The New Hydropathic Cookbook (1853)

AUTHOR: Trall, Russell Thacher

KEYWORDS: food, hydropathy, Temperance, water-cure

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

In the Preface Trall sets out his aims: “In the arrangement of the work, I have aimed to make it, as far as practicable, also a health-reform educational book” (v). He criticizes the “demoralizing” nature of traditional cookbooks, especially the figures showing the different edible parts of the animal carcass. The hydropathic cookbook counteracts this tendency by including elaborate engravings and illustrations of natural foods.

The Introduction scathingly attacks both Sarah Josepha Hale’s and Catharine Beecher’s cookbooks. Interestingly though, he states, with regards to the former: “If the trade of butchering animals for food has a tendency to imbrute the minds of those engaged in it, certainly the dressing up of a pig's head for the table, so as to resemble as nearly as possible the shape, form, features, and expression of a live pig, is equally vitiating to all true delicacy and refinement” (viii). He suggests that a vegan diet requires more fundamental reform of dietary habits:

Under the auspices of the vegetarian reform movement many improvements have taken place in the manner of preparing a great variety of dishes for the table. But vegetarian diet is not necessarily physiological. The best diet contemplates the physiological preparation and use of vegetable food. But most of the vegetarian cook-books thus far are improvements on the ordinary plan of a mixed diet, mainly in excluding " flesh, fish, and fowl," and substituting butter for lard. This is, however, an improvement of no small importance; but it recognizes no physiological principle save the preference of vegetable food for flesh meat. The vegetarians, however, are beginning to study the philosophy of diet more thoroughly, and will, no doubt, very soon modify their cook-books accordingly (xi-xii).

The introduction ends with a song or poem about a cockroach who fell into a baker’s dough and ended up in a lady’s mouth. The last stanzas deliver the moral of the poem:

"Lady! why gave you that terrible shriek?
Why rolled your eye, and paled your cheek?
Why dread to bite a poor worm like me,
But eat sheep and swine most greedily?

"Oh, delicate lady, oh, sensitive fair,
See the table strewn with carcasses there—  
Mangled and torn, all flesh from bone—
Oh, leave such horrible feasts alone!

"The waving corn and fruitful tree,
Bear gracious nourishment for thee;
Live, fair one, as a lady should,
And being beautiful — be good!

"Though lions, tigers, vultures prey.
Be thou more merciful than they;
Thy health will last, thy life be long!"
And thus the cockroach ceased his song (xiii-xiv).

In the first chapter, "Philosophy of Diet," Trall states the fundamental principle underlying his whole theory: that the only way to directly access and assimilate nutrients is by the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and cereals. Animals have themselves processed these nutrients so the nutritional properties of meat are secondary and much inferior. “I regard, therefore, vegetarianism as the true theory of diet; and although I am a vegetarian in practice as well as in theory, I do nevertheless admit or permit, in the cases of many invalids under hydropathic treatment, the moderate use of animal food. This may be said to be in one sense a compromise with error. But the justification is found in the fact that all are not yet sufficiently educated to carry out an exclusively vegetable regimen” (19).

Trall then offers a catalog of the chemical elements that compose food, and what he calls the “proximate elements of food” (such as water, sugar, starch, fat). This section is a simplified version of the corresponding section in The Hydropathic Encyclopedia (339ff). He lists the major cereals, vegetables, and fruits, and the section “Animal Foods” is prefaced by the comment: “In the most civilized countries the domesticated animals afford the principal flesh-meat; though the practice of eating the oxen which have plowed for us, the cows which have given us milk, the lambs which we have petted, and the sheep which has warmed us with its fleece, seems more becoming the savage than the civilized state of society.” However, Trall goes on to reproduce the arguments made in the Encyclopedia, that animal food does contain nutritious elements (though in lower quantity and of lesser quality than vegetables) and these depend on the characteristics of the animal (age, physical condition, how they were slaughtered), the body parts that are selected and the way in which they are prepared.

His chapter concerning the theory of nutrition focuses on the digestive system. His closing “practical reflections” underline the common misunderstanding of nutrition as the accumulation of energetic reserves: “Nutrition, let me say again, is the replenishment of the tissues, not the accumulation of fat or adipose matter in the cellular membrane.” (146) Therefore, Trall argues, fat people or animals are in no way healthy specimens, rather the contrary.