Flour ball, Ridge's Food, Blair's Wheat Food, Schumacher's Food, Imperial Granum, and Robinson's Patent Barley are examples of this class.

Wheat and oats are sometimes prepared by roasting (not steaming), a process which removes all moisture besides producing some chemical changes in the fats and starches. Cereals treated in this manner will keep from moulding in any climate, and are both digestible and nutritious.

Imperial Granum is a type of a large class of prepared foods, the basis of which is starch, modified, it is claimed, so as to render it easily digestible. Such foods are often fed to newborn infants to the exclusion of milk, but no greater mistake can be made, for their digestive apparatus is wholly unfit to deal with starch in any form. The human infant is designed to be nursed at the breast for the first year of life, and Nature has furnished ample food for it which is wholly devoid of starch. The saliva and pancreatic secretion upon which the digestion of starches depends are not fitted for this work at all during the first eight or nine months of life, and then only partially, hence starchy foods, "farinaceous baby foods," should never be given at all before that age as foods, and should only be used very sparingly, if at all, as mechanical diluents of milk. Moreover, in such simple starchy foods as arrowroot the proportion of tissue-building to heat-producing foods is one to twenty, whereas in human milk it is one to five (Starr). Even when the starch of infant foods is rendered soluble or dextrinised or converted into sugar, the absorption of too much of such material diverts energy which can be better employed in controlling metabolism in other ways or removing waste.

Granum is composed of over three fourths starch, made into a fine flour. One teaspoonful of it should go to each three ounces of water, in which it is boiled for ten minutes. An equal quantity of milk is then to be added, and the mixture must be again boiled for five minutes.

The mixture may sometimes be fed to infants after the eighth or ninth month, but only once or twice in twenty-four hours. It is a useful temporary food for adults with irritable stomachs.

Flour ball is prepared by boiling wheat flour tied in a bag, with the supposed purpose of converting it into dextrin, and it is a popular belief that this conversion is quite complete; but it requires a temperature of 2500 F. to dextrinise starch, and this degree cannot be attained by the process. Leeds has shown by recent analyses that even after seventy-five hours of continuous boiling the percentage of soluble carbohydrates is increased by only 0.05 of 1 per cent, whereas some of the prepared foods contain from two to six times as much soluble carbohydrate as wheat flour. Flour ball tastes flat and insipid, owing to the long boiling dissolving out fat, soluble albuminoids, and salts (Leeds).

Starr gives the following rule for the making of flour ball.

Tie one pound of unbolted wheat flour firmly in a pudding bag and boil for ten hours. At the end of this time it will be found, on opening the bag, that the outer layer of the ball is doughy, while the interior is hard and dry, it having been baked by the long-continued heat. This hard mass may be used for infant feeding in the latter part of the first year, but it should not be given more than twice a day. The flour ball is grated fine, and it may then be prepared, according to Starr's rule, as follows: "Rub one teaspoonful of the powder with a tablespoonful of milk into a smooth paste, then add a second tablespoonful of milk, constantly rubbing until a cream-like mixture is obtained. Pour this into eight ounces of hot milk, stirring well, and it is then ready for use. The flour ball thus prepared is quite digestible, and it prevents the formation of large curds of milk.

As a diluent of milk it is much cheaper for the poor than the prepared amylaceous foods which are on sale.