The Chemistry of Cookery

here, that of a Welsh rabbit, or rarebit, it is too often rendered still more indigestible, though this need not be the case. 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 I shall be able, in what is to follow, to impart to my fellow-countrymen, and more especially countrywomen, my own convictions concerning the cookability, and consequent improved digestibility, of cheese, I shall have ‘done the State some service!’ Taking muscular fibre without bone—_i.e._ selected best part of the meat—beef contains on an average 72½ per cent. of water; mutton, 73½; veal, 74½; pork, 69¾; fowl, 73¾; while Cheshire cheese contains only 30⅓, and other cheeses about the same. Thus, at starting, we have in every pound of cheese rather more than twice as much solid food as in a pound of the best meat, or comparing with the average of the whole carcass, including bone, tendons, &c., the cheese has an advantage of three to one. The following results of Mulder’s analysis of casein, when compared with those by the same chemist of albumen, gelatin and fibrin, show that there is but little difference in the ultimate chemical composition of these, so far as the constituents there named are concerned: Casein Carbon 53·83 Hydrogen 7·15 Nitrogen 15·65 Oxygen } Sulphur } 23·37 Albumen Gelatin Fibrin Carbon 53·5 50·40 52·7 Hydrogen 7·0 6·64 6·9 Nitrogen 15·5 18·34 15·4 Oxygen 22·0 24·62 23·5 Sulphur 1·6 ” 1·2 Phosphorus 0·4 ” 0·3 We may therefore conclude that, regarding these from the point of view of nitrogenous or flesh-forming, and carbonaceous or heat-giving constituents, these chief materials of flesh