The Chemistry of Cookery

heated from below. The temperature of the fat-bath may be tested by the ordinary cook’s method—that of throwing into it a small piece of bread-crumb about the size of a nut. If it frizzles and produces large bubbles of steam, the full temperature of frying in the hottest of fat is reached; if it frizzles slightly, and only gives out small steam-bubbles, you have the temperature demanded for slow frying. The bath-frying demands separate supplies of fat[9]—one for fish, another for cutlets and other similar kinds of meat, a third for such goody-goodies as apple-fritters—a most wholesome and delicious dish, too rarely seen on English tables. I suspect that the prevalence of the greased frying-pan is the reason of its rarity. Cooked by this barbaric device, apples are scarcely eatable, but when thin slices are immersed in a bath of melted fat at a temperature of about 300° Fahr., the water of their juice is suddenly boiled, and as this water is contained in a multitude of little bladderlike cells, they burst, and the whole structure is puffed out to a most delicate lightness, far more suitable for following solid meats than soddened fruit enveloped in heavy indigestible pudding-paste. Another advantage is that with proper apparatus (wire basket, kettle, and store of special fat) the fritters can be prepared and cooked in about one-tenth of the time demanded for the preparation and cookery of an apple pudding or pie. A few seconds of immersion in the fat-bath is sufficient. The fat used in frying requires occasional purification. I may illustrate the principle on which it should be conducted by describing the method adopted in the refining of mineral oils, such as petroleum or the paraffin distillates of bituminous shales. These are dark, tarry liquids of treacle-like consistency, with a strong and offensive odour. Nevertheless they are, at but little cost, converted into the ‘crystal oil’ used for lamps, and that beautiful pearly substance, the solid, translucent paraffin now so largely used in the manufacture of candles. Besides these, we obtain from the same dirty source an intermediate substance, the well-known