STUDIES OF POULTRY. 13 



house refrigerator, gave 0.01T per cent of ammoniacal nitrogen. These 

 stored fowls had been kept at from 10-15 F. (12 to 9 C.) and 

 were analyzed after thawing in a house refrigerator. Whether such 

 loosely bound nitrogen is a product of bacterial growth, as is com- 

 monly held, or of enzymic activity, its formation at temperatures so 

 far below freezing is of both scientific and practical interest. 



BACTERIAL CONTENT OF FROZEN FLESH. 



The bacterial content of the flesh of cold-stored poultry was not 

 touched upon by Kichardson except in the general statements already 

 quoted. Emmett and Grindley confined themselves strictly to the 

 chemical side of the subject, hence the work of Wiley and his coad- 

 jutors is the only specific American work on the question. Stiles 

 (Bulletin 115) established the fact that bacteria not only persisted 

 in a viable state in the flesh of frozen poultry of known history after 

 two years of storage, but that this resistance was common to a wide 

 variety of species. Pennington (Bulletin 115) showed that a quanti- 

 tative determination of the number of organisms in the flesh of cold- 

 stored market chickens indicated the same condition, and also that 

 while long holding in a frozen condition tends to kill a certain pro- 

 portion of the germs, the period required for so doing is beyond that 

 commercially practiced. And, also, by the time storage has been 

 sufficiently long to destroy the bacteria the eating quality of the 

 flesh is greatly lowered. 



Pennington (Proceedings First International Congress of Refrig- 

 erating Industries) also showed that the presence of a few bacteria 

 twenty-four hours after death, even with careful and rapid chilling, 

 could be demonstrated in the muscle of breast and thighs by the use of 

 special quantitative methods. Hence the fowls are not sterile when 

 they enter the freezer, though promptness, care, and cleanliness may 

 reduce the number of the organisms to a minimum. 



EXAMINATION OF STORAGE EGGS. 



The study of fresh and cold-stored eggs, chemically and bacterio- 

 logically, is practically a new field. A report by F. C. Cook (Bulle- 

 tin 115) gives observations on five samples of stored eggs, varying 

 in age from 3.5 to 19.6 months. The characteristic " storage " odor 

 was noticed after 12.6 months; the separation of whites and yolks 

 was difficult at the end of 7.5 months, the whites becoming more and 

 more watery as time progressed. 



It was observed that the boiled stored eggs gained water in both 

 white and yolk, the yolk finally containing considerably more water 

 than when fresh. Storage eggs, analyzed after boiling hard, show an 



[Cir. 64] 



