Starch

“ Starch must necessarily abound, because the wheat, barley, rice, potatoes, &c., which form everywhere the staple of man’s food, are abundant in starch; the grains are rubbed off, and scattered by the winds in all directions. ”

“ In order to understand the difference between the proper cooking of starch and the simple bursting of the grains, let us consider the changes which take place in starch when it is subjected to different degrees of heat, and also those which are produced in it during the process of digestion. All starch in food is changed into dextrine and then into sugar (glucose, C6H12O6) in the process of digestion. Glucose is a kind of sugar, resembling cane-sugar, but it is not so sweet. ”

“ Next to the enveloping tissue, the most abundant constituent of the vegetables we use as food is starch. Laundry associations may render the Latin name ‘fecula’, or ‘farina’, more agreeable when applied to food. We feed very largely on starch, and take it in a multitude of forms. Excluding water, it constitutes above three-fourths of our ‘staff of life,’ a still larger proportion of rice, which is the staff of Oriental life, and nearly the whole of arrowroot, sago, and tapioca, which may be described as composed of starch and water. ”

“ When the body is young and growing, it can consume and appropriate a considerable quantity of starchy or structural material, but when it is fully grown, or has turned forty, it can subsist healthfully upon a diet containing only from three to five per cent of starch, and as one becomes older the more soluble forms of starch should be taken, such as the starch contained in green peas, beans, and corn, which, immature, is readily soluble and assimilable. ”

“ In the first place, the ingredients of water, hydrogen and oxygen, combine with the food, and effect its digestion. The starch which we eat in farinaceous and vegetable food cannot without water be converted into sugar. And the latter being transformed into fat, we [Pg 162] should have no fat if we took no water, though it may seem strange that water should make us fat. ”

“ We know about chlorophyll and the starch it makes, and how this starch is stored up in potatoes and wheat and corn and rice and all sorts of food grains and vegetables.
We know, too, how the roots suck up substances from the earth which we need in our bodies, and how they are stored away with the starch or sometimes by 169themselves. We know, in short, how all the food we eat is made first or last by the plants. Not only do we owe our food to the plants, but all animals do. ”

“ The fat gives flavor and nutriment, the starch is used for thickening, the liquid also gives flavor. You are now familiar with the cooking of fat and starch, and can readily understand that the combination of all these ingredients is not an easy matter. The fat will float upon the top of the liquid unless the right amount of starch or flour is used, and the flour will have a tendency to lump. There are several good methods in use. The method given for your experiment is one of the simplest, because it uses only a few utensils, and gives uniformly good results. ”

“ The seeds, roots, leaves, and fruits of plants, constitute the greatest part of the food of mankind; the respective quantities of nourishment, which these contain, may perhaps be estimated from the quantity of starch, or of sugar, they can be made to produce: in farinaceous seeds, the mucilage seems gradually to be converted into starch, while they remain in our granaries; and the starch by the germination of the young plant, as in making malt from barley, or by animal digestion, is converted into sugar. Hence old wheat and beans contain more starch than new ”

“ Physiologists tell us that this is so, and in particular that the secretions which in adult life are called saliva and pancreatic juice and which have the function of preparing starch for digestion, are at this time scanty in amount and deficient in chemical action. But these secretions are essential for the digestion of starchy foods, and chemists tell us that starch abounds in the vegetable kingdom from which most of the food of children is derived. ”

“ Starch is the white material of the grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals, rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. ”

“ In the test tube containing the cooked starch, all of which has undergone a certain amount of digestion, no blue color is discerned, for no pure starch is left, while in the other tube, in which some of the particles remain unchanged, owing to the fact that Nature does all her work slowly, a blue reaction is of course obtained, and the chemist proclaims that uncooked starch is indigestible. ”

“ Like starch, sugar is composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Like starch too its value in nutrition is determined by the amount of heat it can give out on burning, and again its heat of combustion or fuel value 3·9 calories is almost the same as that of starch. It will be noted that the whole of the 10 per cent. quoted in the table as sugar, etc., is not sugar. Some of it is a substance called dextrin which is formed from starch by the excessive heat which falls on the outside of the loaf in the oven. ”

“ The conventional American diet contains such an abnormal quantity of grain-starch, and the methods of preparation are so unnatural, that the Food Scientist, in practise, will find many people whose digestive organs have become so deranged that he may deem it necessary to prohibit grain-starch almost entirely. ”

“ These are the foods which the body can easily burn to keep it warm and give it power to act. Candy, molasses, or sugar in any form, taken in small quantities, is a good food. Starch, which the body quickly changes to sugar, is a much cheaper food. Meats contain very little starch, but nearly all vegetables contain much starch. ”

“ It may surprise some of our readers to be told that the starch of bread has not the slightest nutritive property. Its sole office is a heat producer; and, just like the coal of the engine, the starch or sugar is burned up inside us to keep up the temperature of the machine. ”

“ Starch-Making and its Relation to Human Welfare.—Leaves which have been in darkness show starch to be present soon after exposure to light. A corn plant sends 10 to 15 grams of reserve material into the ears in a single day. The formation of fruit, and especially the growth of the grain fields, show the economic importance of this fact. Not only do plants make their own food and store it away, but they make food for animals as well. ”

“ An eminent physiological chemist, who is a friend of the author, and who has been experimenting with the suggestions offered by the discovery of new uses for Taste in securing perfect economic nutrition, says that the inexpressibly sweet flavour which comes with the last expression of Taste in connection with a morsel of food, especially dry breads, which are largely starch, is evidence of perfect conversion of the starch to sugar by the action of the saliva. ”

