Fire-places and Kitchen Utensils. 181 



To form a just idea of the enormous waste of fuel 

 that arises from making water boil, and evaporate 

 unnecessarily in culinary processes, we have only to 

 consider how much heat is expended in the formation 

 of steam. Now it has been proved by the most decisive 

 and unexceptionable experiments that have ever been 

 made by experimental philosophers that, if it were 

 possible that the heat which actually combines with 

 water in forming steam (and which gives it wings to 

 fly up into the atmosphere) could exist in the water 

 without changing it from a dense liquid to a rare elastic 

 vapour, this water would be heated by it to the temper- 

 ature of red-hot iron. 



From the same data it is easy to show by computa- 

 tion that, if any given quantity of ice-cold water can be 

 made to boil with the heat generated in the combustion 

 of a certain quantity of any given kind of fuel, it will 

 require more than five times that quantity of fuel to 

 reduce that same quantity of water already boiling- 

 hot to steam. 



Hence it appears that, in the formation of steam, 

 there is a great and unavoidable expense of heat ; but 

 it does not seem probable that heat is expended or 

 combined in any of those processes by which food is 

 prepared for the table, except it be, perhaps, in baking ; 

 and as heat is immortal, that is to say, as it never 

 dies or ceases to exist, and as its dispersion may be 

 prevented, or at least greatly retarded, by various simple 

 contrivances, it is not surprising, when we consider 

 the matter attentively, that most of those processes (in 

 which nothing more seems to be necessary than that 

 the food to be cooked should be exposed a certain time 

 in a medium at a certain temperature) should be ca- 



