The Chemistry of Cookery

mutton as a primary product, kill their sheep as soon as they are full grown, when a year old or less. They cannot afford to feed a sheep for two years longer merely to improve its flavour without adding to its weight. Country gentlemen, who do not care for expense, occasionally regale their friends on a haunch or saddle of three-year-old mutton, as a rare and costly luxury. The Antipodean graziers are wool growers. Until lately mutton was merely used as manure, and even now it is but a secondary product. The wool crop improves year by year until the sheep is three or four years old; therefore it is not slaughtered until this age is attained; and thus the sheep sent to England are similar to those of the country squire, and such as the English farmer could not send to market under eighteenpence per pound. There is, however, one drawback; but I have tested it thoroughly (having supplied my own table during the last six months with no other mutton than that from New Zealand), and find it so trifling as to be imperceptible unless critically looked for. It is simply that, in thawing, a small quantity of the juice of the meat oozes out. This is more than compensated by the superior richness and fulness of flavour of the meat itself, which is much darker in colour than young mutton. Legs of frozen mutton should be hung with the thick cut part upwards. With this precaution the loss of juice is but nominal. If the frozen sheep is not cut up until completely thawed and required for cooking there is no loss. Another successful method of meat-preserving has been more lately introduced. It is based upon the remarkable antiseptic properties of boric acid (or boracic acid as it is sometimes named); this is the characteristic constituent of borax, and, like the fatty acids above described, has no sour flavour. The speciality of this process, invented by Mr. Jones, a Gloucestershire surgeon, is the method by which a small quantity of the antiseptic is made to permeate the