The Chemistry of Cookery

by ‘following his nose.’ Huge cauldrons stood by the shore in which were stewing the last batches of the livers of codfish caught a month before and exposed in the meantime to the continuous Arctic sunshine. Their condition must be imagined, as I abstain from description of details. The business then proceeding was the extraction of the oil from these livers. It is, of course, ‘cod-liver oil,’ but is known commercially as ‘fish oil,’ or ‘cod oil.’ That which is sold by our druggists as cod-liver oil is described in Norway as ‘medicine oil,’ and though prepared from the same raw material, is extracted in a different manner. Only fresh livers are used for this, and the best quality, the ‘cold-drawn’ oil, is obtained by pressing the livers without stewing. Those who are unfortunately familiar with this carefully-prepared, highly-refined product, know that the fishy flavour clings to it so pertinaciously that all attempts to completely remove it without decomposing the oil have failed. This being the case, it is easily understood that the fish oil stewed so crudely out of the putrid or semi-putrid livers must be nauseous indeed. It is nevertheless used by some of the fish-fryers, and refuse ‘Gallipoli’ (olive oil of the worst quality) is sold for this purpose. The oil obtained in the course of salting sardines, herrings, &c., is also used. Such being the case, it is not surprising that the use of oil for frying should, like the oil itself, be in bad odour. I dwell upon this because we are probably on what, if a fine writer, I should call the ‘eve of a great revolution’ in respect to frying media. Two new materials, pure, tasteless, and so cheap as to be capable of pushing pig-fat (lard) out of the market, have recently been introduced. These are cotton-seed oil and poppy-seed oil. The first has been for some time in the market offered for sale under various fictitious names, which I will not reveal, as I refuse to become a medium for the advertisement of anything—however good in itself—that is sold under false