The Chemistry of Cookery

in Brompton Road, and founder of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street; then a Parisian _citoyen_, the husband of the ‘Goddess of Reason,’ the widow of Lavoisier; but, above all, a practical and scientific cook, whose exploits in economic cookery are still but very imperfectly appreciated, though he himself evidently regarded them as the most important of all his varied achievements. His faith in cookery is well expressed in the following, where he is speaking of his experiments in feeding the Bavarian army and the poor of Munich. He says: ‘I constantly found that the richness or quality of a soup depended more upon the proper choice of the ingredients, and a proper management of the fire in the combination of these ingredients, than upon the quantity of solid nutritious matter employed; much more upon the art and skill of the cook than upon the sums laid out in the market.’ A great many fallacies are continually perpetrated, not only by ignorant people, but even by eminent chemists and physiologists, by inattention to what is indicated in this passage. In many chemical and physiological works may be found elaborately minute tables of the chemical composition of certain articles of food, and with these the assumption (either directly stated or implied as a matter of course) that such tables represent the practical nutritive value of the food. The illusory character of such assumption is easily understood. In the first place the analysis is usually that of the article of food in its raw state, and thus all the chemical changes involved in the process of cookery are ignored. Secondly, the difficulty or facility of assimilation is too often unheeded. This depends both upon the original condition of the food and the changes which the cookery has produced—changes which may double its nutritive value without effecting more than a small percentage of alteration in its chemical composition as revealed by laboratory analysis. In the recent discussion on whole-meal bread, for example, chemical analyses of the bran, &c., are quoted, and it is commonly assumed that if these can be shown to contain