During the infancy of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, when my classes in Cannon Street constituted the whole of its teaching machinery, I delivered a course of lectures to ladies on ‘Household Philosophy,’ in which ‘The Chemistry of Cookery’ was included. In collecting material for these lectures, I was surprised at the strange neglect of the subject by modern chemists. On taking it up again, after an interval of nearly thirty years, I find that (excepting the chemistry of wine cookery), a

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

As this is one of the most rudimentary of the operations of cookery, and the most frequently performed, it naturally takes a first place in treating the subject. Water is boiled in the kitchen for two distinct purposes: 1st, for the cooking of itself; 2nd, for the cooking of other things. A dissertation on the difference between raw water and cooked water may appear pedantic, but, as I shall presently show, it is considerable, very practical, and important. The best way to study any physical sub

In order to illustrate some of the changes which take place in the cooking of animal food, I will first take the simple case of cooking an egg by means of hot water. These changes are in this case easily visible and very simple, although the egg itself contains all the materials of a complete animal. Bones, muscles, viscera, brain, nerves, and feathers of the chicken—all are produced from the egg, nothing being added, and little or nothing taken away. I should, however, add that in eating an egg

Gelatin is a very important element of animal food; it is, in fact, the main constituent of the animal tissues, the walls of the cells of which animals are built up being composed of gelatin. I will not here discuss the question of whether Haller’s remark, ‘Dimidium corporis humani gluten est’ (‘half of the human body is gelatin’), should or should not now, as Lehmann says, ‘be modified to the assertion that half of the solid parts of the animal body are convertible, by boiling with water , into

I may now venture to state my own view of a somewhat obscure subject—viz. the difference between the roasting or grilling of meat and the stewing of meat. It appears to me that, as regards the nature of the operation, it consists simply in the difference between the cooking media; that a grilled steak or chop, or a roasted joint is meat that has been stewed in its own juices instead of stewed in water; that in both cases the changes taking place in the solid parts of the meat are the same in kin

In the third volume of his ‘Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical,’ page 129, Count Rumford introduces this subject, with the following apology, which I repeat and adopt. He says: ‘I shall, no doubt, be criticised by many for dwelling so long on a subject which to them will appear low, vulgar, and trifling; but I must not be deterred by fastidious criticisms from doing all I can do to succeed in what I have undertaken. Were I to treat my subject superficially, my writing would be of n

The process of frying follows next in natural order to those of roasting and grilling. A little reflection will show that in frying the heat is not communicated to the food by radiation from a heated surface at some distance, but by direct contact with the heating medium, which is the hot fat commonly, but erroneously, described as ‘boiling fat.’ As I am writing for intelligent readers who desire to understand the philosophy of the common processes of cookery, so far as they are understandable,

Some of my readers may think that I ought to have treated this in connection with the boiling of meat, as boiling and stewing are commonly regarded as mere modifications of the same process. According to my mode of regarding the subject, i.e. with reference to the object to be attained, they are opposite processes. The object in the so-called ‘boiling’ of, say, a leg of mutton, is to raise the temperature of the meat throughout just up to the cooking temperature in such a manner that it shall as

I now come to a very important constituent of animal food, although it is not contained in beef, mutton, pork, poultry, game, fish, or any other organised animal substance, unless in egg yolk, as Lehmann states (see page 23). It is not even proved satisfactorily to exist in the blood, although it is somehow obtained from the blood by special glands at certain periods. I refer to casein , the substantial basis of cheese, which, as everybody knows, is the consolidated curd of milk. It is evident a

We all know that there is a considerable difference between raw fat and cooked fat; but what is the rationale of this difference? Is it anything beyond the obvious fusion or semi-fusion of the solid? These are very natural and simple questions, but in no work on chemistry or technology can I find any answer to them, or even any attempt at an answer. I will therefore do the best I can towards solving the problem in my own way. All the cookable and eatable fats fall into the class of ‘fixed oils,’

My readers will remember that I referred to Haller’s statement, ‘Dimidium corporis humani gluten est,’ which applies to animals generally, viz. that half of their substance is gelatin, or that which by cookery becomes gelatin. This abundance depends upon the fact that the walls of the cells and the frame-work of the tissues are composed of this material. In the vegetable structure we encounter a close analogy to this. Cellular structure is still more clearly defined than in the animal, as may be

Having treated the cookery of the chief constituents of the roots and stems of the plant, the fibre and the starch, I now come to food obtained from the seeds and the leaves. Taking the seeds first, as the more important, it becomes necessary to describe the nitrogenous constituents which are more abundant in them than in any other part of the plant, though they also contain starch and cell material, or woody fibre, as already stated. In the preceding chapter I described a method of separating s

As most of my readers doubtless know, peas, beans, lentils and other seeds of leguminous plants are more nutritious, theoretically, than the seeds of grasses, such as wheat, barley, oats, maize, &c. I was glad to see at the Health Exhibition a fine series of the South Kensington cases, displaying in the simplest and most demonstrative manner the proximate analyses of the chief materials of animal and vegetable food. I refer to them now because they did not receive the attention they dese

I must not leave the subject of vegetable cookery without describing Count Rumford’s achievements in feeding the paupers, rogues, and vagabonds of Munich. An account of this is the more desirable, from the fact that the ‘soup’ which formed the basis of his dietary is still misunderstood in this country, for reasons that I shall presently state. After reorganising the Bavarian army, not only as regards military discipline, but in the feeding, clothing, education, and useful employment of the men,

Take eight parts by weight of meal (Rumford says ‘wheat or rye meal,’ and I add, or oatmeal), and one part of butter. Melt the butter in a clean iron frying-pan, and, when thus melted, sprinkle the meal into it; stir the whole briskly with a broad wooden spoon or spatula till the butter has disappeared and the meal is of a uniform brown colour, like roasted coffee, great care being taken to prevent burning on the bottom of the pan. About half an ounce of this roasted meal boiled in a pint of wat

In an unguarded moment I promised to include the above in this work, and will do the best I can to fulfil the rash promise; but the utmost result of this effort can only be a contribution to a subject which is too profoundly mysterious to be fully grasped by any intellect that is not sufficiently clairvoyant to penetrate paving-stones, and see through them to the interiors of the closely-tiled cellars wherein the mysteries are manipulated. I will first define what I mean by the cookery of wine.

In my introductory chapter I said, ‘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 to be as easily assimilated as the prepared grass which we call beef and mutton.’ This sentence, when it appeared in ‘Knowledge,’ brought me in communicat

A few years ago the ‘farmers’ friends’ were very sanguine on the subject of using malt as cattle food. At agricultural meetings throughout the country the iniquitous malt-tax was eloquently denounced because it stood in the way of this great fodder reform. Then the malt-tax was repealed, and forthwith the subject fell out of hearing. Why was this? The idea of malt feeding was theoretically sound. By the malting of barley or other grain its diastase is made to act upon its insoluble starch, and t

I have repeatedly spoken of the nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous constituents of food, assuming that the nitrogenous are the more nutritious, are the plastic or flesh-building materials, and that the non-nitrogenous materials cannot build up flesh or bone or nervous matter, can only supply the material of fat, and by their combustion maintain the animal heat. In doing so I have been treading on loose ground—I may say on a scientific quicksand. When I first taught practical physiology to children