CHINESE COOKERY

Evening Star, Issue 12652, 4 November 1905, Page 10

CHINESE COOKERY

The Chinese cook stuck the .end of an ivory chopstick into a email brown biscuit. "Taste, sir," he said. The biscuit was worm, crisp, rich; it was light, well salted, nutritious —a. bariuit, in a word, of a peculiar excellence. u Tins biscuit, air, is made of the flour of lentils," «aid the Chinaman. " You know lentils? little green pellets, slightly flattened like split peas? Lentils, sir, are considered the most nutritious of all the foods of the earth. This one lentil biscuit, sir, is equal in. nourishing power to a pound and a half of roast beef." He took from a tin a little cake. " Again taste," he said. The very little cake was very rich and good. " It is made, sir, of the flour of almonds," saic' the cook. "Fresh, sweet almonds, ground into a white powder between two millstones. Such a-flour is a finer thing than your flour of wheat, eh?" Then he lifted a great lid and revealed some thirty or forty compartments, one trHed with a pink floor, another with a yellow one, a third with a brown one, :v fourth with a white, a fifth with a. pale green, a sixth with a blue, and so on. " All these are Chinese flours," he said. "In China, sir, we make over fifty kinds of flours. We make flour out of rice, out of peaants, out of beads, out of potatoes, out. of sweet potatoes out of peas, out of cccoanuts, out of millet, out of pulse, out of oats,, out of bananas—the fact is, sir. we make flour in China out of but wheat. For in China, sir, we eat no bread, and therefore the- coarse, dry, tasteless floor of wheat is useless to us.