The Chemistry of Cookery

in order to determine the comparative nutritive value of ‘bosch’ and cream-butter. They were made on a man and a boy. The result was that on an average a little above 1½ per cent. less of the ‘bosch’ was absorbed into the system than of the cream-butter. This is a very trifling difference. Before leaving the subject of animal food I may say a few words on the latest, and perhaps the greatest, triumph of science in reference to food supply—_i.e._ the successful solution of the great problem of preserving fresh meat for an almost indefinite length of time. It has long been known that meat which is frozen remains fresh. The Aberdeen whalers were in the habit of feasting their friends on returning home on joints that were taken out fresh from Aberdeen, and kept frozen during a long Arctic voyage. In Norway game is shot at the end of autumn, and kept in a frozen state for consumption during the whole winter and far into the spring. The early attempts to apply the freezing process for the carriage of fresh meat from South America and Australia by using ice, or freezing mixtures of ice and salt, failed, but now all the difficulties are overcome by a simple application of the great principle of the conservation of energy, whereby the burning of coal may be made to produce a degree of cold proportionate to the amount of heat it gives out in burning. Carcasses of sheep are thereby frozen to stony hardness immediately they are slaughtered in New Zealand and Australia, then packed in close refrigerated cars, carried to the ship, and there stowed in chambers refrigerated by the same means, and thus brought to England in the same state of stony hardness as that originally produced. I dined to-day on one of the legs of a sheep that I bought a week ago, and which was grazing at the Antipodes three months before. I prefer it to any English mutton ordinarily obtainable. The grounds of this preference will be understood when I explain that English farmers, who manufacture