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Read Ebook: Culinary Chemistry The Scientific Principles of Cookery with Concise Instructions for Preparing Good and Wholesome Pickles Vinegar Conserves Fruit Jellies Marmalades and Various Other Alimentary Substances Employed in Domestic Economy with Observations on by Accum Friedrich Christian
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Ebook has 568 lines and 53503 words, and 12 pages
Cookery.
Page
Pickles.
Conserved Fruits
Marmalades, Jams, AND Fruit Pastes.
Vinegar.
Tea.
Coffee.
Kitchen Fire-places, AND Cooking Utensils.
Cookery.
COOKERY IS A BRANCH OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE.
Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, of rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the least cultivated branches of that science. The culinary processes of roasting, boiling, baking, stewing, frying, broiling, the art of preserving meats, bacon, and hams; the preparations of sauces, pickles, and other condiments; the conserving of fruits; the care and keeping of vegetables; the making of jellies, jams, and marmalades, are all founded upon the principles of this science, and much waste of the material, as well as labour to the parties might often be spared, were those to whom the performance of such tasks is committed, made acquainted with simple chemical truths which would invariably lead to certain results. And, besides, the same knowledge would enable them to attain a much greater degree of perfection in curing and preserving all kinds of animal and vegetable aliments, and in combining the three grand requisites of taste, nutriment, and salubrity, in whatever manner they may be prepared. And, though this art is at present in rude hands, as all branches of chemistry were originally, there is no reason that it should remain so. A kitchen is, in fact, a chemical laboratory; the boilers, stew-pans, and cradle spit of the cook, correspond to the digestors, the evaporating basins, and the crucibles of the chemist. And numerous as the receipts of cookery are, the general operations are but few. In some the object aimed at is, to extract the constituent parts of the food, so as to exhibit them in a separate state, or to combine them with other substances, to produce new compounds which differ widely from those from which they originated. In others, the qualities of the substances are simply altered by the action of fire, to render them more palatable and nutritious.
The Ladies Library, vol. ii. p. 203; and also Modern Cookery, 2nd Edition, p. 94.
Literary Chronicle, No. xxii. p. 348, 1819.
Philosophical Magazine, No. cclviii. vol. 54, p. 317.
OBSERVATIONS ON THE FOOD OF MAN.
The hare, rabbit, guinea-pig, &c.
With the lion and the wolf he will eat of fresh slain animals; with the dogs and the vulture he will feed on putrid flesh; with the ox and the guinea-pig he will devour raw vegetables, under the name of salads; with the squirrel and the mouse he will feast on nuts and grain; with birds of prey he feeds on fowl of almost every species; with fishes he feeds on fish; and with insects and reptiles he sometimes lives on insects and reptiles. Nor is he satisfied even with this abundant variety, but must go to the mineral kingdom for salt, as a condiment before he can furnish out his meal.
Every person knows in what a putrid state game is often eaten.
NATIONS LIVING WHOLLY UPON VEGETABLE FOOD.
The variety of alimentary substances used not only by individuals, but among whole nations, are prodigiously diversified, and climate seems to have some effect in producing the diversity of taste, though it must in a great measure depend upon the natural productions of particular countries, their religion, and their commercial intercourse.
A vegetable diet seems suitable to the hot countries under the Equator, and we accordingly find nations there, who have completely adopted it, and who abstain so much the more from all animal food, in as much as it is an article of their religious faith.
Potatoes, chesnuts, and the leguminous and cereal seeds, satisfy the want of the Alpine peasant, and numerous tribes solely feed on vegetables and water. In the most remote antiquity, we read of whole nations in Africa, and of the Indian priests, who lived entirely on vegetable substances. Some wandering Moors subsist almost entirely on gum senegal.
NATIONS LIVING WHOLLY ON ANIMAL FOOD.
The nations which live on animal food are very numerous.
The Ethiopeans, Scythians, and Arabians, ate nothing but flesh.
The miserable inhabitants of New Holland lived wholly on fish when that country was first discovered, and other tribes on the Arabian and Persian gulph.
In the Faro islands, in Iceland and Greenland, the food arises from the same source.
The shepherds in the province of Caracas, on the Oronoko, live wholly on flesh. The Tartars in Asia, and some savage nations in North America, live on raw and half putrid flesh, and some barbarous tribes eat their meat raw.
