Jak. 19, 1883.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



33 



THE CHEMISTRY OF COOKERY. 

 By W. Mattiku Willi.^ms. 



TlIE 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 pro- 

 found generalisation, and one that is worthy of more 

 serious consideration than it has received. 



All our handicraft, however great may be the skill em- 

 ployed, amounts to no more than tliis. The miner moves 

 the ore and the fuel from their subterranean resting-places, 

 then they are moved into the furnace, and by another 

 mo\'ing of combustibles the working of the furnace is 

 started ; tlien the metals are moved to the foundries and 

 forges, then under hammers, or squeezers, or into melt- 

 ing-pots, and thence to moulds. The workman shapes the 

 bars, or plates, or castings by removing a part of their 

 substance, and by more and more movings of material 

 produces the engine, which does its work when fuel and 

 water are moved into its fireplace and boiler. 



The statue is within the rough block of marble ; the 

 sculptor merely removes the outer portions, and thereby 

 renders his artistic conception visible to his fellow-men. 



The agricidturist merely moves the soil in order that 

 it may receive the seed, which he then moves into it, 

 and when the growth is completed, he moves the result, 

 and thereby makes his hardest. 



The same may be said of every other operation. ]\Ian 

 alters the position of physical things in such wise that the 

 forces of Nature shall operate upon them, and produce the 

 changes or other results that he requires. 



My reasons for this introductory digression will be easily 

 understood, as this view of the doings of man and the 

 doings of Nature displays fundamentally the business of 

 human education, so far as the physical proceedings and 

 physical welfare of mankind are concerned. 



It clearly points out two well-marked natural divisions 

 of such education, education or training in the movements 

 to be made, and education in a knowledge of the conse- 

 quences of such movements, i.e., in a knowledge of the 

 forces of nature which actuallj' do the work when man 

 has suitably arranged the materials. 



The education ordinarily given to apprentices in the 

 workshop, or the field, or the studio — or as relating to 

 my present subject, the kitchen — is the first of these, the 

 second and equally necessary being simply and purely the 

 teaching of physical science as applied to the arts. 



I cannot proceed any further without a protest against 

 a very general (so far as this country is concerned) misuse 

 of a now very popular term, a misuse that is rather 

 surprising, seeing that it is accepted by scholars who have 

 devoted the best of their intellectual efforts to the study 

 of words. I refer to the word tecluiical as applied in the 

 designation "technical education." 



So long as our workshops are separated from our science 

 schools and colleges, it is most desirable, in order to avoid 

 continual circumlocution, to have terms that shall properly 

 distinguish between the work of the two, and admit of 

 definite and consistent use. The two words are ready at 

 hand, and although of Greek origin, have become, by 

 analogous usage, plain simple English. I mean the words 

 tec/i7iical and technological. 



The Greek noun tcchne signifies an art, trade, or pro- 

 fession, and our established usage of this root is in 

 accordance with this signification. Therefore " technical 

 education " is a suitable and proper designation of the 

 training which is given to apprentice's, ic, in the strictly 

 technical details of their trades, arts, or professions. When 



we require a name for the science or the philosophy of 

 anything, we obtain it by using the Greek root loyoa, and 

 appending it in English form to the Greek name of the 

 general subject, as geology, the science of the earth ; 

 anthropology, the science of man ; biology, the science of 

 life, kc. 



Why not, then, follow this general usage, and adopt 

 " technology " as the science of trades, arts, or professions, 

 and thereby obtain consistent and convenient terms to 

 designate the two divisions of education — technical educa- 

 tion, that given in the workshop, Ac, and technological 

 education, that which should be given as supplementary 

 to all such technical education? 



In accordance with this, the papers I am here com- 

 mencing will be a contribution to the technology of 

 cookery, or to the technological education of cooks, whose 

 technical education is quite beyond my reach. 



The kitchen is a cliemical laboratory in which are con- 

 ducted a number of chemical processes by which our food 

 is converted from its crude state to a condition more suit- 

 able for digestion and nutrition, and made more agreeable 

 to the palate. 



It is the rationale or ology of these processes that I shall 

 endea\our to explain ; but at the outset it is only fair to say 

 that in many instances I shall not succeed in doing this 

 satisfactorily, as there still remain some kitchen mysteries 

 that have not yet come within the firm grasp of science. 

 The ir/iole storj- of the chemical differences between a roast, 

 a boiled, and a raw leg of mutton has not yet been told. 

 You and I, gentle reader, aided by no other apparatus than 

 a knife and fork, can easily detect the ditlerence between a 

 cut out of the saddle of a three-year-old Southdown and one 

 from a tcn-months-old meadow-fed Leicester, but the 

 chemist in his laboratory, with all his re-agents, test-tubes, 

 beakers, combustion-tubes, potash-bulbs, ic, ic, and his 

 balance turning to one thousandth of a grain, could not 

 physically demonstrate the sources of these differences of 

 flavour. 



Still I hope to show that modern chemistry can throw 

 into the kitchen a great deal of light that shall not merely 

 help the cook in doing his or her work more efficiently, 

 but shall elevate both the work and the worker, and render 

 the kitchen far more interesting to all intelligent people 

 who have an appetite for knowledge, as well as for food, 

 than it can be while the cook is groping in rule-of-thumb 

 darkness — is merely a technical operator unenlightened by 

 technological intelligence. 



In the course of these papers I shall draw largely on 

 the practical and philosophical work of that remarkable 

 man, Benjamin Thompson, the Massachusetts' prentice boy 

 and schoolmaster ; afterwards the British soldier and 

 diplomatist, Colonel Sir Benjamin Thompson ; then Colonel 

 of Horse and General Aide-de-Camp of the Elector Charles 

 Theodore of Bavaria; then Major-General of Cavalry, 

 Privy Councillor of State and head of yVnr Department 

 of Bavaria ; then Count Rumford of the Holy Roman 

 Empire, and Order of the White Eagle ; then Military 

 Dictator of Bavaria, with full governing powers during 

 the absence of the Elector ; then a private resident in 

 Brompton-road, and founder of the Royal Institution in 

 Albemarle-street ; then a Parisian cilotjcn, the husl)and of 

 the " Goddess of Reason," the widow of Lavoisier ; but 

 above all a practical and scientific cook, whose exploits in 

 economic cookery are still but very imperfectly appreciated, 

 though he himself evidently regarded them as the most 

 important of all his varied achievements. 



His faith in cookery is well expressed in the following, 

 where he is speaking of his experiments in feeding the 

 Bavarian ai-my and the poor of Munich. He says : — " I 



