CONDIMENTS.

The use of condiments must have originated in the desire to supply something that was missing in the taste of cooked foods, and it is undoubtedly true that in the process of cooking the nature of many food products becomes so changed that they taste flat and insipid. For instance, a sweet turnip is tasty and liked by many in its raw state, but when it is cooked it seems to need salt or something to give it flavor and life.

In boiling or cooking in heated water the mineral elements are dissolved and lost in the water which is thrown away, and so we try to restore to them that which we have destroyed. But our efforts are vain. No condiment has ever been devised which would restore a lost flavor or the elements that have been destroyed.

In the use of elementary foods all of this is avoided, and the demand or desire for condiments is entirely overcome.

Many people go through the world and eat three meals a day until they have marked off their three score years and ten, and never know the real taste of the commonest article of food. The use of condiments, the pouring of some mixed-up mess of something over foods just before we eat them, in the vain hope of making them better, seems to be a sort of weird superstition. It seems to have become a kind of unaccountable insanity.

Of all the errors and stupid blunders that people have made in their foolish effort to fix up foods, the condiment habit has the least excuse for existence. Think of taking a pure article of food and pouring over it a muddy colored liquid that was made somewhere in Europe out of—well, here we are compelled to call a halt. The imagination fails, and if it did not, language would.

Most individuals in polite society are extremely careful about their persons. Their dress must fit just so, it must be made of certain choice material, the linen must be spotless, the colors with which they bedeck themselves must harmonize. They are extremely careful about their companionship. Their house must face a certain way and the furnishings must be just right. They are very cautious about what they say. They are very jealous of their opinions. They select with much care their language. They will not venture out in threatening weather. They restrict themselves in every conceivable useless thing. They put the chain upon nearly all their liberties, and try hard sometimes to manacle the liberty of others.

But these same wise people will sit in a fashionable café and dine upon an undrawn, cold-storage turkey that has been a year dead, and pour over its ancient flesh a tar-colored fluid that has been upon the shelf of a grocer several years—until it has reached that limit of delicious decay suggested by the green, slimy mildew in Roquefort cheese.

All condiments, especially stock sauces and dressings, vinegar, mustards, and such things, possess absolutely no constructive property, but all of them possess to a very large degree the elements of decay and destruction. The great increase in stomach and intestinal diseases referred to by the best medical authorities in the country is very largely due to the habit of using condiments.

The use of condiments is followed by two very pronounced evils: First, they cause fermentation of foods, and irritation of the mucous membranes of the stomach, which excites a false appetite and causes overeating—the origin of a great many stomach ills.

Second, they deprive the taste-buds of their rights, thus lessening the desire for perfect mastication.

One of the first steps in adopting a reform or hygienic dietary is to eliminate from the bill of fare all condiments, hot sauces, and such stuff. Remember their origin was not very respectable. They seem to have been created for the purpose of covering up something which we instinctively regard as unclean.