Uncooked Foods & How to Use Them - Soil and Health Library

CONDIMENTS.
THE use of condiments must have originated in the desire to
supply something that was missing in the taste of cooked
foods, and it is undoubtedly true that in the process of
cooking the nature of many food products becomes so
changed that they taste flat and insipid. For instance, a sweet
turnip is tasty and liked by many in its raw state, but when it
is cooked it seems to need salt or something to give it flavor
and life.
In boiling or cooking in heated water the mineral
elements are dissolved and lost in the water which is thrown
away, and so we try to restore to them that which we have
destroyed. But our 'efforts are vain. No condiment has ever
been devised which would restore a lost flavor or the
elements that have been destroyed.
In the use of elementary foods all of this is avoided, and
the demand or desire for condiments is entirely overcome.
Many people go through the world and eat three meals a
day until they have marked off their three score years and ten,
and never know the real taste of the commonest article of
food. The use of condiments, the pouring of some mixed-up
mess of something over foods just before we eat them, in the
vain hope of making them better, seems to be a sort of weird
superstition. It seems to have become a kind of unaccountable
insanity.
Of all the errors and stupid blunders that people have
made in their foolish effort to fix up foods, the condiment
habit has the least excuse for existence. Think of taking a
pure article of food and pouring over it a muddy colored
liquid that was made somewhere in Europe out of—well, here
we are compelled to call a halt. The imagination fails, and if it
did not, language would.
Most individuals in polite society are extremely careful
about their persons. Their dress must fit just so, it must be
made of certain choice material, the linen must be spotless,
the colors with which they bedeck themselves must
harmonize. They are extremely careful about their
companionship. Their house must face a certain way and the
furnishings must be just right. They are very cautious about
what they say. They are very jealous of their opinions. They
select with much care their language. They will not venture
out in threatening weather. They restrict themselves in every
conceivable useless thing. They put the chain upon nearly all
their liberties, and try hard sometimes to manacle the liberty
of others.
But these same wise people will sit in a fashionable cafe
and dine upon an undrawn, cold-storage turkey that has been
a year dead, and pour over its ancient flesh a tar-colored fluid
that has been upon the shelf of a grocer several years—until it
has reached that limit of delicious decay suggested by the
green, slimy mildew in Roquefort cheese.