The Chemistry of Cookery

steak is ‘puffed’ out—made thicker in the middle; an ill-cooked, desiccated specimen is shrivelled, collapsed, and thinned by the slow departure or dissociation of its juices. Happy little couples, living in little houses with only one little servant—or, happier still, with no servant at all—complain of their little joints of meat, which, when roasted, are so dry, as compared with the big succulent joints of larger households. A little reflection on the principles above applied to the grilling of steaks and chops will explain the source of this little difficulty, and show how it may be overcome. I will here venture upon a little of the mathematics of cookery, as well as its chemistry. While the weight or quantity of material in a joint increases with the cube of its through-measured dimensions, its surface only increases with their square—or, otherwise stated, we do not nearly double or treble the surface of a joint of given form when we double or treble its weight; and _vice versâ_, the less the weight, the greater the surface in proportion to the weight. This is obvious enough when we consider that we cannot cut a single lump of anything into halves without exposing or creating two fresh surfaces where no surfaces were exposed before. As the evaporation of the juices is, under given conditions, proportionate to the surface exposed, it is evident that this process of converting the inside middle into two outside surfaces must increase the amount of evaporation that occurs in roasting. What, then, is the remedy for this? It is twofold. First, to seal up the pores of these additional surfaces as completely as possible; and secondly, to diminish to the utmost the time of exposure to the dry air. Logically following up these principles, I arrive at a practical formula which will probably induce certain orthodox cooks to denounce me as a culinary paradoxer. It is this: That _the smaller the joint to be roasted, the higher the temperature to which its surface should be exposed_. The roasting of a small joint should, in fact, be conducted in nearly the