The Chemistry of Cookery

not an ordinary article of food, excepting in the form of ‘black puddings,’ its albumen need not be here considered, nor the debated question of whether its albumen is identical with the albumen of the flesh. Existing thus in a liquid state in our ordinary flesh meats, it is liable to be wasted in the course of cookery, especially if the cook has only received the customary technical education and remains in technological ignorance. To illustrate this, let us suppose that a leg of mutton, a slice of cod, or a piece of salmon is to be cooked in water, ‘boiled,’ as the cook says. Keeping in mind the results of the previously-described experiments on the egg-albumen, and also the fact that in its liquid state albumen is diffusible in water, the reader may now stand as scientific umpire in answering the question whether the fish or the flesh should be put in hot water at once, or in cold water, and be gradually heated. The ‘big-endians’ and the ‘little-endians’ of Liliput were not more definitely divided than are certain cookery authorities on this question in reference to fish. Referring at random to the cookery-books that come first to hand, I find them about equally divided on the question. Confining our attention at present to the albumen, what must happen if the fish or flesh is put in cold water, which is gradually heated? Obviously a loss of albumen by exudation and diffusion through the water, especially in the case of sliced fish or of meat exposing much surface of fibres cut across. It is also evident that such loss of albumen will be shown by its coagulation when the water is sufficiently heated. Practical readers will at once recognise in the ‘scum’ which rises to the surface of the boiling water, and in the milkiness that is more or less diffused throughout it, the evidence of such loss of albumen. This loss indicates the desirability of plunging the fish or flesh at once into water hot enough to immediately coagulate the superficial albumen, and thereby plug the pores through