The Chemistry of Cookery

it into cold water, or pouring cold water over it, then heating up to the boiling-point. Cook the other slice by putting it into water nearly boiling (about 200° Fahr.), and keeping it at about 180° to 200°, but never boiling at all. Then dish up, examine, and taste. The second will be found to have retained more of its proper salmon colour and flavour; the first will be paler and more like cod, or other white fish, owing to the exosmosis or oozing out of its characteristic juices. When two similar pieces of split salmon are thus cooked, the difference between them is still more remarkable. I should add that the practice of splitting salmon for boiling, once so fashionable, is now nearly obsolete, and justly so. I was surprised, and at first considerably puzzled, at what I saw of salmon-cooking in Norway. As this fish is so abundant there (1_d._ per lb. would be regarded as a high price in the Tellemark), I naturally supposed that large experience, operating by natural selection, would have evolved the best method of cooking it, but found that, not only in the farmhouses of the interior, but at such hotels as the ‘Victoria,’ in Christiania, the usual cookery was effected by cutting the fish into small pieces and soddening it in water in such wise that it came to table almost colourless, and with merely a faint suggestion of what we prize as the rich flavour of salmon. A few months’ experience and a little reflection solved the problem. Salmon is so rich, and has so special a flavour, that when daily eaten it soon palls on the palate. Everybody has heard the old story of the clause in the indentures of the Aberdeen apprentices, binding the masters not to feed the boys on salmon more frequently than twice a week. If the story is not true it ought to be, for full meals of salmon every day would, ere long, render the special flavour of this otherwise delicious fish quite sickening. By boiling out the rich oil of the salmon, the