We were both young, and, proud of our hardihood in bearing privations, were stanch disciples of Diogenes; but on the last day we succumbed, and bartered the remainder of our bread and cheese for some of the boiled horse-beans and cabbage-broth of the forecastle. The cheese, highly relished at first, had become positively nauseous, and our craving for the vegetable broth was absurd, considering the full view we had of its constituents, and of the dirtiness of its cooks.
I attribute this to the lack of potash salts in the cheese and bread. It was similar to the craving for common salt by cattle that lack necessary chlorides in their food. I am satisfied that cheese can never take the place in an economic dietary otherwise justified by its nutritious composition, unless this deficiency of potash is somehow supplied. My device of using it with milk as a solvent supplies it in a simple and natural manner.
XXV.
My first acquaintance with the rational cookery of cheese was in the autumn of 1842, when I dined with the monks of St. Bernard. Being the only guest, I was the first to be supplied with soup, and then came a dish of grated cheese. Being young and bashful, I was ashamed to display my ignorance by asking what I was to do with the cheese, but made a bold dash, nevertheless, and sprinkled some of it into my soup. I then learned that my guess was quite correct; the prior and the monks did the same.
On walking on to Italy I learned that there such use of cheese is universal. Minestra without Parmesan would there be regarded as we in England should regard muffins and crumpets without butter. During the forty years that have elapsed since my first sojourn in Italy my sympathies are continually lacerated when I contemplate the melancholy spectacle of human beings eating thin soup without any grated cheese.
Not only in soups, but in many other dishes, it is similarly used. As an example, I may name "Risotto à la Milanese," a delicious, wholesome, and economical dish—a sort of stew composed of rice and the giblets of fowls, usually charged about twopence to threepence per portion at Italian restaurants. This is always served with grated Parmesan. The same with the many varieties of paste, of which macaroni and vermicelli are the best known in this country.
In all these the cheese is sprinkled over, and then stirred into the soup, etc., while it is hot. The cheese being finely divided is fused at once, and, being fused in liquid, is thus delicately cooked. This is quite different from the "macaroni cheese" commonly prepared in England by depositing macaroni in a pie-dish, and then covering it with a stratum of grated cheese, and placing this in an oven or before a fire until the cheese is desiccated, browned, and converted into a horny, caseous form of carbon that would induce chronic dyspepsia in the stomach of a wild-boar if he fed upon it for a week.
