articularly valuable as
strength producers, and frequently form a considerable portion of the
diet of persons in training as athletes, at the present day. Being foods
possessed of such high nutritive value, the legumes are deserving of a
more extended use than is generally accorded them in this country. In
their mature state they are, with the exception of beans, seldom found
upon the ordinary bill of fare, and beans are too generally served in a
form quite difficult of digestion, being combined with large quantities
of fat, or otherwise improperly prepared. Peas and lentils are in some
respects superior to beans, being less liable to disagree with persons
of weak digestion, and for this reason better suited to form a staple
article of diet.

All the legumes are covered with a tough skin, which is in itself
indigestible, and which if not broken by the cooking process or by
thorough mastication afterward, renders the entire seed liable to pass
through the digestive tract undigested, since the digestive fluids
cannot act upon the hard skin. Even when the skins are broken, if served
with the pulp, much of the nutritive material of the legume is wasted,
because it is impossible for the digestive processes to free it from the
cellulose material of which the skins are composed. If, then, it be
desirable to obtain from the legumes the largest amount of nutriment and
in the most digestible form, they must be prepared in some manner so as
to reject the skins. Persons unable to use the legumes when cooked in
the ordinary way, usually experience no difficulty whatever in digesting
them when divested of their skins. The hindrance which even the
partially broken skins are to the complete digestion of the legume, is
well illustrated by the personal experiments of Prof. Struempell, a
German scientist, who found that of beans boiled with the skins on he
was able to digest only 60 per cent of the nitrogenous material they
contained. When, however, he reduced the same quantity of beans to a
fine powder previous to cooking, he was enabled to digest 91.8 per cent
of it.

The fact that the mature legumes are more digestible when prepared in
some manner in which the skins are rejected, was doubtless understood in
early times, for we find in a recipe of the fourteenth century,
directions given "to dry legumes in an oven and remove the skins away
before using them."

The green legumes which are more like a succulent vegetable are easily
di