W. Mattieu Williams

“ The question that now naturally arises is, whether modern science can show us that anything more can be done in the preparation of vegetable tissue than the mere softening in boiling water. In my first paper I said that the practice of using the digestive apparatus of sheep, oxen, etc., for the preparation of our food is merely a transitory barbarism, to be ultimately superseded by scientific cookery, by preparing vegetables in such a manner that they shall be as easily digested as the prepared grass we call beef and mutton. ”

“ I may now venture to state my own view of a somewhat obscure subject, viz., the difference between the roasting or grilling and the stewing of meat. It appears to me that, with the exception of the superficial "browning," it consists simply in the difference between the cooking media; that a grilled steak or chop or a roasted joint is meat that has been stewed in its own juices instead of stewed in water; that in both cases the changes taking place in the solid parts of the meat are the same in kind, provided always that the roasting or grilling is properly performed. ”

“ I do not mean by this that the vegetable we should use shall be grass itself, or that grass should be one of the vegetables. We must, for our requirement, select vegetables that contain as much nutriment in a given bulk as our present mixed diet, but in doing so we encounter the serious difficulty of finding that the readily soluble cell-wall or main bulk of animal food—the gelatine—is replaced in the vegetable by the cellulose, or woody fiber, which is not only more difficult of solution, but is not, nitrogenous—is only a compound of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. ”

“ The difference between starch and cellulose that most closely affects my present subject, that of digestibility, is considerable. The ordinary food-forms of starch, such as arrowroot, tapioca, rice, etc., are among the most easily digestible kinds of food, while cellulose is peculiarly difficult of digestion; in its crude and compact forms, it is quite indigestible by human digestive apparatus.
Neither of them is capable of sustaining life alone; they contain none of the nitrogenous material required for building-up muscle, nerve, and other animal tissue. ”

“ When it is once fairly understood that the meat is not to be boiled, but is merely to be warmed by immersion in water raised to a maximum temperature of 212°, and when it is further understood that water can not (under ordinary atmospheric pressure) be raised to a higher temperature than 212° by any amount of violent boiling, the popular distinction between "simmering" and boiling, which is so obstinately maintained as a kitchen superstition, is demolished. ”

“ It clearly points out two well-marked natural divisions of such education: education or training in the movements to be made, and education in a knowledge of the consequences of such movements—i. e., in a knowledge of the forces of Nature which actually do the work when man has suitably arranged the materials.
The education ordinarily given to apprentices in the workshop, or the field, or the studio—or, as relating to my present subject, the kitchen—is the first of these; the second, and equally necessary, being simply and purely the teaching of physical science as applied to the arts. ”

“ I do not, however, recommend such an apparatus, even to the most wealthy and luxurious epicure, because I am convinced, not merely from theoretical considerations, but also from practical experiments, that all kinds of meat may be not merely as well roasted in a close oven as before an open fire, but that the close chamber, properly managed, produces better results in every respect than can possibly be obtained by roasting in the open air. ”

“ WHAT a horrible place must this world appear when regarded according to our ideas from an insect's point of view! The air infested with huge flying hungry dragons, whose gaping and snapping mouths are ever intent upon swallowing the innocent creatures for whom, according to the insect, if he were like us, a properly constructed world ought to be exclusively adapted. ”

“ The starch which we take so abundantly as food appears to have no more food-value to us than to the vegetable germ until the conversion into dextrin or sugar is effected. From what I have already stated concerning the action of heat upon starch, it is evident that this conversion is more or less effected in some processes of cookery. In the baking of bread an incipient conversion probably occurs throughout the loaf, while in the crust it is carried so far as to completely change most of the starch into dextrin, and some into sugar. ”

“ We, by our senses of touch and vision, know the shapes and colors of objects, and by our very rudimentary olfactory organs form crude ideas of their chemistry or composition, through the medium of their material emanations; but the huge exaggeration of this power in the insect should supply him with instinctive perceptive powers of chemical analysis, a direct acquaintance with the inner molecular constitution of matter far clearer and deeper than we are able to obtain by all the refinements of laboratory analyses or the hypothetical formulating of molecular mathematicians. ”

