Cooking of Vegetables

While most vegetables are not improved by cooking, we do not mean that they should never be cooked.  Many diet reformers go to extremes when they claim that all the organic salts in fruits and vegetables are rendered inorganic by cooking.  This is an exaggera-tion.  Cooking is merely a mechanical process of subdivision, not a chemical process of transformation.  Mechanical processes of division do not dissolve or destroy organic molecules to any great extent.

Nevertheless, it remains true that the green leafy vegetables are not improved by cooking.  It is different with the starchy tubers and roots like potatoes, turnips, etc., and with other starchy foods such as rice and grains.  Here the cooking serves to break up and separate the hard starch granules and to make them more pervious to penetration by the digestive juices.

How to Cook Vegetables

After the vegetables are thoroughly washed and cut into pieces as desired, place them in the cooking vessel, adding only enough water to keep them from burning, cover the vessel closely with a lid and let them steam slowly in their own juices.

The leafy vegetables (cabbage, spinach, kale, etc.), usually contain enough water for their own steaming.

Cook all vegetables only as long as is required to make them soft enough for easy mastication.  Do not throw away a drop of the water in which such vegetables as carrots, beets, asparagus, oyster plant, egg plant, etc., have been cooked.  Use what is left for the making of soups and sauces.

The organic mineral salts contained in the vegetables readily boil out into the water.  If the vegetables, as is the usual custom, are boiled in a large quantity of water, then drained or, what is still worse, pressed out, they have lost their nutritive and medicinal value.  The mineral salts have vanished in the sink, the remains are insipid and indigestible and have to be soaked in soup stock and seasoned with strong condiments and spices to make them at all palatable.

Fruits and Berries

Next to the leafy vegetables, fruits and berries are the most valuable foods of the organic minerals group.  Lemons, grapefruit, oranges, apples are especially beneficial as blood purifiers.  Plums, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries, grapes, etc., contain large amounts of fruit sugars in easily assimilable form and are also very valuable on account of their mineral salts.

The different kinds of berries are even richer in mineral salts than the acid and subacid fruits.  In the country homes of Germany they are always at hand either dried or preserved to serve during the winter not only as delicious foods but also as valuable home remedies.

Fruits and berries are best eaten raw, although they may be stewed or baked.  Very few people know that rhubarb and cranberries are very palatable when cut up fine and well mixed with honey, being allowed to stand for about an hour before serving.  Prepared in this way, they require much less sweetening and therefore do not tax the organism nearly as much as the ordinary rhubarb or cranberry sauce, which usually contains an excessive amount of sugar.