The Chemistry of Cookery

of stew composed of rice and the giblets of fowls, usually charged about twopence to threepence per portion at Italian restaurants. This, I suppose, is the reason why I find no recipe for it in the ‘high-class’ cookery-books. It is always served with grated Parmesan. The same with the many varieties of paste, of which macaroni and vermicelli are the best known in this country. In all these the cheese is sprinkled over, and then stirred into the soup, &c., while it is hot. The cheese being finely divided is fused at once, and thus delicately cooked. This is quite different from the ‘macaroni cheese’ commonly prepared in England by depositing macaroni in a pie-dish, then covering it with a stratum of grated cheese, and placing this in an oven or before a fire until the cheese is desiccated, browned, and converted into a horny, caseous form of carbon that would induce chronic dyspepsia in the stomach of a wild boar if he fed upon it for a week. In all preparations of Italian pastes, risottos, purées, &c., the cheese is intimately mixed throughout, and softened and diffused thereby in the manner above described. The Italians themselves imagine that only their own Parmesan cheese is fit for this purpose, and have infected many Englishmen with the same idea. Thus it happens that fancy prices are paid in this country for that particular cheese, which nearly resembles the cheese known in our midland counties as ‘skim dick’—sold there at about fourpence per pound, or given by the farmers to their labourers. It is cheese ‘that has sent its butter to market,’ being made from the skim-milk which remains in the dairy after the pigs have been fully supplied. I have used this kind of cheese as a substitute for Parmesan, and I find it answers the purpose, though it has not the fine flavour of the best qualities of Parmesan. The only fault of our ordinary whole-milk English and American cheeses is that they are too rich, and cannot be so finely grated on account of their more unctuous structure, due