The Chemistry of Cookery

while in baking bread by the old-fashioned method, the temperature continually declines from the beginning to the end of the process; but in order that a dweller in cities, or the cook of an ordinary town household, may understand this difference, some explanation is necessary. The old-fashioned oven, such as was generally used in Rumford’s time, and is still used in country houses and by old-fashioned bakers, is an arched cavity of brick with a flat brick floor. This cavity is closed by a suitable door, which in its primitive, and perhaps its best form, was a flat tile pressed against the opening and luted round with clay. Such ovens were, and still are, heated by simply spreading on the brick floor a sufficient quantity of wood—preferably well-dried twigs; these, being lighted, raise the temperature of the arched roof to a glowing heat, and that of the floor in a somewhat lower degree. When this heating is completed (the judgement of which constitutes the chief element of skill in thus baking) the embers are carefully brushed out from the floor, the loaves, &c., inserted by means of a flat battledore with a long handle, called a ‘peel,’ and the door closed and firmly luted round, not to be opened until the operation is complete. Baked clay is an excellent radiator, and therefore the surface of bricks forming the arched roof of the oven radiates vigorously upon its contents below, which are thus heated at top by radiation from the roof, and at bottom by direct contact with the floor of the oven. The difference between the compact bottom crust, and the darker bubble-bearing top crust of an ordinary loaf is thus explained. As the baking of a large joint of meat is a longer operation than the baking of bread, there is another reason besides that already given for the inferiority of meat when baked in a baker’s oven constructed on this principle. The slow cooling-down must tend to produce a flabbiness and insipidity similar to that of the roast meat which is served at restaurants where a joint remains