1 Juny, 1898. ] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 67 
divided meat by the action of cold distilled water, a great deal of albuminous 
matter, and therefore cooks are warned not to steep fresh meat for long in cold 
or warm water. On the other hand, washed muscular fibre becomes hardened 
by boiling it in water, just as does the white of an egg. It is important, 
therefore, that the cook, if she wants tender meat, should drop it at first into 
boiling water, and thus form, outside the meat, a layer of hardened fibre 
and coagulated albumen, which keeps the other juices in the meat, and the 
albumen among the fibrinous parts inside. ‘The meat should never be 
allowed tc boil hard, but merely to stand and simmer. ‘The effect on 
fibrine of boiling is, we must all remember, to increase its hardness and 
toughness. The same applies to the roasting of meat; the exterior should be 
rapidly heated, to form an envelope, as it were, to retain in the meat the 
interior juices. This is, roughly, the rationale of cooking, and it will enable 
my hearers to recognise that beef-tea is but a solution of the saline and extrac- 
tive matters of beef, whilst the extract made by the Liebig process is an 
evaporated beef-tea containing, in a small volume, the extractive matters and 
the salts of a large quantity of beef, and in virtue of this, possesses medicinal 
and dietetic properties not to be despised. Considered alone as a food, it in 
no seuse represents the meat which has yielded it, since it has lost the albu- 
minous element. We will just destroy one other fallacy of the kitchen before 
passing on to our subject. A. cook will judge of the “strength” of her stock 
by the fact that when cold it was a stiff jelly. Now, as far as nutrition is 
concerned and life-sustaining power, the thinnest, most watery-looking cold 
fluid may be of infinitely more value. The jelly is gelatine, differing nothing 
from any glue or the like extracted from the feet of cattle. Liebig, with other 
chemists, showed that gelatine itself has little or no dietetic value, in spite of 
the nitrogen it contains. 1+ will not support life alone, nor will it even replace 
meat; 50 per cent. of it leaves the body without having helped towards its 
nourishment, and the remaining moiety goes partly to form fat, or passes away 
in the form of urea. It has, however, some value in a mixed diet. The cook’s 
gelatinous soup is then not so “ good,” so “sustaining,” as the watery amber- 
coloured fluid made from the maceration of minced raw beef with water. It is 
to some extent upon the intelligent method of making a true soup that the 
process of the manufacture of ‘extractum carnis”’ depends. Liebig macerated 
finely divided beef in cold water, or water heated up to about 150 degrees Fahr. 
This is evaporated to dryness in a water-bath, and forms the extract of beef. 
From some 32 |b. of lean beef, free from fat and bone, equal to 8 lb. dry meat 
and 24 lb. water, 1 lb. of true extract of beef can be made. Liebig further 
pointed out that of the true extract nearly 80 per cent. is soluble in alcohol of 
85 per cent. In salting meat, the brine that forms contains all the elements of 
the extract, and you can therefore sce what a wasteful plan it is to kill and 
salt down cattle to export salt beef. Salt beef is not a healthy food, itis bulky 
to export, and its better qualities have been running away in a useless brine, 
whilst the composition of the flesh is changed much more even than by 
boiling. ‘ Extractum carnis,”’ then, is free from fat and gelatine, whilst the beet 
of our kitehens contains both. Tf ‘‘ extractum carnis” contained fat it would not 
keep, but become rancid; if it contained gelatine it is depreciated in value, for 
the best dry gelatine is only about half the price of extract of meat. 
You will naturally ask what is the value of meat extract, as apparently its 
qualities, as referred to by me, would seem to be mainly negative, in that I 
have only said what it does not contain. Leibig saw in it the means of bring- 
ing to Europe some part of the food that was wasting at a distance for the 
want of anyone to eat it. At the time he wrote, lean beef in Australia was 
worth from 4d. per lb. to nothing ; but he meant the extract to be eaten with 
liberal additions of bread, peas, or lentils ; that is, with foods that contained 
nitrogenous constituents, in which the meat extract, by reason of the process 
of its manufacture, was, of necessity, lacking. ‘to-day in the modern German 
factory this is being done. The famous erbwurst of the German soldier is 
peameal and meat extract with little bits of fat bacon chopped up in it. And 
