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Cooking Vegetables.

Many a housewife when straining vegetables wonders whether, with the water, she is discarding some of the most valuable constituents. According to experiments recently carried out in the kitchen of King's College Hospital, London, even the most careful cooking, using very little water and a trace of fat, would increase the calcium, phosphorus and iron in a mixed diet by only 3 per cent. The addition of three-hundredths to the amount of mineral salts consumed seems not worth worrying about. As the report of the experiments is published by the Medical Research Council, we may rely on the statements made.

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An interesting observation was that, though the addition of bicarbonate of soda to green vegetables increased the rate of cooking, it made little difference to the losses.

If the housewife is eagerly endeavouring to retain that 3 per cent, of mineral salts, she will be pleased to know that the skins of potatoes almost completely prevent the outward diffusion of salts. She will thus content herself with scrubbing potatoes before cooking, and will congratulate herself that her family really prefers potatoes baked in their jackets to those roasted in the meat dish. But wait! The Doctor and his assistants found that the friendly potato loses nothing but water when cooked in air or fried in fat. So, as far as salts are concerned, chips and roast potatoes may still figure on the menu.

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Still trying to conserve the 3 per cent., the housewife notes that when such vegetables as carrots, swedes, mushrooms and spinach are cooked in steam, they lose water, salts and other soluble materials. The rate and extent of this loss increases as the temperature is raised.

Another interesting point is that a large piece of vegetable loses less in proportion than a small piece. There-fore the housewife who cooks her cauliflower whole retains an infinitesimal amount of salts more than the careful cauliflower-cleaner who cuts her vegetable into small and easily inspected pieces—or perhaps cauliflower, owing to its branching nature, is not a good example of cooking in bulk.

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The salt-chaser will be very careful to remove her vegetables from further loss in water as soon as they are cooked.

She will be glad to know that fresh vegetables, when soaked in cold water, lose only negligible amounts of salts, but she will be horrified at the thought that dried legumes (peas and haricot beans) lose from 5 to 50 per cent, of their more soluble contents in eight hours. She will make a vow never to soak her peas for eight hours, and will gloat over the percentages of salts she has saved for her family in the past by always using the water.

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According to these experiments, then, the housewife need not worry over her method of cooking vegetables.

An interesting point in the report regarding green vegetables, is that the outer leaves, usually discarded, contain more salts than the inner leaves. So now you know the reason why white butterfly caterpillars, slugs and snails eat the outer leaves first.

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