An article of food which has lately been seriously recommended by Mr. Grey to Europeans as a most advantageous measure of political economy.
SINGULAR KIND OF ALIMENTS OF VARIOUS NATIONS.
Besides the before-mentioned diversities of national and individual taste for different kinds of substances, used as aliments, there are other kinds of food which we at least think more singular. Some of the tribes of Arabs, Moors, the Californians, and Ethiopians, eat tad-poles, locusts, and spiders.
The horse, ass, and camel, are eaten in several regions of the earth, and the seal, walruss, and Arctic bear, have often yielded a supply to sailors.
On the singular taste of epicures it is not necessary to speak. Maecenas, the prime minister of Augustus, and refined patron of Horace, had young asses served upon his table when he treated his friends; and, according to Pliny, the Romans delighted in the flavour of young and well fattened puppies. This strange practice subsists still in China, and among the Esquimaux. Plump, and well roasted bats, laid upon a bed of olives, are eaten in the Levant as a dainty.
APICIUS, among other whimsical personages of ancient Rome, presented to his guests ragouts, exclusively composed of tongues of peacocks and nightingales. This celebrated epicure, who instituted a gormandizing academy at Rome, having heard that shrimps and prawns of a superior flavour were to be met with on the coasts of Africa than on the Italian shore, freighted a ship, and sailed in search of these far famed marine insects. This person spent more than ?.60,000 merely to vary the taste of culinary sauces.
Three brothers of that name were celebrated at Rome, on account of their unparallelled love of good eating.
Vitellus was treated by his brother with a dinner, consisting of 2,000 dishes of fish, and 7,000 of poultry--surely this is not doing things by halves.
Cours Gastronomique.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN EPICURE AND A GLUTTON.
IMPORTANCE OF THE ART OF COOKERY.
As man differs from the inferior animals in the variety of articles he feeds upon, so he differs from them no less in the preparation of these substances. Some animals, besides man, prepare their food in a particular manner. The racoon is said to wash his roots before he eats them; and the beaver stores his green boughs under water that their bark and young twigs may remain juicy and palatable.
The action of fire, however, has never been applied to use by any animal except man; not even monkies, with all their knacks of imitation, and all their fondness for the comforts of a fire, have ever been observed to put on a single billet of wood to keep up the fuel.
Domesticated animals, indeed, are brought to eat, and even to relish, food which has been cooked by the action of heat.
The variety of productions introduced by our different modes of preparing and preserving food is almost endless; and it appears particularly so when we compare the usages, in this respect, of various countries.
The savage of New South Wales is scarcely more knowing in the preparation of food, by means of fire, than his neighbour, the kangaroo, if the anecdote told by Turnbull be true, that one of these savages plunged his hand into boiling water to take out a fish.
When we contemplate the aliments used by men in a civilized state of existence, we soon become convinced that only a small part of our daily food can be eaten in its natural state. Many of the substances used as aliments, are disagreeable, and some even poisonous until they have been cooked. Few of them are to be had at all seasons, although produced at others in greater abundance than can be consumed.
The importance of a proper and competent knowledge of the true and rational principles of cookery, must be obvious, when it is considered that there is scarcely an individual, young or old, in any civilized country, who has not some time or other suffered severely from errors committed in the practice of this art.
"A skilful and well directed cookery abounds in chemical preparations highly salutary. There exists a salubrity of aliments suited to every age. Infancy, youth, maturity, and old age, each has its peculiar adapted food, and that not merely applicable to the powers in full vigour, but to stomachs feeble by nature, and to those debilitated by excess."
Ude's Cookery, p. 25.--Ibid, 23.
Without abetting the unnatural and injurious appetites of the epicure, or the blameable indulgences of the glutton, we shall not perhaps be far out in our reckoning, if we assert, that almost every person is an epicure in his own way.
Precision in mixing ingredients is as often and as closely laid down for the coarsest dish of the peasant as for the most guarded receipe of the Lady Bountiful of the village. The pleasures of the table have always been highly appreciated and sedulously cultivated among civilized people of every age and nation; and, in spite of the Stoic, it must be admitted, that they are the first which we enjoy, the last we abandon, and those of which we most frequently partake.
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