r baked to
the proper color and consistency, and then mixed in. No great sympathy
need be expended on those who suffer from this particular humbug,
however; for when it is so easy to buy the real berry, and roast or at
least grind it one's self, it is our own fault if our laziness leaves us
to eat all those sorts of stuff.

Cocoa is "extended" with sugar, starch, flour, iron-rust, Venetian-red,
grease, and various earths. But it is believed by pretty good authority
that the American-made preparations of cocoa are nearly or quite pure.
Even if they are not the whole bean can be used instead.

Butter and lard have one tenth, and sometimes even one-quarter, of water
mixed up in them. It is easy to find this out by melting a sample before
the fire and putting it away to cool, when the humbug appears by the
grease going up, and the water, perhaps turbid with whey, settling
below.

Honey is humbugged with sugar or molasses. Sugar is not often sanded as
the old stories have it. Fine white sugar is sometimes floured pretty
well; and brown sugar is sometimes made of a portion of good sugar with
a cheaper kind mixed in. Inferior brown sugars are often full of a
certain crab-like animalcule or minute bug, often visible without a
microscope, in water where the sugar is dissolved. It is believed that
this pleasing insect sometimes gets into the skin, and produces a kind
of itch. I do not believe there is much danger of adulteration in good
loaf or crushed white sugar, or good granulated or brown sugar.

Pepper is mixed with fine dust, dirt, linseed-meal, ground rice, or
mustard and wheat-flour; ginger, with wheat flour colored by turmeric
and reinforced by cayenne. Cinnamon is sometimes not present at all in
what is so called--the stuff being the inferior and cheaper cassia bark;
sometimes it is only part cassia; sometimes the humbug part of it is
flour and ochre. Cayenne-pepper is mixed with corn-meal and salt,
Venetian-red, mustard, brickdust, fine sawdust, and red-lead. Mustard
with flour and turmeric. Confectionery is often poisoned with
Prussian-blue, Antwerp-blue, gamboge, ultramarine, chrome yellow,
red-lead, white-lead, vermilion, Brunswick-green, and Scheele's green,
or arsenite of copper! Never buy any confectionery that is colored or
painted. Vinegar is made of whisky, or of oil of vitriol. Pickles have
verdigris in them to make them a pretty green. "Pretty green" he must be
who will eat bought pickles! Preserved frui