and
civilized bread. The savage mixes simple flour and water into balls of
paste, which he throws into boiling water, and which come out solid,
glutinous masses, of which his common saying is, "Man eat dis, he no
die,"--which a facetious traveler who was obliged to subsist on it
interpreted to mean, "Dis no kill you, nothing will." In short, it
requires the stomach of a wild animal or of a savage to digest this
primitive form of bread, and of course more or less attention in all
civilized modes of bread making is given to producing lightness. By
lightness is meant simply that the particles are to be separated from
each other by little holes or air-cells; and all the different methods
of making light bread are neither more nor less than the formation in
bread of these air-cells.

So far as we know, there are four practicable methods of aerating
bread, namely, by fermentation; by effervescence of an acid and an
alkali; by aerated egg, or egg which has been filled with air by the
process of beating; and, lastly, by pressure of some gaseous substance
into the paste, by a process much resembling the impregnation of water
in a soda fountain. All these have one and the same object,--to give
us the cooked particles of our flour separated by such permanent
air-cells as will enable the stomach more readily to digest them.

A very common mode of aerating bread in America is by the effervescence
of an acid and an alkali in the flour. The carbonic acid gas thus formed
produces minute air-cells in the bread, or, as the cook says, makes it
light. When this process is performed with exact attention to
chemical laws, so that the acid and alkali completely neutralize each
other, leaving no overplus of either, the result is often very
palatable. The difficulty is, that this is a happy conjunction of
circumstances which seldom occurs. The acid most commonly employed is
that of sour milk, and, as milk has many degrees of sourness, the rule
of a certain quantity of alkali to the pint must necessarily produce
very different results at different times. As an actual fact, where
this mode of making bread prevails, as we lament to say it does to a
great extent in this country, one finds five cases of failure to one
of success. It is a woful thing that the daughters of New England have
abandoned the old respectable mode of yeast brewing and bread raising
for this specious substitute, so easily made, and so seldom well
made. The green, clammy, a