“ Then, when she has got her white flour, and her cane sugar, and her lard, she will take it home, and mix it up, and put it in the frying pan, and serve it hot to her husband and children. Nature has so constituted her husband and children that they digest starch before they digest fat; that is to say, the starch is digested mainly in the stomach, while the fat is digested mainly after the food has been passed on into the small intestine. ”

“ Sugar is a crystalline substance, differing from starch by its sweet taste and solubility in cold water. As food, its uses are the same as starch; all starch must be converted into sugar before it can be assimilated. ”

“ The coating of vegetables and cereals with the hot fat prevents the necessary action of saliva upon the starch globules. As previously stated, most of the starches are digested in the mouth and the stomach, while the fats are not emulsified until they reach the intestines. ”

“ The digestion of raw starch may take place in the intestines, by the action of the pancreatic juice, but cannot take place in the stomach, for the reason that the saliva has not the power to penetrate the cellulose envelope of the starch granule, and hence cannot digest raw starch.
This fact coincides in a most interesting manner with the biological fact that man is by nature a frugivorous animal. ”

“ Still more violent does he grow over starch:—
“The one arch or piller whereby his (the Devil’s) kyngdome of great ruffes is vnderpropped, is a certaine kind of liquid matter, whiche they call starch, wherein the deuill hath willed them to washe and dive their ruffes well, whiche, beeying drie, will then stande stiff and inflexible about their necks. ”

“ The starch which we take so abundantly as food appears to have no more food-value to us than to the vegetable germ until the conversion into dextrin or sugar is effected. From what I have already stated concerning the action of heat upon starch, it is evident that this conversion is more or less effected in some processes of cookery. In the baking of bread an incipient conversion probably occurs throughout the loaf, while in the crust it is carried so far as to completely change most of the starch into dextrin, and some into sugar. ”

“ The cereals wheat, corn, rye, oats, and barley are the most prominent source of starch in an ordinary diet. Breakfast foods manufactured from grain are not only nutritious in themselves, but their value is increased by the milk or cream used with them. Bread is the staple starch-containing food in this country, and starch is our main source of energy, but it is necessary to eat only a small quantity of bread, if the diet includes a relatively large amount of vegetables. ”

“ White starch gently levigates or makes smooth such parts as are rough, syrup of Violets being made thick with it and so taken on the point of a knife, helps coughs, roughness of the throat, wheezing, excoriations of the bowels, the bloody-flux. ”

“ What ingredients in these puddings scorch readily? Why is Prune Pudding surrounded with hot water during baking?
LESSON XIX CEREALS: STARCH AND CELLULOSE STARCH is a very important FUEL food; like sugar, it gives energy to the body. Starch is closely related to sugar; it has much the same composition and the same use in the body. In certain respects, however, starch differs from sugar.
EXPERIMENT 14: THE STARCH TEST.—Put a drop of tincture of iodine on,— corn-starch, flour, rice, cream of wheat, wheatena, oatmeal, tapioca, potato, meat, and egg. ”

“ There is one thing which will perhaps be found in every place, and in every pinch of dust, and you will be not a little surprised to learn what that is. It is starch. No object is more familiar to the microscopist than the grain of starch. It is sometimes oval, sometimes spherical, and varies in size. The addition of a little iodine gives it a blue colour, which disappears under the influence of light. There seems to be no difference between the starch grains found in the dust of Egyptian tombs and Roman temples, and that found in the breakfast-parlour of to-day. ”

“ OUR Brother the Sun gets up every morning to cook, cooks all day, and seems to enjoy cooking. The cooking processes which we engage in are many of them imitations of his. When we use water and heat to soften and break up starch cells, it is only a copy of the process by which the sun makes the dry starch laid up in a seed in the damp earth into food for the first little leaves of a plant. ”

“ Many of you know, and all of you ought to know, that the principal ingredients of nearly all our foods are starch and albumen. Starch is the principal nutritive ingredient of vegetables and breadstuffs. ”

“ Starch, sugar and fats become foods or fuels only through their assimilation. Abundant physiological evidence attests that no substance can act as a food, or as a true source of energy, unless it has first entered into the composition of the body. ”

“ But sugar is now recognized as one of our most useful and valuable foods. In fuel value, it is the equal, indeed the superior, weight for weight, of starch; and as all starch has to be changed into it before it can be used by the body, it is evident that sugar is more easily digested and absorbed than starch, and furnishes practically a ready-made fuel for our muscles. ”

“ CARBOHYDRATE IN CEREALS.--The food substance found in the greatest proportion in cereals is carbohydrate in the form of starch. Cereals contain many times more starch than any of the other food substances, rice, which is fully three-fourths starch, containing the most, and oats, which are less than one-half starch, the least. Starch is distributed throughout the grain in tiny granules visible only under the microscope, each being surrounded by a covering of material that is almost indigestible. ”

“ It is this property of burning and giving out heat which makes starch 111 valuable as a foodstuff. When eaten in the form of bread, or other article of food, it is first transformed by the digestive juices of the mouth and intestine into sugar, which is then absorbed from the intestine into the blood, and thus distributed to the working parts of the body. ”

“ Cooking of Starchy Foods.—Nothing in the whole art and science of preparing food for the human being is of so much importance as the proper cooking of starches. As a result of the heat employed, certain chemical changes are induced in the starch-granules, as a consequence of which they are rendered digestible. ”