The Chemistry of Cookery

Warren, and followed by those who use his cooker, should be reversed for roasting; that the meat should have the twenty minutes before the fire—or in a hot oven—before, instead of after, its stewing in its own vapour. Some experiments I have made confirm this view so far as they go, but are not sufficiently numerous to settle the question. For stewing of all kinds, and for such concoctions as Rumford’s soup (_see_ Chapter XIV.), it is an admirable apparatus, and the contrivances for carrying the steam from the outer vessel to a vegetable steamer above the cooking chamber, before described, is very ingenious and effective. The statement in the prospectus, that the ‘nourishing juices’ otherwise wasted ‘are by that mode condensed, and form at the bottom of the vessel a rich gelatinous body,’ is misleading. Gelatin is not volatile; the gelatinous body at the bottom of the vessel is not composed of condensed vapours, though condensed vapour of water is concerned in its formation. It is simply some of the gelatin of the joint dissolved by the water which condenses upon it, and finally drips down from the joint, carrying with it the dissolved gelatin. CHAPTER VII. FRYING. THE process of frying follows next in natural order to those of roasting and grilling. A little reflection will show that in frying the heat is not communicated to the food by radiation from a heated surface at some distance, but by direct contact with the heating medium, which is the hot fat commonly, but erroneously, described as ‘boiling fat.’ As I am writing for intelligent readers who desire to understand the philosophy of the common processes of cookery, so far as they are understandable, this fallacy concerning boiling fat should be pushed aside at once. Generally speaking, ordinary animal fats are not boilable under the pressure of our atmosphere (one of the constituent fatty acids of butter, butyric acid, is an exception; it boils at 314° Fahr.). Before reaching their boiling-point, _i.e._ the temperature at which they pass completely into the state of vapour, their constituents are more or less