Bache.] d-jU [^jjoy 17^ 



ducts, and is, in sum, most succulent and wholesome for the gourmet, be- 

 sides being excellent dictelically for the sick and convalescent. 



Having had, through my particular course of life, an exceptionally good 

 opportunity of seeing the average mode of cooking in the land, I can say 

 without hesitation that I do not upon reflection consider my conviction at 

 all exaggerated, wiien I state that its general cooking of meat, as being 

 innutritions and wasteful, is barbarous, and for this reason I once be- 

 thought me of making a small contribution to the sum of knowledge of 

 better things. With the conviction of which I speak in my mind, I 

 thought, a few years ago, in 1887, to aid in the improvement of the art of 

 cooking, at least among the well educated, whence the knowledge might 

 spread, by devising an oven which should approximate in its function to 

 the task of yielding the osmazome which a given piece of meat is capable 

 of producing, in nearly the most perfect form of which the piece is sus- 

 ceptible. "We must remember that we do not create osmazome by any 

 process, and that its manifestation on the outer layers of meat subjected to 

 the roasting or baking process does not represent all the osmazome in the 

 piece, but merely that portion which has submitted to what Savarin aptly 

 calls caramel ization. Nevertheless, the proper caramelization on a piece 

 of roasted meat is the outward sign of an inward grace. If the piece has 

 been countrified, the outer layers are charred and the interior dried by 

 long continued evaporation of the juices of the meat. If the piece is rep- 

 resented by the opposite extreme of treatment, the outside has never been 

 allowed to become so hardened as to present a serious barrier to the pene- 

 tration of heat to the interior ; the outside is sapid, though crisp, and the 

 interior shaded off from the outside by insensible gradations of rareness ; 

 the flavor of the whole surviving in the so-called juice, containing the ac- 

 tive principles, osmazome and other extractives, that give delicious flavor. 

 But the ordinary oven is not an instrument capable of effecting this result 

 to a high degree ; no existing oven is. Well adapted as the oven is to the 

 drying of dough inciilentally to the baking of bread, cake and pies, it is 

 for that very reason, besides others, the poorest possible instrument in its 

 present form wherewith to attempt to imitate a roast. 



I fully realized that the course of cookery could not be turned backward 

 in a land where the frying-pan still wields the sceptre against the invasion 

 of the gridiron. I accordingly applied for a patent for an oven which de- 

 pends upon the simple device of allowing a controllable stream of air, as 

 pure as procurable, to pass through it while the process of cooking is pro- 

 ceeding. For the first time, however, in apjjlying for a patent, I failed to 

 obtain one. The objection made to my device by the patent examiner to 

 whom it was, in the course of routine, submitted, was that it had been 

 anticipated by some one who had invented a wire-gauze door for an oven. 

 I have not, however, changed my opinion that the device does not con- 

 flict in the slightest degree with the otlier invention cited as preventing its 

 acceptance. There are examiners and examiners, and some are not infalli- 

 ble, as I found out many years ago, when, having incidentally used, as a 