“ The solid earth continually shaken by the approaching tread of hideous giants—moving mountains—that crush out precious lives at every footstep, an occasional draught of the blood of these monsters, stolen at life-risk, affording but poor compensation for such fatal persecution. ”

“ On a properly-constructed hot-plate or sand-bath, a dozen saucepans may be kept at the true cooking temperature, with an expenditure of fuel commonly employed in England to "boil" one saucepan. In the great majority of so-called boiling operations, even simmering is unnecessary. Not only is a "boiled leg of mutton" not itself boiled, but even the water in which it is cooked should not be kept boiling, as we shall presently see.
In order to illustrate some of the changes which take place in the cooking of animal food, I will first take the simple case of cooking an egg by means of hot water. ”

“ Thus, as a matter of chemical fact, a "boiled leg of mutton" is one that has been cooked, but not boiled; while a roasted leg of mutton is one that has been partially boiled. Much of the constituent water of flesh is boiled out, fairly driven away as vapor during roasting or baking, and the fat on its surface is also boiled, and, more or less, dissociated into its chemical elements, carbon and water, as shown by the browning, due to the separated carbon. ”

“ This simple experiment teaches a great deal of what is but little known concerning the philosophy of cookery. It shows in the first place that, so far as the coagulation of the albumen is concerned, the cooking temperature is not 212°, or that of boiling water, but 160°, i. e., 52° below it. Everybody knows the difference between a tender, juicy steak, rounded or plumped-out in the middle, and a tough, leathery abomination, that has been so cooked as to shrivel and curl up. ”

“ One of the many delusions engendered by our human self-conceit and habit of considering the world as only such as we know it from our human point of view is that of supposing human intelligence to be the only kind of intelligence in existence. ”

“ The flame of an ordinary coal-fire is due to the distillation and combustion of tarry vapors. If such a flame strikes a comparatively cool surface like that of the meat, it will condense and deposit thereon a film of crude coal-tar and coal-naphtha, most nauseous and rather mischievous; but, if the flame be that which is caused by the combustion of its own fat, the deposit on a mutton-chop will be a little mutton-oil, on a beefsteak a little beef-oil, more or less blackened by mutton-carbon or beef-carbon. ”

“ We may now understand what happens when something humid—say a sole—is put into a frying-pan which contains fat heated above 212°. Water, when suddenly heated above its boiling-point, is a powerful explosive, and may be very dangerous, simply because it expands to 1,728 times its original bulk when converted into steam. Steam engine boilers and the boilers of kitchen-stoves sometimes explode simply by becoming red-hot while dry, and then receiving a little water which suddenly expands to steam. ”

“ When we eat raw vegetables, as in salads, we obtain all their potash.
Fruits generally contain important quantities of potash salts, and it is upon these especially that the possible victims of lithic acid should rely. Lemons and grapes contain them most abundantly. Those who can not afford to buy these as articles of daily food may use cream of tartar, which, when genuine, is the natural salt of the grape, thrown down in the manner I shall describe when on the subject of the cookery of wines. ”

“ London was agitated by the bread-reform movement, and bakers were alarmed. A large establishment was opened in Oxford Street, and much amusement created by an opposition placard display in some of the neighboring bakers' shops, "Bread sold here with the gin in it." This, of course, was fallacious as the alcohol produced by the panary fermentation is driven off by the heat of the oven. Other methods similar in principle have been adopted, such as adding ammonia carbonate with the soda carbonate. The ammonia salt is volatile itself, besides evolving carbonic acid by its union with the acid. ”

“ A Jersey pear, for example, when full grown in autumn is little better than a lump of acidulated wood. Left hanging on the leafless tree, or gathered and carefully stored for two or three months, it becomes by Nature's own unaided cookery the most delicious and delicate pulp that can be tasted or imagined. ”

“ The general verdict appears to be that the unfermented bread is not so "sweet," that it lacks some element of flavor, is "chippy" or tasteless as compared with good old-fashioned wheaten bread, free from alum or other adulteration. My theory of this difference is that it is due to the absence of those changes which take place while the sponge or dough is rising, when, if I am right, the diastase of the grain is operating, as in germination, to produce a certain quantity of dextrin and sugar, and possibly acting also on the gluten. ”

