The Chemistry of Cookery

strong resinous flavour of their flesh. If my theory of the constitution of such woody tissues is correct, these animals only require the power of secreting some solvent for the resin, on the removal of which their food would consist of the same material as the tissue of the succulent stems and leaves eaten by ordinary herbivorous animals. The resinous flavour of the flesh of the ptarmigan indicates such solution of resin. I may here, by the way, correct the commonly accepted version of a popular story. We are told that when Marie Antoinette was informed of a famine in the neighbourhood of the Tyrol, and of the starving of some of the peasants there, she replied, ‘I would rather eat pie-crust’ (some of the story-tellers say ‘pastry’) ‘than starve.’ Thereupon the courtiers giggled at the ignorance of the pampered princess, who could suppose that starving peasants had such an alternative food as pastry. The ignorance, however, was all on the side of the courtiers and those who repeat the story in its ordinary form. The princess was the only person in the Court who really understood the habits of the peasants of the particular district in question. They cook their meat, chiefly young veal, by rolling it in a kind of dough made of sawdust mixed with as little coarse flour as will hold it together; then place this in an oven or in wood embers until the dough is hardened to a tough crust, and the meat is raised throughout to the cooking point. Marie Antoinette said that she would rather eat _croûtons_ than starve, knowing that these _croûtons_, or meat pie-crusts, are given to the pigs; that the pigs digest them, and are nourished by them in spite of the wood sawdust. When on the subject of cooking animal food, I had to define the cooking temperature as determined by that at which albumen coagulates, and to point out the mischief arising from exceeding that temperature and thus rendering the albumen horny and indigestible. No such precautions are demanded in the boiling of vegetables. The work to