W. Mattieu Williams

“ Here, in this densely-populated country, where we import so much of our food, cheese demands our most profound attention. The difficulties and cost of importing all kinds of meat, fish, and poultry are great, while cheese may be cheaply and deliberately brought to us from any part of the world where cows or goats can be fed, and it can be stored more readily and kept longer than other kinds of animal food. All that is required to render it, next to bread, the staple food of Britons is scientific cookery. ”

“ If nothing more than this were done, and such simple dough were baked, the starch granules would be duly broken up and hydrated, the gluten also hydrated, but, at the same time, the particles of flour would be so cemented together as to form a mass so hard and tough when baked, that no ordinary human teeth could crush it. Among all our modern triumphs of applied science, none can be named that is more refined and elegant than the old device by which this difficulty is overcome in the everyday business of making bread. ”

“ Before giving my answer to this question I must explain the chemical constitution of fat. It is a compound of a very weak base with very weak acids. The basic substance is glycerine, the acids (not sour at all, but so named because they combine with bases as the actually sour acids do) are stearic acid, palmitic acid, oleic acid, &c., and bear the general name of ‘fatty acids.’ They are solid or liquid, according to temperature. When solid they are pearly crystalline substances, when fused they are oily liquids. ”

“ Gouffé says: ‘Fat is the best for frying; the light-coloured dripping of roast meat, and the fat taken off broth are to be preferred. These failing, beef suet, chopped fine and melted down on a slow fire, without browning, will do very well; when the bottom of the stewpan can be seen through the suet, it is sufficiently melted.’ He is no advocate for lard, ‘as it always leaves an unpleasant coating of fat on whatever is fried in it.’ Olive oil of the best quality is almost absolutely tasteless, and having as high a boiling point as animal fats it is the best of all frying media. ”

“ 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 [178] of animal food—the gelatin—is replaced in the vegetable by the cellulose, or woody fibre, which is not only more difficult of solution, but is not nitrogenous, is only a compound of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. ”

“ The Frenchman takes them out of his bouilli, or boiled meat, and transfers them to his bouillon, or soup, which, with him, is an essential element of a meal. If he ate his meat without soup, he would be like the dogs fed on gelatin by the bone-soup commissioners. To the Englishman, with his roast or grilled meat, soup is merely a luxury, not an absolutely necessary element of a complete dietary.
What we call boiled meat, as a boiled leg of mutton or round of beef, is an intermediate preparation. The heat is here communicated by water, and the juices partially retained. ”

“ As the meat is to be stewed in its own juices, it is evident that these juices must be retained as completely as possible, and that in order to succeed in this, we have to struggle with the evaporating energy of the ‘dry heat’ which effects the cookery, and may not only concentrate the juices by driving off some of their solvent water, but may volatilise or decompose the flavouring principles themselves. We must always remember that these organic compounds are very unstable, most of them being decomposed when raised to a temperature above the boiling-point of water. ”

“ My own experiments on myself, and the multitude of other experiments that I am daily witnessing among men of all occupations who have cast aside flesh food after many years of mixed diet, prove incontestably that flesh food is quite unnecessary; and also that men and women who emulate the aforesaid sheep to the mild extent of consuming daily about two ounces of animal tissue combined with six ounces of water, and dilute this with such weak vegetable food as the potato, are not measurably altered thereby so far as physical health is concerned. ”

“ During the forty years that have elapsed since my first sojourn in Italy, my sympathies are continually lacerated when I contemplate the melancholy spectacle of human beings eating thin soup without any grated cheese. ”

“ In other words, by the consumption of a certain quantity of tea, the health and strength of the body will be maintained in an equal degree upon a smaller quantity of ordinary food. Tea, therefore, saves food—stands to a certain extent in the place of food—while, at the same time, it soothes the body and enlivens the mind.’
He proceeds to say that ‘in the old and infirm it serves also another purpose. In the life of most persons a period arrives when the stomach no longer digests enough of the ordinary elements of food to make up for the natural daily waste of the bodily substance. ”

“ The flavouring of wine, the imparting of delicate bouquet, is a high art, and is costly. It is only upon high-priced wines that such costly operations can be practised. Simple ordinary grape-juice—as I have already stated—is so cheap when and where its quality is the highest, i.e. in good seasons and suitable climates, that adulteration with anything but water renders the adulterated product more costly than the genuine. When there is a good vintage it does not pay even to add sugar and water to the marc or residue, and press this a second time. ”

“ The value of food in reference to its phosphate of lime is not merely a matter of percentage, as this salt may exist in a state of solution, as in milk, or as a solid very difficult of assimilation, as in bones. That retained in cheese is probably in an intermediate condition—not [135] actually in solution, but so finely divided as to be readily dissolved by the acid of the gastric juice.
I may mention, in reference to this, that when a child or other young animal takes its natural food in the form of milk, the milk is converted into unpressed cheese, or curd, prior to its digestion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We all practically admit every day in eating our ordinary English dinner, that this excess of nitrogenous matter and fat is bad; we do so by mixing the meat with that particular vegetable which contains an excess of the carbo-hydrates [298] (starch) with the smallest available quantity of albuminoids and fat. The slice of meat, diluted with the lump of potato, brings the whole down to about the average composition of a fairly-arranged vegetarian repast. When I speak of a vegetarian repast, I do not mean mere cabbages and potatoes, but properly selected, well cooked, nutritious vegetable food. ”

