The Chemistry of Cookery

Norwegian reduces it nearly to the condition of cod-fish, concerning which I learned a curious fact from two old Doggerbank fishermen, with whom I had a long sailing cruise from the Golden Horn to the Thames. They agreed in stating that cod-fish is like bread, that they and all their mates lived upon it (and sea-biscuits) day after day for months together, and never tired, while richer fish ultimately became repulsive if eaten daily. This statement was elicited by an immediate experience. We were in the Mediterranean, where bonetta were very abundant, and every morning and evening I amused myself by spearing them from the martingale of the schooner, and so successfully that all hands (or rather mouths) were abundantly supplied with this delicious dark-fleshed, full-blooded, and high-flavoured fish. I began by making three meals a day on it, but at the end of about a week was glad to return to the ordinary ship’s fare of salt junk and chickens. The following account of an experiment of Count Rumford’s is very interesting and instructive. He says: ‘I had long suspected that it could hardly be possible that precisely the temperature of 212° (that of boiling water) should be that which is best adapted for cooking _all sorts of food_; but it was the unexpected result of an experiment that I made with another view which made me particularly attentive to this subject. Desirous of finding out whether it would be possible to roast meat on a machine that I had contrived for drying potatoes, and fitted up in the kitchen of the House of Industry at Munich, I put a shoulder of mutton into it, and after attending to the experiment three hours, and finding that it showed no signs of being done, I concluded that the heat was not sufficiently intense, and despairing of success I went home, rather out of humour at my ill success, and abandoned my shoulder of mutton to the cookmaids. ‘It being late in the evening and the cookmaids thinking, perhaps, that the meat would be as safe in the drying machine as