The Chemistry of Cookery

I shall presently apply this definition in distinguishing between good and bad cookery. In the roasted or grilled meat the juices are retained in the meat (with the exception of those which escape as gravy on the dish), while in stewing the juices go more or less completely into the water, and the loosening of the fibres and solution of the gelatin and fibrin may be carried further, inasmuch as a larger quantity of solvent is used. Roasting and grilling may be regarded as our national methods of flesh cookery, and stewing in water that of our continental neighbours. The difference between the flavour of English roast beef and French _bouilli_ or Italian _manzo_ is due to the retention or the removal of the saline and highly-flavoured soluble materials. (Concentrated kreatine and kreatinine are pungently sapid.) The Frenchman takes them out of his _bouilli_, or boiled meat, and transfers them to his _bouillon_, or soup, which, with him, is an essential element of a meal. If he ate his meat without soup, he would be like the dogs fed on gelatin by the bone-soup commissioners. To the Englishman, with his roast or grilled meat, soup is merely a luxury, not an absolutely necessary element of a complete dietary. What we call boiled meat, as a boiled leg of mutton or round of beef, is an intermediate preparation. The heat is here communicated by water, and the juices partially retained. Not only do we, in roasting and grilling our meat, keep the juices within it, but we concentrate them considerably by evaporating away _some_ of the water by which they are naturally diluted. This is my explanation of the _rationale_ of the chief difference between boiled meat and roasted or grilled meat. A further difference—that due to browning—is discussed in the chapter on Frying. Those accustomed to such concentration of flavour regard the milder results of boiling as insipid, for, by this process and by stewing, where much water is used, the juices are further diluted instead of being concentrated. It is a fairly debatable question whether the simplicity of taste