“ My theory of the cookery of fat is simply that heat, when continued long enough, or raised sufficiently high, effects an incipient dissociation of the fatty acids from the glycerine, and thus assists the digestive organs by presenting the base and the acids in a condition better fitted (or advanced by one stage) for the new combinations demanded by assimilation. Some physiologists have lately asserted that the fat of our food is not assimilated [159] at all—not laid down again as fat, but is used directly as fuel for the maintenance of animal heat. ”

“ I suspect that the prevalence of the greased frying-pan is the reason of its rarity. Cooked by this barbaric device, apples are scarcely eatable, but when thin slices are immersed in a bath of melted fat at a temperature of about 300° Fahr., the water of their juice is suddenly boiled, and as this water is contained in a multitude of little bladderlike [101] cells, they burst, and the whole structure is puffed out to a most delicate lightness, far more suitable for following solid meats than soddened fruit enveloped in heavy indigestible pudding-paste. ”

“ The bicarbonate of potash is an original novelty that will possibly alarm some of my non-chemical readers. I advocate its use for two reasons: first, it effects a better solution of the casein by neutralising the free lactic acid that inevitably exists in milk supplied to towns, and any free acid that may remain in the cheese. At a farmhouse, where the milk is just drawn from the cow, it is unnecessary for this purpose, as such new milk is itself slightly alkaline.
My second reason is physiological, and of greater weight. Salts of potash are necessary constituents of human food. ”

“ 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 cannot (under ordinary atmospheric pressure) be raised to a higher temperature than 212° by any amount of violent boiling, the popular distinction between ‘simmering’ [15] and boiling, which is so obstinately maintained as a kitchen superstition, is demolished. ”

“ This explains the apparent paradox that hard crust, or dry toast, is more easily digested than the soft crumb of bread; the cookery of the crumb not having been carried beyond the mere hydration of the gluten and the starch, and such degree of dextrin formation as was due to the action of the diastase of the grain during the preliminary period of ‘rising.’ In the crust some of the work of insalivation is already done by the baker. The digestibility of toast is doubtless aided by its brittleness, causing it to be more broken up and mixed with the saliva. ”

“ When we speak of ‘boiled beef,’ ‘boiled mutton,’ ‘boiled eggs,’ ‘boiled potatoes,’ we talk nonsense; we are not merely using an elliptical expression, as when we say, ‘the kettle boils,’ which we all understand to mean the contents of the kettle, but we are expounding a false theory of what has happened to the beef, &c.—as false as though we should describe the material of the kettle that has [14] held boiling water as boiled copper or boiled iron. No boiling of the food takes place in any such cases as the above-named—it is merely heated by immersion in boiling water ”

“ The refreshment is certainly not due to nutrition, not to the rebuilding of any worn-out or exhausted organic tissue. The total quantity of material conveyed from the tea-leaves into the water is ridiculously too small for the performance of any such nutritive function; and besides this, the action is far too rapid, there is not sufficient time for the conversion of even that minute quantity into organised working tissue. The action cannot be that of a food, but is purely and simply that of a stimulating or irritant drug, acting directly and abnormally on the nervous system. ”

“ Man is a cosmopolitan animal, and the variations of his natural demand for food in different climates affords very direct support to Liebig’s theory. Enormous quantities of hydro-carbon, in the form of fat, are consumed by the Esquimaux and by Europeans when they winter in the Arctic regions. They cannot live there without it. In hot climates some fuel food is required, and the milder form of carbo-hydrates is chosen, and found to be most suitable; rice, which is mainly composed of starch, is an example. Sugar also. Offer an Esquimaux a tallow candle and a rice or tapioca pudding ”

“ Those of my readers who have done anything in practical chemistry are well acquainted with blue and red litmus, and the general fact that such vegetable colours change from blue to red when exposed to an acid, and return to blue when the acid is overcome by an alkali. The colouring matter of the grape is one of these. Mulder and Maumené have given it the name of œnocyan or wine-blue, as its colour, when neutral, is blue; the red colour of genuine wines is due to the presence of tartaric and acetic acid acting upon the wine-blue. ”

“ As some thousands of farms contribute to the supplying of London with milk, the risk of such contact with infected hands occurring occasionally in one or another of them is very great, and fully justifies me in urgently recommending the manager of every household to strictly enforce the boiling of every drop of milk that enters the house. At the temperature of 212° the vitality of all dangerous germs is destroyed, and the boiling point of milk is a little above 212°. The temperature of tea or coffee, as ordinarily used, may do it, but is not to be relied upon. ”

“ 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 vapour 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. ”

“ FRYING. The process of frying follows next in natural order to those of roasting and grilling. A little reflection will show that in frying the heat is not communicated to the food by radiation from a heated surface at some distance, but by direct contact with the heating medium, which is the hot fat commonly, but erroneously, described as ‘boiling fat.’
As I am writing for intelligent readers who desire to understand the philosophy of the common processes of cookery, so far as they are understandable, this fallacy concerning boiling fat should be pushed aside at once. ”

“ 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. ”