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THE

CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.

Table of Contents

The philosopher who first perceived and announced the fact that all the physical doings of man consist simply in changing the places of things, made a very profound generalisation, and one that is worthy of more serious consideration than it has received.

All our handicraft, however great may be the skill employed, amounts to no more than this. The miner moves the ore and the fuel from their subterranean resting-places, then they are moved into the furnace, and by another moving of combustibles the working of the furnace is started; then the metals are moved to the foundries and forges, then under hammers, or squeezers, or into melting-pots, and thence to moulds. The workman shapes the bars, or plates, or castings by removing a part of their substance, and by more and more movings of material produces the engine, which does its work when fuel and water are moved into its fireplace and boiler.

The statue is within the rough block of marble; the sculptor merely moves away the outer portions, and thereby renders his artistic conception visible to his fellow-men.

The agriculturist merely moves the soil in order that it may receive the seed, which he then moves into it, and when the growth is completed, he moves the result, and thereby makes his harvest.

The same may be said of every other operation. Man alters the position of physical things in such wise that the forces of Nature shall operate upon them, and produce the changes or other results that he requires.

My reasons for this introductory digression will be easily understood, as this view of the doings of man and the doings of Nature displays fundamentally the business of human education, so far as the physical proceedings and physical welfare of mankind are concerned.

It clearly points out two well-marked natural divisions of such education—education or training in the movements to be made, and education in a knowledge of the consequences of such movements—i.e. in a knowledge of the forces of Nature which actually do the work when man has suitably arranged the materials.

The education ordinarily given to apprentices in the workshop, or the field, or the studio—or, as relating to my present subject, the kitchen—is the first of these, the second and equally necessary being simply and purely the teaching of physical science as applied to the arts.

I cannot proceed any further without a protest against a very general (so far as this country is concerned) misuse of a now very popular term, a misuse that is rather surprising, seeing that it is accepted by scholars who have devoted the best of their intellectual efforts to the study of words. I refer to the word technical as applied in the designation ‘technical education.’

So long as our workshops are separated from our science schools and colleges, it is most desirable, in order to avoid continual circumlocution, to have terms that shall properly distinguish between the work of the two, and admit of definite and consistent use. The two words are ready at hand, and, although of Greek origin, have become, by analogous usage, plain simple English. I mean the words technical and technological.

The Greek noun techne signifies an art, trade, or profession, and our established usage of this root is in accordance with its signification. Therefore, ‘technical education’ is a suitable and proper designation of the training which is given to apprentices, &c., in the strictly technical details of their trades, arts, or professions—i.e. in the skilful moving of things. When we require a name for the science or the philosophy of anything, we obtain it by using the Greek root logos, and appending it in English form to the Greek name of the general subject, as geology, the science of the earth; anthropology, the science of man; biology, the science of life, &c.

Why not then follow this general usage, and adopt ‘technology’ as the science of trades, arts, or professions, and thereby obtain consistent and convenient terms to designate the two divisions of education—technical education, that given in the workshop, &c., and technological education, that which should be given as supplementary to all such technical education?

In accordance with this, the present work will be a contribution to the technology of cookery, or to the technological education of cooks, whose technical education is quite beyond my reach.

The kitchen is a chemical laboratory in which are conducted a number of chemical processes by which our food is converted from its crude state to a condition more suitable for digestion and nutrition, and made more agreeable to the palate.

It is the rationale or ology of these processes that I shall endeavour to explain; but at the outset it is only fair to say that in many instances I shall not succeed in doing this satisfactorily, as there still remain some kitchen mysteries that have not yet come within the firm grasp of science. The whole story of the chemical differences between a roast, a boiled, and a raw leg of mutton has not yet been told. You and I, gentle reader, aided by no other apparatus than a knife and fork, can easily detect the difference between a cut out of the saddle of a three-year-old Southdown and one from a ten-months-old meadow-fed Leicester, but the chemist in his laboratory, with all his reagents, test-tubes, beakers, combustion-tubes, potash-bulbs, &c. &c., and his balance turning to one-thousandth of a grain, cannot physically demonstrate the sources of these differences of flavour.

Still I hope to show that modern chemistry can throw into the kitchen a great deal of light that shall not merely help the cook in doing his or her work more efficiently, but shall also elevate both the work and the worker, and render the kitchen far more interesting to all intelligent people who have an appetite for knowledge, as well as for food; more so than it can be while the cook is groping in rule-of-thumb darkness—is merely a technical operator unenlightened by technological intelligence.

In the course of these papers I shall draw largely on the practical and philosophical work of that remarkable man, Benjamin Thompson, the Massachusetts ’prentice-boy and schoolmaster; afterwards the British soldier and diplomatist, Colonel Sir Benjamin Thompson; then Colonel of Horse and General Aide-de-Camp of the Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria; then Major-General of Cavalry, Privy Councillor of State and head of War Department of Bavaria; then Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire and Order of the White Eagle; then Military Dictator of Bavaria, with full governing powers during the absence of the Elector; then a private resident 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 more of the theoretical bone-making or brain-making elements, that they are, therefore, in reference to these requirements, more nutritious than the fine flour. But before we are justified in asserting this, it must be made clear that these outer and usually rejected portions of the grain are as easily digested and assimilated as the finer inner flour.

I think I shall be able to show that the practical failure of this whole-meal bread movement (which is not a novelty, but only a revival) is mainly due to the disregard of the cookery question; that whole-meal prepared as bread by simple baking is less nutritious than fine flour similarly prepared; but that whole-meal otherwise prepared may be, and has been, made more nutritious than fine white bread.

Another preliminary example. A pound of biscuit contains more solid nutritive matter than a pound of beefsteak, but may not, when eaten by ordinary mortals, do so much nutritive work. Why is this?

It is a matter of preparation—not exactly what is called cooking, but equivalent to what cooking should be. It is the preparation which has converted the grass food of the ox into another kind of food which we can assimilate very easily.

The fact that we use the digestive and nutrient apparatus of sheep, oxen, &c., for the preparation of our food, is merely a transitory barbarism, to be ultimately superseded when my present subject is sufficiently understood and applied to enable us to prepare the constituents of the vegetable kingdom in such a manner that they shall be as easily assimilated as the prepared grass which we call beef and mutton, and which we now use only on account of our ignorance of the subject treated in the following chapters. I do not presume to assert or suggest that my efforts towards the removal of this ignorance will transport us at once into a vegetarian millennium, but if they only open the gate and show us that there is a road on which we may travel towards great improvements in the preparation of our food as regards flavour, economy, and wholesomeness, my reasonable readers will not be disappointed.

So much of cookery being effected by the application of heat, a sketch of the general laws of heat might be included in this introductory chapter, but for the necessary extent of the subject.

I omit it without compunction, having already written ‘A Simple Treatise on Heat,’ which is divested of technical difficulties by presenting simply the phenomena and laws of Nature without any artificial scholastic complications. Messrs. Chatto & Windus have brought out this little essay in a cheap form, and, in spite of the risk of being accused of puffing my own wares, I recommend its perusal to those who are earnestly studying the whole philosophy of cookery.