The Chemistry of Cookery

same manner as the grilling of a chop or steak described in my last. The surface should be crusted or browned—burned, if you please—as speedily as possible, in such wise that the juices within shall be held there under high pressure, and only allowed to escape by burst and splutters, rather than by steady evaporation. The best way of doing this is a problem to be solved by the practical cook. I only expound the principles, and timidly suggest the mode of applying them. In a metallurgical laboratory, where I am most at home, I could roast a small joint beautifully by suspending it inside a large red-hot steel-smelter’s crucible, or, better still, in an apparatus called a ‘muffle,’ which is a fireclay tunnel open in front, and so arranged in a suitable furnace as to be easily made red-hot all round. A small joint placed on a dripping-pan and run into this would be equally heated by all-round converging radiation, and exquisitely roasted in the course of ten to thirty minutes, according to its size. Some such an apparatus has yet to be invented in order that we may learn the flavour and tenderness of a perfectly-roasted small joint of beef or mutton. For roasting large masses of meat, a different proceeding is necessary. Here we have to contend, not with excessive surface in proportion to bulk—as in the grilling of chops and steaks, and the roasting of small joints—but with the contrary, viz. excessive bulk in proportion to surface. If a baron of beef were to be treated according to my prescription for a steak, or for a single small wing rib, or other joint of three to five pounds weight, it would be charred on its surface long before the heat could reach its centre. A considerable time is here inevitably demanded. Of course, the higher the initial outside temperature, the more rapidly the heat will penetrate; but we cannot apply this law to a lump of meat as we may to a mass of iron. We may go on heating the outside of the iron to