The Chemistry of Cookery

which finds satisfaction in the milder diet is better and more desirable than the appetite for strong meat. The difference has some analogy to that between the thirst for light wine and that for stiff grog. The application of the principles above expounded to the processes of grilling and roasting is simple enough. As the meat is to be stewed in its own juices, it is evident that these juices must be retained as completely as possible, and that in order to succeed in this, we have to struggle with the evaporating energy of the ‘dry heat’ which effects the cookery, and may not only concentrate the juices by driving off some of their solvent water, but may volatilise or decompose the flavouring principles themselves. We must always remember that these organic compounds are very unstable, most of them being decomposed when raised to a temperature above the boiling-point of water. The repulsive energy of heat drives apart or ‘dissociates’ their loosely-combined elements, and when thus wholly or partially dissociated, all the characteristic properties of the original compound vanish, and others take their place. It should be clearly understood that the so-called ‘dry heat’ may be communicated by convection or by radiation, or both. When water is the heating medium, there is convection only—_i.e._ heating by actual contact with the heated body. In roasting and grilling there is also some convection-heating due to the hot air which actually touches the meat; but this is a very small element of efficiency, the work being chiefly done, when well done, by the heat which is radiated from the fire directly to the surface of the meat, and which, in the case of roasting in front of a fire, passes through the intervening air with very little heating effect thereon. I am not perpetrating any far-fetched pedantry in pointing out this difference, as will be understood at once by supposing a beefsteak to be cooked by suspending it in a chamber filled with hot dry air. Such air is actively thirsting for the vapour of water, and will take into itself, from every