The kitchen (that is, your stomach) being out of order, the garret (the head) cannot be right, and every room in the house becomes affected.  Remedy the evil in the kitchen, and all will be right in parlor and chamber.  If you put improper food into the stomach, you play the mischief with it, and with the whole machine besides.—­Abernethy.

    Cattle know when to go home from grazing, but a foolish man never
    knows his stomachs measures.—­Scandinavian proverb.

    Enough is as good as a feast.

Simplicity of diet is the characteristic of the dwellers in the Orient.  According to Niebuhr, the sheik of the desert wants only a dish of pillau, or boiled rice, which he eats without fork or spoon.  Notwithstanding their frugal fare, these sons of the desert are among the most hearty and enduring of all members of the human family.  A traveler tells of seeing one of them run up to the top of the tallest pyramid and back in six minutes.

    One fourth of what we eat keeps us, and the other three fourths we
    keep at the peril of our lives.—­Abernethy.

COOKERY.

It is not enough that good and proper food material be provided; it must have such preparation as will increase and not diminish its alimentary value.  The unwholesomeness of food is quite as often due to bad cookery as to improper selection of material.  Proper cookery renders good food material more digestible.  When scientifically done, cooking changes each of the food elements, with the exception of fats, in much the same manner as do the digestive juices, and at the same time it breaks up the food by dissolving the soluble portions, so that its elements are more readily acted upon by the digestive fluids.  Cookery, however, often fails to attain the desired end; and the best material is rendered useless and unwholesome by a improper preparation.

It is rare to find a table, some portion of the food upon which is not rendered unwholesome either by improper preparatory treatment, or by the addition of some deleterious substance.  This is doubtless due to the fact that the preparation of food being such a commonplace matter, its important relations to health, mind, and body have been overlooked, and it has been regarded as a menial service which might be undertaken with little or no preparation, and without attention to matters other than those which relate to the pleasure of the eye and the palate.  With taste only as a criterion, it is so easy to disguise the results of careless and improper cookery of food by the use of flavors and condiments, as well as to palm off upon the digestive organs all sorts of inferior material, that poor cookery has come to be the rule rather than the exception.