A Question Of Health

This plain question comes home to every house-keeper. We all desire pure and wholesome food, and this cannot be had with the use of impure or poisonous baking powder. There can be no longer a question that all the eheaper, lower grades of baking powders contain either alum, lime or phosphatic acid. As loath as we may be to admit so much against what may have been some of our household gods, there can be no gainsaying the uninanimous testimony of the official chemists. Indeed analysts seem to find no baking powder entirely free from some one of these objectionable ingredients except the Royal and that they report as chemically pure. We find some of the baking powders advertised as pure, to contain, under the tests of Professor Chandler, Habirshaw and others, nearly twelve per cent. of lime, while others are made from alum with no cream of tartar. This we Dresume. accounts for theirlack of leavening power as sometimes complained of by the cook, and for the bitter taste found in the biscuits so frequently complained of by ourselves. But aside from the inferiority of the work done by these powders, the physicians assure us that lime and alum taken into the system in such quantities as this are injurious. Their physiological effects are indigestión, dyspepsia, or worse evils. The question naturally arises, wny do these cheap baking powder makers use these things? Alum is three cents a pound, lime still cheaper, while eream of tartar costs thirty-flve or forty. The reasons for the chemical purity of the Boyal Baking Powder were recently given in the New York Times in aninteresting description of a new method for renning argois, or crude cream of tartar. It seems that it is only under this process that cream of tartar can be freed from the lime natural to it and rendered chemically pure; that the patents and plant for this cost the Eoyal baking Powder Company about half a million dollars, and that they maintain exclusive control of the rights. Prof. McMurtie, late chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, at ington, IX C., made an 'examination ot this process, and reported upon the reBults attained in the refined cream of tartar. The following extract from the report would seem to answer the queation repeated at the head of this article, and which is so frequently propounded by the house-keeper : "Ihave examined the cream. of tartar used by the Boyal Baking Powder Company in the manufacture of their baking powder, and find it to be perfectly pure and free from lime in any form. The chemical tests to which I have submitted the Royal Baking Powder prove it perfectly healthful and free from every deleterious substance. The Royal Baking Powder is purest in quality and highest in strength of any baking powder of which I have knowledge." _____.