, and tender.

This matter of lightness is the distinctive line between savage and
civilized bread. The savage mixes simple flour and water into balls of
paste, which he throws into boiling water, and which come out solid,
glutinous masses, of which his common saying is, "Man eat dis, he no
die,"--which a facetious traveller who was obliged to subsist on it
interpreted to mean, "Dis no kill you, nothing will." In short, it
requires the stomach of a wild animal or of a savage to digest this
primitive form of bread, and of course more or less attention in all
civilized modes of bread-making is given to producing lightness. By
lightness is meant simply that the particles are to be separated from
each other by little holes or air-cells, and all the different methods
of making light bread are neither more nor less than the formation in
bread of these air-cells.

So far as we know, there are four practicable methods of aerating bread,
namely--by fermentation,--by effervescence of an acid and an
alkali,--by aerated egg, or egg which has been filled with air by the
process of beating,--and lastly, by pressure of some gaseous substance
into the paste, by a process much resembling the impregnation of water
in a soda-fountain. All these have one and the same object,--to give us
the cooked particles of our flour separated by such permanent air-cells
as will enable the stomach more readily to digest them.

A very common mode of aerating bread, in America, is by the
effervescence of an acid and an alkali in the flour. The carbonic acid
gas thus formed produces minute air-cells in the bread, or, as the cook
says, makes it light. When this process is performed with exact
attention to chemical laws, so that the acid and alkali completely
neutralize each other, leaving no overplus of either, the result is
often very palatable. The difficulty is, that this is a happy
conjunction of circumstances which seldom occurs. The acid most commonly
employed is that of sour milk, and, as milk has many degrees of
sourness, the rule of a certain quantity of alkali to the pint must
necessarily produce very different results at different times. As an
actual fact, where this mode of making bread prevails, as we lament to
say it does to a great extent in this country, one finds five cases of
failure to one of success. It is a woful thing that the daughters of New
England have abandoned the old respectable mode of yeast-brewing and
bread-raising for thi