If you take the meat or the dry bread and masticate sufficiently, allowing the nutriment to become thoroughly solved by the saliva and separated from the _dirt_,--the indigestible, tasteless remainder--the taste will become more and more delicious as the saliva gets possession of the solution, and will have a final delicacy which sauces cannot equal, as a reward for pursuing Nature's invitation and rendering her the appointed service.
An easy experiment that will prove the above statement to be correct is to take a variety of breads, white and brown, toasted and untoasted, crust and soft, and afterwards some of the same soaked in soup or milk, or, in the juice of whatever meat you happen to have at your meal.
Taken dry, toast will only reduce and disappear, without effort of swallowing, into the stomach, leaving no tasteless dregs behind, after about thirty actions of the jaw. This is probably the reason why toast is an invalid's best diet; because mastication is required to crush it, saliva is liberated by the acts of mastication, less saliva is required to prepare toast for the stomach than any other form of bread, and therefore, the proper conditions are attained _perforce_, and easy digestion is promoted. Crust of French bread will do the same by means of about forty jets let loose by mastication; the soft inside of French bread will require fifty, or more; crust and inside of biscuits and of "home-made" bread somewhat more than the French bread; while "Boston brown bread" requires as many as seventy to eighty jets turned on by action of mastication to dissolve it.
The above refers to moderate mouthfuls. The process is incomplete until all is dissolved, taste ceases, and natural swallowing occurs.
Will it not be observed that mastication, as far as crushing or mangling is concerned, has small part in the reduction of "Boston brown bread," and little seeming use except to turn on the jets of the solving saliva, for the material itself is soft, and sometimes "mushy"? Saliva has little use as a lubricant in this case, for the reason that the brown bread experimented with can be easily swallowed when first taken in the mouth. Abundant experiment has been made by those to whom "Boston brown bread" was formerly little less than a poison, to prove the assertion that, sufficiently mixed with saliva, it is perfectly digestible and that the delicious taste of the bread after forty or fifty bites (1/3 to 1/2 minute) gets sweeter and sweeter, and attains its greatest sweetness and most delicate taste at the very last, when it has dissolved into liquid form and most of it has escaped into the stomach.