The Chemistry of Cookery

in the preparation of ordinary Australian tinned meat. A number of tins are filled with the meat, and soldered down close, all but a small pin-hole. They are then placed in a bath charged with a saline substance, such as chloride of zinc, which has a higher boiling point than water. This is heated up to its boiling point, and consequently the water which is in the tins with the meat boils vigorously, and a jet of steam mixed with air blows from the pin-hole. When all the air is expelled, and the jet is of pure steam only (a difference detected at once by the trained expert), the tin is removed, and a little melted solder skilfully dropped on the hole to seal the tin hermetically. An examination of one of these tins will show this final soldering with, in some, a flap below to prevent any solder from falling in amongst the meat. The object of this is to exclude all air, for if only a very small quantity remains, oxidation and putrefaction speedily ensues, as shown by a bulging of the tins instead of the partial collapse that should occur when the steam condenses, the display of which collapse is an indication of the good quality of the contents. By ‘good quality’ I mean good of its kind; but, as everybody knows who has tried beef and mutton thus prepared, it is not satisfactory. The preservation from putrefactive decomposition is perfectly successful, and all the original constituents of the meat are there. It is _apparently_ tender, but _practically_ tough—_i.e._ it falls to pieces at a mere touch of the knife, but these fragments offer to the teeth a peculiar resistance to proper mastication. I may describe their condition as one of pertinacious fibrosity. The fibres separate, but they are stubborn fibres still. This is a very serious matter, for, were it otherwise, the great problem of supplying our dense population with an abundance of cheap animal food would have been solved about twenty years ago. As it is, the plain tinned-meat enterprise has not developed to any