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Cookery is a branch of applied chemistry. To cook anything, in the
narrower sense of the term, means to bring about changes in it by
submitting it to the action of heat, and usually of moisture also,
which will make it more fitted for food; and it is on the nature of
this action on different materials that the _rationale_ of the cook's
art chiefly depends. Good cooking can make any meat tender, and bad
cooking can make any meat tough.
The substance in meat called albumen becomes tougher and more
indigestible, the higher the temperature to which it is subjected
reaches beyond a certain point. It is this effect of heat on albumen,
therefore, which has to be considered whenever the cooking of meat
is in question, and which mainly determines the right and the wrong,
whether in the making of a soup or a custard, the roasting or boiling
of a chicken or a joint, or the frying of a cutlet or an omelet.
We now will see to begin with, what are the special ways in which it
bears on meat cookery. Take a little bit of raw meat and put it in
cold water. The juice gradually soaks out of it, coloring the water
pink and leaving the meat nearly white. Now take another bit, and pour
boiling water upon it; and though no juice can be seen escaping, the
whole surface of the meat turns a whitish color directly.
Lean meat is made up of bundles of hollow fibres within which the
albuminous juices are stored. Wherever these fibres are cut through,
the juice oozes out and spreads itself over the surface of the meat.
If, as in our first little experiment, the meat is put in cold water,
or even in warm water, or exposed to a heat insufficient to set the
albumen, either in an oven or before the fire, the albuminous juices
are in the first case drawn out and dissolved, and in the second
evaporated. In either case the meat is deprived of them. But if the
meat is put into boiling water or into a quick oven or before a hot
fire, the surface albumen is quickly set, forms a tough white coating
which effectually plugs the ends of the cut fibres, and prevents any
further escape of their contents.
Here, then, we have the first principles on which meat cookery must be
conducted; viz: that if we wish to get the juices out of the meat,
as for soups and stews, the liquid in which we put it must be cold
to begin with; while if we wish, as for boiled or roast meat, to keep
them in, the meat must be subjected first of all to the action of
boiling water, a hot fire or a quick oven. The meats of soups and
stews must not be raw, and that of joints must not be tough; and the
cooking of both one and the other, however it is begun, should be
completed at just such a moderate temperature as will set, but not
harden, the albumen. That is to say, the soup or stew must be raised
to this temperature, after the meat juices have been drawn out by
a lower one, while a joint or fowl must be lowered to it after the
surface albumen has been hardened by a higher one.
All poultry or game for roasting should be dredged with flour before
and after trussing, to dry it perfectly, as otherwise it does not
crisp and brown so well. Unless poultry is to be boiled or stewed it
never should be washed or wet in any way as this renders the flesh
sodden and the skin soft. Good wiping with clean cloths should be
quite sufficient. With the exception of ducks and geese, all poultry
and game require rather a large addition of fat during roasting, as
the flesh is dry. Chickens will cook in from twenty to thirty minutes;
fowls take from thirty to sixty minutes when young and tender, the
only condition in which they are fit to roast; turkeys take from one
to two hours and even more if exceptionally large. Game takes longer
in proportion to its size than poultry, and all birds require better
and more cooking than beef or mutton.
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