“ But we must remember that the flour which has been prepared for baking is mixed with water, and the evaporation of this water will materially lower the temperature of the dough itself. Besides this, we must bear in mind that another object is to be attained. A hard shell or crust has to be formed, which will so incase and support the lump of dough as to prevent it from subsiding when the further evolution of carbonic-acid gas shall cease, which will be the case some time before the cooking of the mass is completed. ”

“ We all know that when an egg has been immersed during a few minutes in boiling water, the colorless, slimy liquid is converted into the white solid to which it owes its name. This coagulation of albumen is one of the most decided and best understood changes effected by cookery, and therefore demands especial study.
Place some fresh, raw white of egg in a test-tube, or other suitable glass vessel, and in the midst of it immerse the bulb of a thermometer. (Cylindrical thermometers, with the degrees marked on the glass stem, are made for such laboratory purposes.) ”

“ It is evident that many domestic cooks (not hotel or restaurant cooks) have a vague idea that the metal plate forming the bottom of the frying-pan should directly convey the heat of the fire to the fried substance, and that the bit of butter or lard or dripping put into the pan is used to prevent the fish from sticking to it, or to add to the richness of the fish by smearing its surface.
The theory which I have suggested (see No. XIII, page 818) is that the melted fat cooks by convection of heat, just as water does in the so-called boiling of meat. ”

“ Always keeping in view that the primary problem in roasting is to raise the temperature throughout to the cooking heat with the smallest possible degree of desiccation of the natural juices of the meat, and applying to this problem the laws of vapor diffusion expounded in my last, it is easy enough to understand the theoretical advantages of roasting in a closed oven, the space within which speedily becomes saturated with those particular vapors that resist further vaporization of these juices. ”

“ All night long and all the next morning men were continuously at work pouring melted fat over the surface of the slowly-rotating carcass of the Warwick ox, skillfully directing a ladleful to any part that indicated undue dryness.
By this device the meat is more or less completely enveloped in a varnish of hot melted fat, which assisted in the communication of heat while it checked the evaporation of the juices. In such roasting the heat is partially communicated by convection through the medium of a fat-bath, as in stewing it is all supplied by a water-bath. ”

“ It is a matter of preparation—not exactly what is called cooking, but equivalent to what cooking should be. It is the preparation which has converted the grass-food of the ox into another kind of food which we can assimilate very easily. ”

“ In such a world of intermediate activities the insect probably lives, with a sense of vision revealing to him more than our microscopes show to us, and with his minute eye-like ear-bag sensifying material movements that lie between our world of sounds and our other far distant worlds of heat and light.
There is yet another indication of some sort of intermediate sensation possessed by insects. Many of them are not only endowed with the thousands of lenses of their compound eyes, but have in addition several curious organs that have been designated "ocelli" and "stemmata." ”

“ The flour is moistened with this liquid, which only demands a temperature of about 70° Fahr. to act with considerable energy on every granule of flour that it touches. Instead, then, of the passive, lumpy, tenacious dough produced by moistening the flour with mere water, a lively "sponge," as the baker calls it, is produced, which "rises" or grows in bulk by the evolution and interposition of millions of invisibly small bubbles of gas. ”

“ For roasting large masses of meat, a different proceeding is necessary. Here we have to contend, not with excessive surface in proportion to bulk—as in the grilling of chops and steaks and the roasting of small joints—but with the contrary—viz., excessive bulk in proportion to surface. If a baron of beef were to be treated according to my prescription for a steak, or for a single wing-rib, or other joint of three to five pounds' weight, it would be charred on its surface long before the heat could reach its center. ”

“ It is so little changed by cookery that I need say little about it beyond stating the fact that an acid may be separated from it which has been named pectic acid, the properties and artificial compounds of which appear to me to suggest the theory that the natural jelly of fruits largely consists of pectites of potash or soda or lime. We all know the appearance and flavor of currant-jelly, apple-jelly, etc., which are composed of natural vegetable jelly plus sugar. ”