The Chemistry of Cookery

grilled meat and boiled meat applies to fried fish; that the flavouring juices are retained when the fish is fried, while more or less of them escape into the water when boiled. Besides this, the surface of the fried fish, like that of the roasted or grilled meat, is ‘browned.’ What is the nature, the chemistry of this browning? I have endeavoured to find some answer to this question, that I might quote with authority, but no technological or purely chemical work within my reach supplies such answer. Rumford refers to it as essential to roasting, and provides for it in the manner already described, but he goes no farther into the philosophy of it than admitting its flavouring effect. I must therefore struggle with the problem in my own way as I best can. Has the gentle reader ever attempted the manufacture of ‘hard-bake,’ or ‘toffy,’ or ‘butter-scotch,’ by mixing sugar with butter, fusing the mixture, and heating further until the well-known hard, brown confection is produced? I venture to call this fried sugar. If heated simply without the butter it may be called baked sugar. The scientific name for this baked sugar is _caramel_. The chemical changes that take place in the browning of sugar have been more systematically studied than those which occur in the constituents of flesh when browned in the course of ordinary cookery. Believing them to be nearly analogous, I will state, as briefly as possible, the leading facts concerning the sugar. Ordinary sugar is crystalline, _i.e._ when it passes from the liquid to the solid state it assumes regular geometrical forms. If the solidification takes place undisturbed and slowly, the geometric crystals are large, as in sugar-candy; if the water is rapidly evaporated with agitation, the crystals are small, and the whole mass is a granular aggregation of crystals, such as we see in loaf sugar. If this crystalline sugar be heated to about 320° Fahr. it fuses, and without any change of chemical composition undergoes some sort of internal physical alteration that makes it cohere in a different fashion. (The learned name