Fire-places and Kitchen Utensils. 187 



The heat of boiling water, continued for a shorter or 

 a longer time, having been found by experience to be 

 sufficient for cooking all those kinds of animal and 

 vegetable substances that are commonly used as food ; 

 and that degree of heat being easily procured, and easily 

 kept up, in all places and in all seasons ; and as all the 

 utensils used in cookery are contrived for that kind of 

 heat, few experiments have been made to determine the 

 effects of using other degrees of heat, and other mediums 

 for conveying it to the substance to be acted upon in 

 culinary processes. The effects of different degrees 

 of heat in the same body are, however, sometimes very 

 striking ; and the taste of the same kind of food is often 

 so much altered by a trifling difference in the manner 

 of cooking it, that it would no longer be taken for the 

 same thing. What a surprising difference, for instance, 

 does the manner of performing that most simple of all 

 culinary processes, boiling in water, make on potatoes ! 

 Those who have never tasted potatoes boiled in Ireland, 

 or cooked according to the Irish method, can have no 

 idea what delicious food these roots afford when they 

 are properly prepared. But it is not merely the taste 

 of food that depends on the manner of cooking it : its 

 nutritiousness also, and its whole someness, qualities 

 still more essential if possible than taste, are, no doubt, 

 very nearly connected with it. 



Many kinds of food are known to be most delicate and 

 savoury when cooked in a degree of heat considerably 

 below that of boiling water ; and it is more than probable 

 that there are others which would be improved by being 

 exposed in a heat greater than that of boiling water. 



In the seaport towns of the New England States in 

 North America, it has been a custom, time immemorial, 



