be taken against overheating. A writer in the New York Tribune thus discourses to the housekeeper about the way to feed different members of the family: Suppose she has a half-dozen hungry farm laborers to feed, she will not give them chicken croquettes, tongue sandwiches and ice cream, for this would not feed them. She would rather place before them corned beef, well done, cabbage, onions, beans, potatoes, buttermilk and bread and butter. In the corned beef they would have for every hundred grains eaten, fifteen grains of nitrogen, which would go at once to repair muscular waste; in cabbage every hundred part would give them four parts of nitrogen; in onions they would have five parts of nitrogen in every hundred parts; in beans about the same, and in potatoes both nitrogen and potash, though in smaller proportions. The buttermilk, beside affording a cooling acid, is a refreshing beverage, since every constituent of milk but the fatty part is present in it. A piece of apple pie would fitly close the repast. But such a meal would not suit the braiu-worker; it is too hearty, and makes larger demands on the digestive organs than would be agreeable to him. For him the food should be at once lighter and more concentrated—a cupful of nutritious soup, a piece of juicy meat (fish, flesh or fowl), a baked potato, eggs, bread and butter, fruit, with some light dessert without pastry; this would permit him, after a short interval, to resume his work without heaviness. In the summer time fruits and vegetables naturally form a large part of our diet. When neither under-ripe nor overripe, nothing can be more wholesome than fruit. But there are no articles of food more deranging to the system than unripe fruit, or that verging on decay, in which the fermentations of decomposition have begun. So far as possible, fruit should be eaten without sugar. Bugar is carbon in a saccharine garb, and carbon is heat. Curds are very delightful and nutritious articles of food*. For breakfast on a sultry morning in June and July, nothing can exceed a cream cheese for delicacy and satisfaction. The habit once formed of eating cold dishes in summer, and the American idea that every meal must taste of the fire being discarded, large comfort ensues to the cook and the eater no less. Cold tea and cold coffee, if rightly made and cooled, are as refreshing and stimulating as the same beverages at 219 deg. Fahrenheit. Cold meats are as nutritious as warm meats, and many vegetables are as palatable when thev have been half a day from the fire as when first cooked. Salads of all kinds are specially grateful in warm weather, and should form a part of every dinner.